As a kid growing up road trips weren’t a time to get caught up on watching movies or cranking out seasons of Netflix. Reading in the car was a recipe for disaster, and cassette tapes were limited, so there were long periods of silence, interrupted by sibling bickering of course, and playing games.
One game was twenty questions, also known as “Animal, Mineral, Vegetable” or “Person, Place or Thing”. The goal is to guess what someone is thinking of asking only yes / no questions. It was infuriating to not be able to figure out what they were thinking of!
This game is similar but different. This game isn’t about guessing a random animal or literary figure, it’s about solving one of your most complicated challenges (full discloser: I got this idea from Master Your Time, Master Your Life by Brian Tracy).
You will need: A pen and paper and some time without your phone. Decide how long you’re going to spend on this problem for phase one.
The Twenty Questions Problem Solving Game:
-
Pick a problem in your life.
It could be a work challenge, a limit to your income, a tension in a relationship. -
Think of 3 solutions.
Generally this is no problem to do, and the ideas should come quickly. Start writing the potential solutions down. -
Think of 7 more solutions.
This will start to get progressively more difficult. This is where you need to stay away from your phone. Keep writing. -
Think of 5 more solutions.
This will start to be way more frustrating to generate this many solutions. Start to think too about your assumptions about the issue at hand. What do you assume is true? What limiting beliefs do you have about this problem? -
Think of 5 more solutions.
This may be nearly impossible, but you need to stick with it until you’ve come up with all 20 solutions. What if this problem was easy to solve? What if you had unlimited resources? What if you had to break it into baby steps? What if you could pay someone else to solve it? What if someone would pay you to solve it? What makes this problem tricky? What resources or knowledge would let you solve this problem? -
Review the twenty options, and take action on at least one option.
The reality is that we normally settle for our initial reaction to a problem. The solution is intuitive, and we trust ourselves, I mean we’d never lie to ourselves would we? (Answer: Yes, we would, all the time) The more time we spend on this problem, the more that we’re going to harness the critical reasoning skills we’ve got to develop solutions to complicated problems.
This “game” is a fantastic activity to stretch yourself and challenge yourself to come up with non-obvious solutions to challenging problems. It encourages you to ask more questions. To challenge your assumptions. To wrestle with the problem and mull it over.
If your problem isn’t solved in one sitting, mull it over just before sleeping and let your subconscious mind tackle the issue.
The most fascinating example of the subconscious mind working on a problem is from Elias Howe, the inventor of the sowing machine. He’d been working on the sowing machine, but had run into a problem of what to do with the needle and thread after piercing the fabric. He’d worked on this problem, but couldn’t progress, so he slept on it.
In a dream, he saw cannibals who all had curious spears – each spear tip had a hole in it. When he awoke, he knew the solution to his sowing machine challenge, and was able to finish the design of the modern sowing machine. Howe had a form of lameness that meant he needed to solve the sowing machine problem to feed his family, however he needed to work intensely, and then take a rest in order to have a breakthrough on the invention. He ended up a millionaire as a result of this invention (no small feat in 1860!).
So get yourself a notebook, digital or analogue is up to you, and write out some of the challenges in your life. Pick one to start to work on today, and see how twenty questions can help you make progress in finding a solution!