ThinkingInParallel

Let’s think about problem solving as composing a Wikipedia:Jigsaw puzzle - each of the team members has his own pack of the tiles and you can never guess in advance what is needed next. If someone insists on only adding new tiles in one direction our hope to get the whole picture diminishes and this is exactly what frequently happens in discussions. It can be a result of some initial conflict of interests but often the conflict is about ‘winning the argument’ not about leading the whole group in the direction better fitting personal interests. It is important to note that this ‘winning the argument’ mechanism is in a way a result of the beneficial social mechanism of rewarding those who give the right advice (this reward is mostly recognition).

In the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ technique DeBono? proposes to structure the discussion in a way that even if everyone still tries to ‘win the argument’ the discussants do cover all possible directions. This happens by choosing a direction from a spectrum in turns, and letting everyone add the tiles in that direction. So for example everyone has a chance to ‘win the argument’ for some idea and also ‘win the argument’ against it.

The “When Collections of Creatives Become Creative Collectives” article [1] presents another technique for aligning thinking - Help Seeking/Help Giving can reduce the ‘winning the argument’ phenomenon by:

• limiting the social exposure - the interactions seem to be mostly on the one-to-one level
• creating a social situation that somehow coerces people into more cooperative modes - it is clearly a waste of time to fight when you are helping someone

Using the jigsaw puzzle metaphor we can express another aspect of this technique - the help seeker can have some knowledge about the shapes that other persons in the team have - and he can use that knowledge to more effectively engage the others - i.e. ask them for help only if he sees that a particular shape is needed.

Relevance to Problem Solving

ThinkingInParallel is a problem solving method designed to address potentially unhelpful, yet typical social behavior that arises in a collaborative setting. Various online collective problem solving approaches could leverage structured methods for problem solving in order to address unique types of problems (see ProblemSpace), or perhaps to address eccentricities of the online social medium in general. In addition, technology allows for an enforcement of process and structure that may facilitate the implementation and use of a novel or potentially cumbersome problem solving methodology.

Discussion

ZbigniewLukasiak: I am not very happy with the title now - I’ve taken it from DeBono? - but now it seems like just one technique here.

ZbigniewLukasiak: Here is a a strange video I have this feeling that it is another example of ThinkingInParallel - and also another technique how to reach it.