Inception - The power of words

The inspiration behind this blog is a Karyashalla (workshop) at SSV 2011. Four teams (of about 18) were given the task of crossing a hall without any of their members touching the floor. They had 15 mins and three chairs. Their brief was “get as many people across as possible”. For those of you who are familiar with this the most common technique is to take two people across using the chairs and then for one person to come back using the chairs then take another person across and so on. Indeed, this is what all the teams did for the first 5 mins (n which time they got 5 people across in total). As this time one of the instructors paused the activity and pointed this out to the teams and emphasised that they only had ten mins left and at their current rate they would only get ten more people out of 70 over. The reaction of the participants was to continue to work as they were but to try to speed up. From an external view point the solution was clear.