Thinking in the Box

Yesterday, my son was reading signs. We were making our way through Manhattan and he saw one of his favorite buses. The BoxM100. For those of you familiar with NYC public transit, that would be the cute way of saying BxM100, which would be a bus with the number 100 that starts in the Bronx and goes into Manhattan. But it got me thinking.

I recently had the pleasure of learning how to think creatively with a team of facilitators from a group called SIT, Systematic Inventive Thinking, located in Tel Aviv. Wow. They work with Fortune 500 companies all over the world, and with little people like me who don't do any work whatsoever with companies, let alone in the Fortune 500.

One of their basic principles is thinking inside the box (yep, reference back to that Box Bus above). We go too far out when we reach for innovation. Instead, we should think within the boundaries of what is familiar to us and most accessible, and think about how to use what is closest to us to solve problems and do things differently. You might not fully get this: it took me three full days to understand it and by the end I thought my brain was gonna explode.

And you're wondering now how this has anything to do with a Jewish parenting blog. Well, lucky for you, SIT has some pretty amazing applications of their work to parenting.


How do you soothe and distract a hurt child?
http://www.sitsite.com/blog/2009/09/innovative-aunt-ing/

How do you get your child to tell you how his day at school went?
http://www.sitsite.com/blog/2009/08/dad-you-wont-believe-what-happened-to-me-at-school-today-a-tale-of-father-son-and-sit/


Now that I've learned a few of their handy tools, I'm trying to apply them myself too.
Back on the bus...