#problem solving

Making Connections

Making Connections

I’ve become a recent fan of playing the New York Times’ daily puzzles online, and one of my favorites is Connections. Sixteen words are provided, and the goal is to form four groups of four words that are in some way connected. You have to figure out what the connection is, and you get four mistakes, after which the game ends and the correct answers pop up. For example, on the day that I’m writing this, four connected words are bar, dinner, liberty, and tinker. They’re all “words before ‘bell’”.

When I first started playing, I would find two or three words that appeared to be obviously connected. But finding the last one or two for a group proved elusive. My initial thoughts about the connections were generally wrong. Then, I would look up definitions to refresh my memory on how they were used. I’d think about informal uses of words, and different ways of how they might be linked. The good news is, once I got the first three groups, the last one was obvious (there were only four words left!), even if I didn’t understand why they were connected. (more…)

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The Power of &

The Power of &

Breaking News! On June 6th the PGA Tour and Saudi backed LIV Golf announced an agreement to merge. For anyone whose head may have been buried in a sand trap, this was a stunning announcement of an alliance between the decades-old organizer of golf in the U.S. and North America, and the year-old start up that paid hundreds of millions of dollars to woo big name pro golfers to defect from the PGA.

The two organizations spent the better part of a year in an acrimonious legal battle that included Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, former PGA golfers, antitrust allegations, and more. The startling agreement “effectively makes the Saudis investors in U.S. golf…” according to the Wall Street Journal.1 (more…)

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5 Steps to Gaining a New Perspective

5 Steps to Gaining A New Perspective

Think about a time when you’ve been in the midst of an important challenge, working on a major project or slogging through solving a pervasive problem. Then you hit a wall. Your burst of energy and creativity has dissipated. Your initial accelerated progress has slowed to a snail’s pace. You and your team are stuck and find it difficult to break through to the next level of innovation and advancement. How do you move forward? You need a new perspective. You need to look at the challenge from a different angle, using a different lens, with a fresh set of eyes.

Unfortunately, too often we waste time pressing forward working on a solution just to show activity, while in reality we’re making minimal headway. A more effective use of our time is to proactively take specific steps to gain a different perspective. When we anticipate the diminishing return on our effort, we can pause and make a shift in our approach to ensure maximum productivity. (more…)

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