This was many years ago – the company I was working for had, for whatever reason, decided to move its computer operations to a new data centre. I was part of a team invited to a tour of the new facilities.
As we were shown around the offices, I couldn’t help but notice that standing on every employee’s desk was a small folded card. The word – THINK – was printed in bold letters on both sides of the card. I was somewhat perplexed, so I asked what they were for. With some patronising overtones, I was enthusiastically told – like this was some super gift to mankind – that they were there to remind people to think. I got the feeling that I had just been given a peek inside the doors of the inner circle, and I should have felt honoured!
Perhaps these cards were a gimmicky desk-top version of the proverbial “Thinking Cap”. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they should also remind these same people to breathe since they were incapable of thinking by themselves. This company unashamedly flaunted the notion they only hire the very best, so I just wondered where they found so many non-thinkers.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes once said, “I think, therefore I am.” So, since these sorry souls at this company needed to be reminded to think, I deduced that the cards were perhaps a humanitarian effort to prevent them from a life of non-existence.
Sometime after that experience, which incidentally was my only memory of that tour, I heard the expression, “Think outside the Box”.
Wow! Really?
Did that same company invent that little gem – an upgrade to Version 2, perhaps?
Not only do we have to prompt people to think so they can exist, but we also have to supply them with boxes to help them think. Perhaps the practice of thinking outside the box was a step towards weening them off their life-threatening dependence upon boxes.
That’s when I started to think about Schrodinger’s Cat! Would the cat inside the box be thinking about whether it was alive or dead? Or as Schrodinger pointed out, would anyone thinking outside the box know if the cat was either dead or alive, or even what it was thinking. It’s all too quantum.
Hercule Poirot, a character created by Agatha Christie, would frequently remind his associate, Captain Hastings, to use the ‘little grey cells’, referring to the brain. Perhaps it is time to throw away the prompts, the virtual caps, and all the silly boxes, and start using our little grey cells.
All this talk about thinking got me thinking about thinking. What is it that we think about? Once I started to think about it, apparently, it seems that I think about lots of things. Perhaps I’m just paranoid about the Descartes Effect – if I stop thinking, I might just fade away.
But let’s get serious for a moment. Here is what I often think about –
- What and Why. These are the analytical question.
- When and Where. These are the investigative questions.
- Who and How. These are the solution questions.
In the comments below, tell me what you think.
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