A Racoon and an Architect Walk into a Bar …

This week, I want to show you a surprisingly clever little problem-solvingtechnique that I use with my clients.

I use it alongside - and increasingly instead of - the evaporating cloud I wrote about in my last book CorkScrew Solutions.

But rather than me gushing on about how great it is … let me show you.

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Remember this tweet from last week’s newsletter?

Well, this week, we’re gonna turn the joke into a diagram using a technique I’ll call a continuum-twist.

ONE - We start by noting that the joke is based around these two extreme and opposite positions:

1. the Scandinavian Architect, and,

2. the Racoon on Meth.

TWO - Now, over the years, I’ve trained myself to notice whenever anyone mentions “polar opposites” like these, and, in my mind, I instantly turned the two extremes into a continuum.

Like this:

(When I’m working with clients, we usually do this in Miro using adouble-arrow line and 2 text boxes - simples! In this case I drew thepic on my lovely new Kindle Scribe.)

So far so good.

THREE - Let’s tidy up the diagram a little.

Can you quickly look at the continuum and study it for a moment.

I want you to notice how we can untangle it a little more.

Do you see that:

• • You could label the left-hand side “Architects” and the right-hand side “Racoons”.

  • And, then, on the Scandi side of the scale, you could draw a little arrow from “Scandinavian” up to the continuum line, to indicate the most extreme form of “Architect”.

  • And likewise, you could add another up arrow from “On Meth” to show the extreme type of “Raccoon”.

This gives us a diagram that looks like this:

So far, so obvious, right?

Here’s the twist.

The Twist

I wish I could say I invented the twist, but in reality, I discovered the twist about 6 years ago, when my Scandinavian Architect wife (who is actually an Irish doctor) and I were out for a walk on one of the nearby beaches.

She discovered the twist about 10 years earlier at a medical conference when one of the geekier doctors (ooooh, trigger! - there’s a continuum for “geekiness” too!) pointed out that many, but not all, continuums are actually hiding two continua.

Huh?

Let me show you:

FOUR - Look at the diagram below and note how I’ve taken the architect <-> racoon continuum, grabbed the line by its midpoint then twisted the left half up to form an XY diagram, like this:

It might not seem like a lot, and the diagram is incomplete, but somehow this little twist opens up all sorts of questions and opportunities.

(You could say that the twist from 1-dimension to 2-dimensions has created a map or a landscape that we can explore)

The most obvious question that pops up for me is:

Can a person be a bit architect and a bit racoon?

And I reckon - based on all the emails I got back in response to the last email - that most of us are a bit of both.

And that makes me wonder:

Can we measure people’s AQ (Architecture quotient) and their RQ (Racoon Quotient), like we do with IQ and EQ?

The measurements wouldn’t be accurate or precise - none of those sorts of measures are - but I bet they’d be useful.

I’ll expand on this next week …

Finally …

The continuum twist is a generic process and can be applied to lots of situations.

For instance:

• • the introvert <-> extrovert scale is most likely two scales collapsed, falsely, into one - most people are ambiverts.

  • less obviously, people can be both selfish and altruistic, even though we might think of them as opposites.

I’m gonna wrap up now because I don’t want to firehouse you with too much info.

Next week we will go for a wee wander across the RQAQ landscape.

Any thoughts or suggestions, - or even a thumbs up for encouragement? - please hit reply 

Clarke