I'll Assume You'll Find This Interesting

Sometimes when I’m sitting at the computer, I will play a game called Freecell - this may come as a shock to some of you that I play games, but to others it will merely confirm your suspicions.

The game itself is not particularly taxing - it involves moving cards around in stacks until you can remove them to other stacks - but it has a large number of possible permutations (that is, it isn’t boring), & has one redeeming feature - there is always a solution to the logic puzzle it presents. Given this fact, it must be possible for me to find that solution. The general approach to the solution is to think “to remove that first card I want, I have to move this card, which means I have to move this card, …”

Some would call this a ‘logical’ approach to solving the problem. More often than not, it doesn’t work, & the tendency is to back-track on the logic to work out where I got the logic wrong. This is time consuming. It is often wasteful in terms of solving the problem. It is also the way that most of us were ‘trained’ - if we were trained at all - to approach such problems. We were taught to break down a difficult problem into simpler steps & solve each of these in the order we ‘know’ reaches the solution. However, can we ‘prove’ that this will solve the problem? It sounds ‘logical’.

For those who have been paying attention to the inverted commas, & understand one of the many uses of same, you will see that ‘logic’, as I’m highlighting, implies something that I’m not convinced is the right term here, or at least the right application of thinking. It’s not the right methodology, the appropriate approach, … & it’s very difficult to explain something that is an alternative that can still be considered correct in achieving a goal that appears to be a logic puzzle solution.

However, de Bono coined the term “Lateral Thinking” quite a long time ago, & it still hasn’t filtered into our speech sufficiently to see it as a kind of logic beyond logic, an approach to solving logic problems that is different, not ‘logical’ in the sense that we were taught.

My approach to solving Freecell is to think in terms of having made an assumption that was wrong in my logic, & therefore the moves that I made based on that assumption would not lead to a solution. How can we get away from false assumptions? Lateral Thinking. How do I solve the logic puzzle when I seem ‘stuck’ - I start from scratch & remove every assumption I’d made before.

This may sound like I’m diving into the problem blind, with no hope of solving the logic puzzle, but this works because logic puzzles are about patterns, not process. The brain will find the patterns (because that’s what brains are really good at), without needing to understand the process of solving the puzzle. When you’re playing a game on a computer, you don’t have to tell the computer how you solved the puzzle. You’re allowed to just solve it & move on to the next problem.

You’re wondering by now where this is all leading…

Communication is a logic puzzle. When you want to express something to someone, you have a goal (getting your message across), & you have a process in mind (sentence constructions, ideas, language), & you apply a logical process to convey your message. What happens if it doesn’t work? What happens if your audience is still totally dumbfounded?

You have to accept at that point that you’ve made assumptions about your audience - whether it’s a commonality of background knowledge, language, your communication skills, or even whether they’ve got perfect hearing in that ear, you’ve made an assumption. You could take a logical approach & remove these assumptions one by one, or you could take a lateral thinking approach & scrap all assumptions & try a new way of communicating entirely.

The new way may be through using metaphors, speaking more slowly, or with different emphasis on key points, or even asking questions to elicit the audience’s level of understanding, so that you can remove assumptions. These are all a part of good communication. They solve the puzzle of getting your message across.

Of course, if you’ve got no feedback mechanism from the audience, then you are somewhat stymied. If you don’t know when you’ve solved the puzzle, then it’s particularly hard to know when to stop. In this way, we come full circle, & relate back to this particular blog & how, time & again, I wonder if I’m making an assumption that any of this is of any interest to anyone.