- Image by Jer Kunz via Flickr
The next time you are bored to tears in a staff or board meeting, consider this brainercise.
- Pick an object.
- Ask yourself these questions:
- How did it get here?
- Where was it before that?
Keep cycling these questions while you speculate on the answers until you come up with an origin. In this cycle, you might also ask questions like:
- Who did that?
- What did it/he look like?
- What was the smell when that happened?
Here’s an example:
- I’ll pick my mechanical pencil sitting next to me.
- Here’s the cycle:
- How did it get here?I put it there from the glass of pens and pencils from the foyer.
- Where was it before that? In the package at Target.
- How did it get there? In a giant 18-wheeler with a large hairy man driving it.
- Where was it before that? At the factory that smelled of a lot of plastic.
- How did it get there? It was made there from petroleum products.
- Where was it before that? Deep in the earth. It was tiny micro-organisms millions of years ago.
Give it a try. It might just pull you out of your board-um. And let us know how it goes.
Stay Curious!
– Idearella
