I've seen a couple of discussion on the web around How Common sense could be developed...nurtured.
Yesterday a young lady (6 years old by the way) asked me a question...Convert "IX" into six by adding a line...you can't rearrange/ re order/ Delete the existing lines.
Most of us will approach this with the assumption that since "IX" is a roman numeral "9" hence the solution too will lie in this...also prevail will the assumption that line can only be straight (we all have been conditioned to belive that North Pole is always on top...while in reality the globe can be seen upside down as well without any change in the landscapes and/or geographies). since I've lost almost all of my hairs and a little inteligence as well in that process, I could not answer it correctly...the correct answer was adding an S.."SIX". This solution challenges the two assumptions I talked about earlier...Line can only be straight and solution should exist in the Roman Numerals.
My immediate response to the lady, who happens to be my daughter was...hey it is sheer common sense...How can I miss that.
Common sense is usually not that common and is usually masked by our assumptions, prejudices, experience etc etc. As a friend of mine rightly commented, "...most of the time it is "Super Sense" that people think afterwards as it is a "common sense" ONLY after the event has occurred and a lot of water has flown under the bridge..." I don't think when google founders 1st launched the search engine...they did that using common sense...and when they wanted to sell it out of the same sense, so called common sense prevailed on people that it will not work. Google has brought about a complete paradigm shift...there are 31 billion searches on Google every month...In 2006, this no was 2.7 billion...To who were these questions addressed before B.G (before Google)?
The idea here is keeping the basics right...challenging the underlying assumption, changing the frame/ window through which we see the world, reinvent ourselves and continuously keep shifting the frame. We all get stuck and will get stuck if we look at things from one Frame...Google brothers never resigned to reality but created a reality of their own. We may call it a common sense or a super sense...words hardly matter.
Dear Vijai, I read your post on common sense and really liked it. I reached this page through your linkedin profile. Like you, even I have worked in IBM Daksh.
ReplyDeleteThis problem of common sense was studied by psychologists also..and specially psychologists coming from Gestalt school have some points on this problem of people not using common sense..
One of the best examples that I remember from my school days involved finding a bad coin (either less in weight or more) from a lot of 8 coins. You have a balance but you can use it only two times to find out the bad coin.. most of the people when given this problem to solve say that you should divide 8 coins in 2 groups of 4.. though it is not the right apporach to solve this problem... and Wertheimer (a gestalt psychologist) calls it as problem of functional fixedness.. because from our childhood we have learned that easiest way is to divide an eight is into two fours.. for more information you may like to visit the following link - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_n4_v61/ai_15955167/pg_11/?tag=content;col1