A man’s condemned to death. He has to choose from 3 rooms to accept his punishment. The 1st room has a firing squad with guns loaded, the 2nd a blazing fire, and the 3rd a room full of tigers that haven’t eaten for 6 months. Which room would you choose?

What are your initial thoughts? Did you immediately stray to one choice over the other? Did you question your choice?

This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but more and more some of the biggest corporations (and even highest ranking intelligence firms) are employing the use of creative thinking questions such as these. Why? Well the answer is simple. How well do you know what you don’t know. What is the strength of your mental pliability?…that is, your ability to contemplate a concept from multiple different angles. This isn’t some new age, generation Z, tik tok trend. It’s been known that some of the greatest inventors in history employed some of the very same tactics. Thomas Edison used a soup test. Yep, a soup test.

He would wine and dine potential apprentices to decide if they were worthy of the job. If they put salt and pepper in their soup before even tasting it he knew they weren’t the ones for him. You see, Edison needed someone who didn’t have preconceived notions of the world or how it worked. Being one of the most creative thinkers of his time he needed an abstract thinker to help see his projects through to fruition. So, adding salt and pepper before they tasted the soup was an easy way to see they carried judgements without knowing.

He was onto something…the ability to rethink and unlearn.

There is discomfort in doubt and to a certain degree we lose a sense of humility as we gain experience.

“I know what I know to be true.”

It’s odd isn’t it? I expect my iPhone to constantly update, or it’s replaced with a newer, shinier version but not my ideas about the one way to solve a math problem that I learned in 1994. People like to cling to ideas that make them feel good, things they feel certain they are knowledgeable about. Not ideas that make them think hard.

I see it every day in my classroom. Even with 8 year olds. Imagine trying to tell an 8 year old, “I’m teaching you this way, but I might not be teaching you the right way. Question me.” It’s not the steadiest process, but let me tell you it is a beautiful one. And isn’t that the true purpose of learning? Not to affirm your beliefs, to feel good about…but to evolve them, to constantly adapt, to question.

Interestingly enough, your ability to rethink your thinking is directly correlated to your emotional intelligence level. The more fixated you are on knowing, the more you overestimate your abilities, the less likely you are to want to question if you’re wrong, the less self awareness you possess. And in a day and age where everyone has a multitude of resources at their fingertips to be able to question, why don’t we???

If you do, the best and brightest want you. The most forward thinkers of our time at the some of the most prestigious locations. The FBI even ran an ad, #unexpectedagent. They want people from different fields, lifestyles, backgrounds, who never would have considered a career as an FBI agent. Because, well…there’s a million ways to look at a problem and there’s no point in having tunnel vision.

So back to the riddle. What option did you pick? Did you even question the right problem in the scenario? Are you willing to rethink it?