The Princess and the Many Choices

Posted by MSwiecichowski on Tue, 11/08/2009 - 09:17 in Blogs 1247 2 comments | report

Once upon a time there was a princess whose castle was constantly being attacked by a terrible and fierce dragon. Being the ruler of this realm, she knew she had to fight the dragon but didn't know how, so she called her most wise magician. She just had to find a way to protect her subjects!

The magician said he could help the princess by giving her a mystical power, but that she must practice with it before confronting the dragon. She immediately agreed. The magician cast his spell and told her, "Whenever you need help you can summon up the power of choices. You will hear as many solutions to your problem as you need until things are solved."

The princess, forgetting the need to practice, immediately confronted the dragon. She called on the power of choices, but was overwhelmed because she began to hear suggestion after suggestion on how to confront her nemesis. She was so confused she had to run back into the castle and sleep for 3 hours!

The next week she practiced, and finally realised she could listen to each idea and see if it helped her, but didn't need to take action on everything she heard. In fact, she was beginning to realise the real power was in her receiving prompts to develop her own ideas that were just right for the situation. Finally, her power became almost a friend pointing her in the right direction, but not necessarily solving all her problems for her.

Using the power of choices, the princess developed the perfect weapons to fight the dragon. She also better understood his tactics and learned to anticipate what he would do next. In the end, the dragon gave up and decided to bother a more easily attacked castle.

And the princess never saw the dragon again.

Comments

And the conclusion is...

Anonymous | Tue, 11/08/2009 - 09:52 | Permalink

The magician, rather than give the princess a practical way of killing the dragon (magic sword, knight in shining armour, asbestos suit & fire extinguisher, etc) has instead dressed up a piece of common sense to make it look like a valuable, novel, and no doubt saleable and scaleable (dragon - scaleable - geddit?) 'solution'.

He has also failed to ensure proper training so that the 'solution' is not properly implemented, meaning that it has fallen over the first time it was tried. Even when it did work, it did not do what the princess probably thought it would (solve ALL her problems), but there was not thing 1 she could do about it, because the magician's original promise had a get-out in the small print ('hear as many solutions as you need until it is solved' can mean infinite 'solutions' to an insoluable problem).

He can't have evaluated his work on the basis of practical outcomes, because he clearly doesn't know what the outcome was - if he had known how the princess had ended up killing the dragon he would have said so, rather than the bland puff that 'she developed the perfect weapon'.

Conclusion - the magician is a management consultant.

How many interpretations are there?

MSwiecichowski | Tue, 11/08/2009 - 13:17 | Permalink

It is always amazing how many interpretations to a story there can be. I hadn't even originally contemplated anything like a management consultant taking charge of the castle. Maybe I should have said all weapons were tried and failed. If there are any consultants out there please defend you corner.

My real aim of this story was to introduce a problem solving technique I'll be talking about in my post on Thursday. It will be something that you can actually implement and use on a defined problem which usually gives you a solution you can use. Watch this space.

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