The Bear Story
So we had this pretty cool management workshop by this group called Coverdale about two weeks back now, and one of the things they stressed was the importance of hearing out all possible ideas during a brain storming process...
Irrespective of how crazy the ideas might seem at the time, try and follow the idea to a finite conclusion, to better assess its worth.
To illustrate this point, the session leader narrated this story of a Canadian telecom company, spent millions on cabling every winter. The main reaon for this was the huge piles of snow used to weigh down the phone lines and cause so much strain on the cables that they would snap. Leaving large portions of the northern half of the country without service, and also a huge repair bill...
The company had a brainstorming session, where one of the ideas floated was about as far out as you can get.... We should get the bears to shake the poles and then the snow would also fall off the wires...
Thankfully the CEO of the company was wiser than to just shoot the person who passed such a seemingly thoughtless comment. He asked the person to elaborate - and the person replied that bears liked honey, so if they should put honey at the top of each telephone post, the bears in their attempt to get at the honey would shake the post enough to dislodge all the snow piled on the wires...
The next obvious question was how were they supposed to get the honey on those posts, and the person replied by lowering down jars of honey onto the posts by helicopter...
At about this point of time, light bulbs began flashing in the heads of others around the room... they quickly realised that the wake of a helicopter's spinning blades as it attempted to lower the aforementioned bottle, would cause the snow piles to be dislodged, in effect giving them the best possible solution.
So, to this day, in the deep of winter, helicopters are flown for hundreds of miles along the telephone lines in Canada, and the wake of their passing blows away all the snow from the lines...
The 'bear' idea actually turning into a productive and useful solution...
Irrespective of how crazy the ideas might seem at the time, try and follow the idea to a finite conclusion, to better assess its worth.
To illustrate this point, the session leader narrated this story of a Canadian telecom company, spent millions on cabling every winter. The main reaon for this was the huge piles of snow used to weigh down the phone lines and cause so much strain on the cables that they would snap. Leaving large portions of the northern half of the country without service, and also a huge repair bill...
The company had a brainstorming session, where one of the ideas floated was about as far out as you can get.... We should get the bears to shake the poles and then the snow would also fall off the wires...
Thankfully the CEO of the company was wiser than to just shoot the person who passed such a seemingly thoughtless comment. He asked the person to elaborate - and the person replied that bears liked honey, so if they should put honey at the top of each telephone post, the bears in their attempt to get at the honey would shake the post enough to dislodge all the snow piled on the wires...
The next obvious question was how were they supposed to get the honey on those posts, and the person replied by lowering down jars of honey onto the posts by helicopter...
At about this point of time, light bulbs began flashing in the heads of others around the room... they quickly realised that the wake of a helicopter's spinning blades as it attempted to lower the aforementioned bottle, would cause the snow piles to be dislodged, in effect giving them the best possible solution.
So, to this day, in the deep of winter, helicopters are flown for hundreds of miles along the telephone lines in Canada, and the wake of their passing blows away all the snow from the lines...
The 'bear' idea actually turning into a productive and useful solution...
posted by Jeet at
5:46 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home