Box on subversion
Posted on August 13, 2007 by organicfrog
Ok, here is something I’ve always wanted to blog about, but oddly I’ve never manage to do it. I had some great discussions about planning with Saher when I was at AKQA and he once used what I now refer to as the ‘box analogy’ as a way to solve a problem… (The box is the problem & the solutions are inside the box)
Well, here are the basic principles of the box analogy. When you look at a box, you sometimes don’t see any perspectives and could easily think that what you are looking at isn’t a box but a simple sheet of paper.
Is it a box?!
What a planner will discover when doing the analysis of a ‘problem’ is that this isn’t actually a simple sheet of paper but a 3D box. Each time you will discover a new side of the box, you will find a new insight and some information about what’s inside… When you’ve finally discovered each sides of the box, you are then more able to have a guess about what’s inside… But remember you’ll never know exactly what’s inside the box; you will just be closer to the truth.
I really enjoy this analogy; it puts in perspective (!) a few essentials planner skills: the need to be curious, to investigate, to go beyond perceptions, to think about a problem from different angles… but the most important thing for me is to stay humble and to remember that there isn’t a perfect and unique answer.
