On Problem Solving

Escape room game Sydney

Linear thinking and logic are fine for analysing something established and at least partially understood. They can even take a working idea or system further. Yet they are limited if they try to develop something completely new, or if they try to understand something completely unfamiliar. Lateral thinking, which looks at building an understanding from the ground up, which finds many different common factors and looks to see which ones connect into a meaningful pattern, can be indispensable for some situations. It can be slow, looking at so many different possibilities, but if one or more of those options proves useful it is a type of thinking that is worth pursuing.

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Linus Pauling

• Try arranging ideas, clues and pieces of information in different ways. There is always more than one possibility. One of them is probably the right one.
• Check assumptions. Something thought of as a fact could be an underlying assumption. Did we assume somebody’s gender based on their name or status? Could two people actually by the same person.
• What seems like one item might be two – do we confuse pounds the currency with pounds the weight.
• There might be red herrings
• Plays on words are sometime clues, and sometime coincidences.
• The details are important, but there should be an overall theme or pattern. The details should (ultimately) fit this overall pattern.

In real life the number of people and objects involved is very broad; everything happen within the context of a larger world. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to find all the connections between pieces of information. An escape room game is different because it is designed to be interconnected; there are enough clues in the room to form the complete story. While there is always a chance that a perceived fact might be irrelevant, or that a genuine clue is misinterpreted and misconnected to other information, it is good to bear in mind that the pieces will all fit together. The trick it to find the overall pattern.

Escape room Sydney

Escape rooms are popular for company training exercises, groups that want to develop thinking skills, or just social event that don’t want to resort to pure hedonism. If your group is interested in experiencing an escape room Sydney CT adventure is a recommended option.