Dr. Ray Jorgensen uses the classic nine dots puzzle to explore how leaders perceive problems and respond to them. The presentation challenges conventional thinking and shows why stepping outside expected boundaries matters for leadership.
Good morning. It's Ray Jourgensen talking to you from Landrum, South Carolina. And this morning, I'm just going to take a couple of minutes of your time to discuss one of the three significant leadership responsibilities. And it's an internal responsibility, one that requires us to pay attention to how we see things and how we respond to things as they unfold, and during our leadership conversations and actually during any conversation we might have at all, should you choose. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I think you'll enjoy it. I actually think it's something you all have probably seen before or some semblance of it. So all in all, I think it's going to be a lot of fun for you and certainly for me to share this information with you. So let's switch to looking at one of the little whiteboards that I have in my office here. So hold on one second. I'm sure that many of you have seen this exercise before, called nine dots. Those of you that have worked with me over the past years probably have seen me do something like it. And if you have seen it before, let me invite you to continue to try it again. I first saw this when I was a high school student. I saw it again in college, and I forgot how to do it. And again, some years later, I saw it again and forgot how to do it. So this is not a question of my memory or iq, although I think some people might say it is my iq. Over time, some of these important points get lost as we try and determine what's the next best learning. So for now, I think this learning, if you've had the experience before, may have a slightly different coloration. If you're brand new to the experiment, let me just set it up for you and have you do it. So right now, there are nine dots behind me on a simple white piece of paper or whiteboard. My invitation to you is to connect the nine dots with a pen or a pencil with four straight lines. But you can't take your pen or pencil off the paper. So four straight lines and don't take your pen or pencil off the paper. Have fun doing it. I'll come back in a minute and kind of show you one of the ways to actually solve this little problem. So enjoy your writing time and try and put those four lines through those nine dots, four straight lines, without taking your pen or pencil from the paper. Enjoy. See you in a minute. Welcome back, everybody. As promised, here's our nine dots. And there's lots of ways to solve this thing. But the one that seems to be most commonly seen is this one. So we start in any corner and we go up through these three dots, and outside the proverbial box, we swing back through these two dots. Here we come back over this way, and then there's our fourth straight line without taking our pen or pencil from the paper. So my invitation to you now is to recognize that that feels a bit like a trick, because somebody always says to me, oh, you went outside the box. My response is, what box? It doesn't appear to me today that there's a box there. Just. Just nine dots. However, we very quickly put things inside of boxes, and in a few minutes we're going to talk about what kind of box have we put ourselves inside of, or even what kind of box have we put people that we know inside. Anyhow, there's your nine dots experiment. Think of it as defining somebody's box the way they see each other. Maybe how successful you think you can be is your nine dots, or the quality of the relationships that you have that may be defining your nine dots. So it has implications personally and in leading others. We'll be right back to you to talk a little bit more about nine dots. Thank you.
