101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

76. It’s Not My Job

Background

Have you ever been curious about other people’s jobs? What exactly do they do? How do

they do it? How do they feel about it? Henry Andersen (1991), a former marketing man-

ager for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Europe, Ltd., had a similar curiosity. One difference

was that his curiosity was directed more at how ideas could be generated by borrowing

from different work disciplines.

Andersen developed “The Diamond Idea Group” to promote use of multidisciplinary

perspectives during idea generation. He envisioned the Diamond Idea Group as a world-

wide resource organizations could use to generate ideas for any number of problems. His

primary activity for generating ideas is what he calls “Trans-Disciplinary Analogy” (TDA).

Objectives

• To help participants generate as many creative ideas as possible


• To help participants learn how to use the activities to generate ideas

Participants

Small groups of four to seven people each

Materials, Supplies, and Equipment

• For each group: markers, two flip charts, and masking tape for posting flip-chart
  sheets


• For each participant: one sheet each of three different colors of sticking dots
  (^1 ⁄ 2 ” diameter) and one pad of 4 x 6 Post-it®Notes

Handout

• It’s Not My Job Handout

Time

30 minutes

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