Card #48 – ”Ignore”

Card #48 – ”Ignore” from the Creative Whack Pack

Available on the iOS App Store and as a physical deck of cards

One of my favorite workship exercises involves making paper airplanes.

I assign participants to teams and give each team fifty sheets of paper. Then I draw a line at the back of the room. Each team has five minutes to see how many airplanes it can make that fly past the line: the one with the most is the winner.

The most common approach is to fold the sheets into standard paper airplane shapes.

But the winning design is usually a sheet of paper that has been crumpled into a ball. These crumpled balls invariably “fly” past the line — the only criterion that has to be satisfied.

When the losing teams see this, they immediately grasp that what had hobbled their thinking were their preconceptions about what a paper airplane is supposed to look like.

The winning teams also held these same assumptions initially, but then conveniently ignored them.

— What assumptions and preconceptions can you ignore?

Scroll to Top