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Four Face-saving Fix-it Tips

By Peter Lloyd

I was given a simple challenge. Make three, old, weathered, seven-foot doors stand as a backdrop for my daughter’s wedding. The wedding planner wanted to hang autumn-colored wreathes from them and drape them with fabric. Easy enough, right?

I’m still kicking myself for all the plans I considered and scrapped before settling on an inferior design. Something along the lines of L-bracing each door to a plywood surface. At the hardware store, when I asked a floor assistant about plywood, he asked me, “Why don’t you just connect the doors with hinges?”

Reading my embarrassment, he assured me, “I wouldn’t have thought of hinges, except that I just set up a display that stood that way.” How reassuring! I’ve been writing about creativity for too many years not to know better.

photo of wedding dancersSo in the spirit of live and learn, allow me to outline a few steps that might spare you and me wasted time and needless embarrassment.

1. Look around
If I had looked at or even thought about other standing-panel configurations, like dividing screens, I might have noticed that they are hinged! And they stand very well without braces. They brace each other.

2. Free associate
Door, doorknob, door jamb, frame, hinge... Words and ideas associated with doors and standing and support might very well have led me to the idea of hinging.

3. Ask questions
Although I did question the hardware store man at the last minute, I could have saved some time. My engineer friend and neighbor, Gary, for example. As I was telling him about my visit to the hardware store, he interrupted me with the hinge solution before I got to it.

4. Visualize through
Simply thinking about all the other parts of the challenge might have introduced me to the hinge solution. How will the doors connect to each other? Certainly that question might have suggested hinges. And I might have recognized that hinging the doors was all that was needed to keep them standing.

Maybe I’ll take my own advice from now on. It was a beautiful wedding, by the way.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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