The Mystery of Medical Eminence
Medical Eminence is a lateral thinking exercise to challenge your group to solve a mystery with limited data. Groups love these little minute mysteries even though they tend to take a lot more than a minute to solve sometimes.
Gather your group, invite them to sit them down and present the ‘facts, the whole facts and nothing but the facts’ of a particular situation. Then, you then invite your group to ask a series of questions that can be answered only with a “YES”, “NO” or ‘IRRELEVANT” reply.
Often times, a group will ask questions that are irrelevant or do not help the group to get closer to a solution. If this occurs, simply say “IRRELEVANT” and invite another question.
As the minutes tick by, your group will narrow their focus and finally arrive at the solution. As with all lateral-thinking exercises, it is critical that you do not let these mysteries linger for too long lest people quickly disengage.
The Mystery
A father and his son are involved in a car accident. The father dies, but the boy survives and is taken to the hospital for surgery. An eminence of medicine with glasses looks at the child and says: “I cannot operate on this child, he is my son.” Why?
On occasions, you may need to guide your group to ask questions about a certain topic to draw them closer to a solution.
Moment of Reflection
- What reactions did you observe in the group when the mystery was first announced?
- What feelings did you or the group experience during the activity? Why?
- As time passed and you couldn’t find the solution, did you or the group prefer to abandon the challenge? Why?
- At any point in the game did you feel frustrated or any other similar emotion? Why?
- How did you feel when you managed to solve the riddle?
By the way… The surgeon is the child’s mother.
The topics of this publication: creativity, motivation, interactions, active listening, imagination, brainstorming, lateral thinking
