Puzzle Thought Exercise Contributed by: Laura Parkin Executive Director, NEN & Sunita Singh Director, NEN

EN Consulting Introduction During this activity, student teams attempt to imagine a situation in which they would reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle in order to create value. The students have to imagine that they are functioning as a group to achieve this goal. The challenge is that they are not actually reconstructing the puzzle, but imagining that they are doing it under two different situations. It orients students to entrepreneurial thinking that is based on effectual reasoning. Learning Objectives

To get the students excited about entrepreneurship. To introduce entrepreneurial thinking. To illustrate that entrepreneurs are opportunity obsessed with the goal of value creation, irrespective of the resources they control. To help the students especially the management students see the difference between being a manager and being an entrepreneur.

When to Use This exercise can be used During any course on entrepreneurship In entrepreneurial skill development workshops As a creative introduction to entrepreneurship, during any entrepreneurship activity, without being formally linked to any course. Preparation by the faculty member This exerci se re quires some p reparation o n yo ur part as a faculty member; reading through "What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? by Saras D. Sarasvathy (Prof of Entrepreneurship, e in University of Wa shington) is a pre requi site t o run thi s exercise. It is availabl as an appendix to this www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf. The frame work is provided document. The Exercise Explain to the students that in a thought exercise they will be required to imagine the situation, and their reactions or behavior in that situation. Given below are two situations you will ask your students to imagine they are in, while doing this exercise. Situation A: Instruction for students 1. Imagine that in this room we are going to play a game or rather puzzle making competition 2. I am going to identify 10 leaders in the room and give them a bag full of jumbled up puzzle pieces or resources each.

Created June 2008 NEN

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3. The task of the leader is to complete the puzzle as completely and quickly as possible. 4. Apart from the 10 leaders all others in the room may be regarded as potential resources for anybody. 5. The question is: How will you accomplish your task? Explain in 3-5 simple steps Directing the response: You can ask a couple of different people to answer this. Typically, you will see the same basic reaction from people - identify and build a good team that has both the skill for the task at hand and can work well; assign tasks and motivate them to complete. Now give them Situation B:
Instructions to students:

1. Imagine that it is the same room full of people and you are still playing the puzzle game. But now the rules of the games have changed. 2. Now, all the puzzles are mixed up and random sets of pieces are given to every single person in the room. 3. The task is for you to build the puzzle again larger value of the puzzle is determined by the built up pieces of the puzzle/s that you can build. 4. Additionally, a smaller value is also assigned to the individual pieces that you may have. 5. The question is - how do you behave now? Again ask them to give out their reactions.

Directing response: This time you may ask more than 2 people to react. You will typically find that people can have diverse reactions everything from building a team of neighbors/people with similar pieces/people with specific skills; from competing with different teams to collaborating, from one person assuming leadership to bring people together and give initial direction to another taking a lead on trading pieces or coopting members from other teams. Throw out some questions/new rules at them pro-actively like what would you do if you could trade your pieces for money at different points in the game and winner was to be determined by either how much money value he had, or how much of tangible assets (built-up pieces) at the end of the game. You will see that again there may be some who will be willing to trade off everything for money, some others who will want to keep what they have and so on.

Concluding the exercise: This is the time to stop and highlight the differences in the situations and their behavior; you may ask them the following questions to help them understand the differences. How are the two situations different? What was the original goal in the second situation? Did it change? Why?

After the questions, you can point out the following to clearly draw out the differences: the first situation is one where there is a clear and defined goal which can be accomplished successfully if the leader was smart, agile and could put together the right team with the right skill sets, assigning responsibilities for highest productivity. And if the leader is strategic, he/she may find multiple ways to reach that goal, choosing them in different combinations to remain ahead of the competition.

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The second on the other hand is a fairly unstructured situation with the potential of multiple goals the participants in this process are forced to figure out and define their own goals. And even then as the circumstances change and dynamics emerge, they have the flexibility, creativity and resourcefulness to change approaches as required. In the first case they were being a typical manager (causal reasoning) and in the second an entrepreneur (effectual reasoning). Basically it is the difference between causal reasoning and effectual reasoning; causal (predictive) reasoning is behind all strategical thinking, and begins with a specific goal. Whereas effectual reasoning begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time. (see figure showing Entrepreneurial thinking, given below in
Appendix)

Time: 1hour Material required (optional): 1. A slide presentation (PPT) showing Prof. Sarasvathys framework 2. Handout of the research paper What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? Appendix Saras D. Sarasvathys Framework (2001, University of Washington)

Created June 2008 NEN

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