How to Solve an Impossible Problem

Here is another story from ‘The Shadow of the Sun’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski  (one of the best books I have read, beautifully written).

It concerns a rather improbable method of trading that used to take place between the Tuareg people of the Sahara and the Bantu people of the Sahel.  For centuries a great enmity has existed between them, villages burnt, people killed and enslaved - made worse in times of drought.  Both groups had valuable commodities to trade, the Tuareg salt, and the Bantu gold.  But such was the level of fear between them, it was impossible to see how they could trade. 

 How did they solve that seemingly impossible problem?   You would assume that they simply traded through a third party, but for some reason, this is not so.

If fact, they contrived an extraordinary solution. 

When the Tuareg arrived at the trading location, they left salt in orderly piles.  They then retreated half a day’s travel.  The Bantu duly approached and left a measure of gold by each pile of salt.  After they had retreated, the Tuareg returned and if they deemed the amount of gold to be sufficient, they took it and left the salt, if not, they left both the gold and salt in place and retired.  The Bantu returned and either took their salt, or added more gold or took it away. This exchange continued until there was no further exchange.  The transactions took place with neither party seeing the other, it was called ‘silent trading’.

Silent trading took place for hundreds of years, but how did it come about?  How did such an extraordinary level of trust come about between two violently opposed groups?

Given our usual assumptions about trading, an ‘incremental’ solution doesn’t seem possible; they obviously found another way round the problem.

Using Visual Metaphors to Overcome problems

Look at this image*.  If you were a robot, what would you see?  I think I can say with some confidence that you would see a lot of colour pencils and a pencil sharpener.

 

But you aren’t a robot, you see a zip – and it isn’t as if you have to concentrate, it jumps out at you.  But there is no zip.

This is not a skill we need to learn, it is inherent.  We pick out the key features and make associations with other objects or concepts that may have similar features.  We create ‘visual metaphors’. 

This is an extraordinary gift that we all have – to be able to see a zip from a bunch of pencils.  What it does is to expand our thinking.  It enables us to think far more creatively.  Frederick Law Olmstead described his design for a connected system of parks as an ‘emerald necklace’.  Visual metaphor is much used in architecture; - the Sydney Opera House’s shell forms reflect the image of yachts in Sydney Harbour.

It is less commonly used in engineering, but a significant example is in the development of supersonic flight.  Scientists were struggling with the effects of shock waves at trans-sonic airspeeds.  This was overcome when a key figure thought of the airflow over the fuselage as being in the form of ‘water pipes’.  By redesigning the fuselage to match the contours of the ‘pipes’, the problem was overcome. 

Perhaps a better known example is the struggle that the chemist Kekule had when trying to understand the shape of the benzene molecule.  He dreamed of a snake eating its own tail, and realized that benzene comes in the shape of a ring.

Visual metaphors provide stepping stones, clues that can lead to seeing a solution. 

Each of us has a fantastic visual ability, by pushing ourselves to see something new in the familiar will help overcome the most intractable problems.

*To see more of this artist's work, see  http://kpk-photography.de/gallery