Take two, sometimes called speed scrabble, is played with the scrabble letters, but without the board. Every player starts with seven letters and has to make words that are interconnected, but everyone is working on their own – the words are not interconnected. When one player has used up her letters, she shouts ‘Take two” and everyone takes two more letters and continues on making interconnected words on their own. The game ends when there are no more letters to ‘take’.

Whenever I play there is always at least one moment in which I pick up a set of letters and I wonder ‘should I scrap my current word grid and start over’. Sometimes this is because I’m stuck and can’t figure out how to add the loose letters I have, while other times it’s because I ‘see’ a great word I could make. It’s always a feels like a gamble because I’m usually somehow already ‘wedded’ to my original design.

There’s also the inevitable staring at tiles that happens. I pick up two more, flip them over, and the staring begins. Mentally I’m moving them around, mixing them up, adding other letters to them, but outwardly I’m staring. Weirdly, it’s when I start physically moving them around into different orders, putting them beside different letters, that the magic happens, ideas form, words appear.

How often when we face a challenge do we simply stare at it and try to perform mental gymnastics? What would happen if we started moving the parts of the problem around, seeing it from different angles, rearranging the order?

How often are we afraid to start the design over when a new piece of information shows up? What would happen if we would start again building the design around a new key element?

What are we afraid of?