Navarang Puzzle and things to learn from it!

Today Dr. Mandi gave the concept of Navarang Puzzle. It is one of the most amazing ways of demonstration that in an organization how employees having different expertise work towards common goal. The method used by Dr. Mandi brought forth some nice points.







it

It consists of 27 small cubes of 9 different colors. Contrary to a Rubik’s cube which has 6 colours, Navrang has 9 colours. The cube is made of 27 coloured detachable cubes in sets of 3.


The first challenge was for two of us to volunteer and solve the cube - put it back into place with the given set of constraints - 

1. Each face of the cube must have all the 9 colors. Which also means obviously that none of the colors can be repeated on any face - since there are only 9 slots in each.

2. We only had 5 minutes in which to solve the cube in.Since our professor had 2 sets of the navrang in possession, he invited two groups of two students each to come to his desk and try their luck. The 27 smaller cubes were clustered randomly on the table, and it took the teams more than a minute to even segregate and arrange the smaller cubes in some order. Neither of them came close.

Management Lessons:

Attempt by Student (First time)	Attempt by Professor
A Trial Attempt without preparation	A planned attempt with early preparation
Random Format	Structured Format
Confusions, Uncertain, stressed,	Calm, Simple and Clear flow of ideas
Unrealistic goals set based on excitement	Realistic goals based on experience
Not done even upto 10 Mins	Done within 4 Minutes

• Each Problem can be solved by systematic thinking
• Each Block represents an entity (Labor, Machine etc.) in an organization and is to be assembled in a structured and hierarchical way like the above process, so efficiency is maximum
• Two blocks of the same color may represent people who don't gel well with each other. And hence while forming a team, a structured approach is necessary