Last Updated on 7 March 2017

While I expect a book about creative problem solving to inspire me with innovative ideas, I don’t expect the book itself to necessarily be innovative in its approach. “The Creative Problem Solver’s Toolbox” by Richard Fobes offers something I’d never seen before.

I wanted to look up different ways to illustrate ideas or visual thinking… I looked it up in the index, and it lists:

Visually, thinking 128.1 – 131.5

What’s with the decimals?

I saw this graphic (shown along the left-hand side) at the beginning of the index. This is what the author wrote…

“Page numbers are given in tenths. The number to the left of the decimal point is the page number. The digit (0-9) to the right of the decimal point indicates how far down the page, as indicated on the ruler to the right, to find the referenced paragraph.”

Wouldn’t you know… when I turned to page 128, just about 3/4-of-an-inch from the top of the page he started describing visual thinking.

Pretty cool. What a great idea. Fobes has made it much easier to get to where you want to go within his book. (By the way, his book is chock full of excellent problem-solving techniques – a worthy reference).