The famous Roschach test is probably the most famous psychological test. Patients are shown random images of inkblots and asked to talk through what they see. In the case of this test, it is not really important what the ink blots show, but rather what people see within them. While there have been some criticisms of the technique over the years, it continues to be widely used based on the amount of information that people share as they link into randomness and are asked to see patterns. Recently, when working through an initially elusive problem, we came to realize just how powerful this dynamic is within people as we identified a problem solving anti-pattern we dubbed “Rorschach problem solving”, where people look at the presenting evidence of a problem and project onto it their own biases. Continue reading →