The Navrang Puzzle

 What you see here is a Navrang puzzle or a Navrang cube.  It's a simple playing cube composed of 27 identical small cubes of 9 different colors (3 cubes of same color) . Each small cube a hole in five of its sides and a connector in sixth one so that it can be attached to the other cubes. When seen , it resembles a Rubic cube but is very different in nature and composition . The Navrang cube can be disassembled into its 27 smaller cubes, and the cube is said to be solved when each of the faces has 9 different colored cubes on each face.
But hold on.. This is supposed to be a management blog! So why am I telling you about a puzzle? Well as Prof. Mandi showed us in our POM class, there are valuable management lessons to be learned even from a game.

Prof. Mandi invited us to try and solve the puzzle, but when the entire class failed, despite trying their best, to come up with a solution, Prof. Mandi showed us how to do it in 5 minutes flat!

When you see the task performed in front of your it looks rather simple: Take the 27 elements, organize them to form 9 rods, which can be combined to form 3 plates, and the 3 plates finally come together to form a single block.


When you look at it this way, you can actually see how this principle can be applied to any modern organization-

1. Just as the cubes of same color  cannot appear at the same face so should not the people or resources of same skills and characters appear in the same strata in any organization; lest their egos may clash or cause skill deficiency.
2. It is important to have diversity within the organization so that different ideas and views come up and a broader vision and perspective gets established.The organization then becomes holistic and multidimensional.
3. But while diversity brings broader perspective,it is of utmost importance to ensure that the different views are channelized towards a common goal i.e. growth of organization.

So the key takeaway here is that despite number of elements (symbolic of individuals), be it 27 or 27 million, a clearly defined purpose will result in a harmonious organization where there would be no clash of colors. A systematic approach to problem solving will help in understanding the problem better and thus finding a solution to the problem becomes easy.

This organization of 27 elements depicts the real world organizations where a manager works like an artist. The artist does permutations and combinations repeatedly till the purpose of the organization is achieved.

With that I'll end this blog. As usual, you know where the comments are... Let me know what you think!
Onwards and upwards!