Stone Soup

(Our passionate discussions)

(Our Stone Soup)

What is Stone Soup?

It was originally a children’s book illustrated by Marcia Brown in 1975. The lesson of the story was to work as a team, and combine random resources to create a delicious soup, or simply beauty.

Last week, I had a privilege to experience a similar activity as the Stone Soup. Except, our team was working into create a visually entertaining craft using random materials our teammates brought, including scarf, cardboard, cotton balls, ribbons, magazines etc..

The start of a discussion is always dragging and vague. But when people begin to throw in random ideas, the conversation starts to get more enthusiastic. Then others start flipping over pages of magazines, and we realize there are several skiing and snow landscape pages in the magazines, so come to our first analogy to build a craft like a snow landscape.

Interestingly, one thing laid to another, our originally concept had a turning point. While we were shattering thin papers and stuffing them in colored plastic papers, we randomly made it look like a body with two heads.

So after our realization, the stuffed plastic paper did not fit well with our original idea anymore, so then we went ahead with the body idea and made another similar one.

Our team might have gone overboard with the idea of Stone Soup. We went too deep with the idea, purpose, and realism of this activity, but forgot it does not have to make any sense.

The breathtaking results are the ones we made unintentionally. The significant works are not developed in stress. Same as design and everything else. 

(smile.)