Rose, Bud, and Thorn: a Design Thinking Tool That Can Help You Enjoy Life More.
The classic exercise is a great tool for mastering subjective time.
I’m kind of embarrassed at how long it took for me to learned about this game.
It was at a networking breakfast, of all places, and we were doing a different exercise: talking about “weird family traditions.” I had shared my daughter’s “bad musicale” gatherings where people were only allowed to us instruments they couldn’t play; another person had talked about their dad’s obsessive use of leftovers.
Then a local rep from a utility company spoke up. “I don’t know if it’s weird,” he said, “but we always had a tradition at the dinner table to talk about three things during our day: one thing that went good, one thing that went bad, and one thing we were looking forward to tomorrow.”
He said it was called Rose, bud, and thorn, and I instantly wrote it down (my girlfriend’s a horticulturist, of course I’m a sucker for a plant metaphor). I confess I had a hard time listening to the presentations, because I kept coming back to this game, and how it related to the idea of “subjective time” that I’d recently been considering.
