In the mid-seventies, Brian Eno, in collaboration with his friend the artist Peter Schmidt (no, me neither) published a set of cards called Oblique Strategies. Each card was printed with a question or an instruction intended to help when a producer or a band at work in the studio has wound up in a creative dead end. One of them is, “what are the sections sections of?” And another: “emphasise the flaws.”
Their usefulness extends to any creative endeavor, really. So it’s good to know that someone has helpfully – and hopefully legally – turned the cards into a distinctly retro website at(link: http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html text: stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html). It’s perhaps worth exploring when you are next thinking of ideas and find you’ve run out of YouTube videos to watch.
Either way, the Oblique Strategies are an example of lateral thinking, Edward de Bono’s famous model for solving problems indirectly. De Bono invented the term in 1967, about ten years before the Oblique Strategies. He himself defines lateral thinking in several ways. The first of which is that you cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.
I read somewhere that our brains are inherently lazy and always look for a shortcut when challenged. We can override this function and that is what lateral thinking is. Successful problem solving involves the knack of tricking your brain into working.
Of course, it’s so easy to get stuck in well-worn patterns of thinking and having a formula to solve similar briefs. Our day-to-day briefs can sometimes feel repetitious and working on the same account for any length of time can mean that it’s tempting to just do what we did last time.
Lateral thinking, says de Bono, is concerned with the perception part of thinking. We make many assumptions and set boundaries for ourselves. What lateral thinking sets out to do is change these accepted notions of what we can and can’t do, of what is and isn’t possible.
All that YouTube viewing mentioned above, alongside our request for table tennis means that some other agency folk may think that the creative department is lazy.
As much as I want to try and legitimise YouTube-watching and table tennis as lateral thinking tools, I can’t. Edward de Bono is already a bit upset about how his work is constantly being misinterpreted (“on the Internet there is much misleading and erroneous information about lateral thinking) and I don’t want to antagonise him any further.
But let’s give it a go.
Finding and watching funny/clever/interesting/irrelevant content on YouTube is distracting. Table tennis engages a different part of the brain. This may not be scientifically accurate but you get my drift. While indulging in either activity, our brains are in the background, processing information, testing ideas and working out finer details. It’s just what happens.
Thinking isn’t linear. Great ideas can happen anywhere and at any time. That’s mostly when they do come. The annoying thing about ideas is that you so often find them when you aren’t looking. How often does it happen that a week after a pitch you come up with what would have been a shoot-out-the-lights idea?
I’ll end with a final, and my favourite, Oblique Strategy from Brian Eno: “do nothing for as long as possible.”