(continued...)
Movement is a crucial part of lateral thinking. Provocation
without movement is useless. The apparently crazy idea is
not an end point, but only the first stage. It is what happens
next that really makes all the difference.
Movement is not just a suspension of judgment. Movement
is an active mental process. There are steps that can be
learned, practiced, and used. With judgment, we look at
an idea and compare it to our experience. If the idea does
not fit our experience, we reject it. With movement, we
use the idea for its movement value to go for- ward to a
new idea.
Movement is not just an intention or a positive attitude
of the mind. There are five formal ways of getting movement:
1. Extract a principle or feature and work forward from
that.
2. Focus on the difference.
3. Look at the moment-to-moment effect of putting the idea
into practice.
4. Focus on the positive aspects.
5. Figure under what circumstances there would be direct
value.
It is an emphasis on the formal steps of movement and also
the formal steps of setting up a provocation which are so
different from traditional brainstorming.
Movement is not a technique but an operation. It is a mental
operation that requires confidences and practice. The trick
is to think slowly. What movement might we get from PO:
'cars should have square wheels'? Taking the large surface
in contact with the ground, we move forward to develop a
concept of an inner tire and high pressure surrounded by
an outer tire and at low pressure-to increase grip on the
ground. With square wheels you would not need a hand broke
when parking. This leads to a special set of wheels for
braking on heavy goods vehicles. These wheels would not
normally touch the ground, but would touch down when strong
braking was required.
If we imagine a square wheel rolling (moment to moment)
we see that it rises on the point of the square. This would
lead to a bumpy ride unless the suspension got shorter at
the same time. This leads to the idea of an active suspension
which actually lifts the wheels over bumps. This type of
suspension is about to become a reality in the auto world.
I am not suggesting that movement is easy. It requires
a lot of careful practice and coaching. But deliberate steps
can be used.
The random word is the simplest of all creative techniques.
It is so very simple that it is hard to believe that it
works. I first suggested it many years ago and various people
have borrowed the process since then.
You have a need for a new idea relating to some situation.
You simply introduce a random word. How? Pick a slip of
paper out of a pile of slips on each of which there is a
word. Or, think of a page number in a dictionary and then
think of a position of the word on that page (say, page
1 27, tenth word down); continue to the first noun which
will then be your random word.
Let's look at a sample. The subject was cigarette. The
random word was traffic light. From that quickly came the
suggestion of putting a red band around cigarettes so that
the smoker had a decision zone. If he or she stopped at
the red band, then the smoker was gaining control over his
or her smoking habit.
How can such a simple technique work? At first it seems
absurd. By definition, a random word is unconnected to any
subject and so any word would work for any subject. In a
passive information system, this would be total nonsense.
But in an active (patterning) system, the random word provides
a new entry point. As we work back from the new entry point,
we increase the chances of using patterns we would never
have used if we had worked outward from the subject area.
This is why we need to understand something about the information
handling system of the brain before trying to devise better
thinking techniques.
