What are the ‘sections’ sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain? Who should be doing this job? How would they do it? Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate) Oblique Strategies can be used by intelligent agents in the following simple steps:Ĭommitting to executing on the strategy, regardless of apparent relevance or comfort Therefore, lateral thinking strategies can be surprisingly effective and engaging by opening up new ways of thought in simple ways. Mechanics:Īll humans become comfortable in certain patterns of thought and, like an ignorant builder with a hammer, tend to think all problems they subsequently face are nails. Sufficient context and empirical understanding of the problem is required, and the competency of the user is also a significant factor. The user may be any intelligent agent solving any problem. Initiating lateral thinking requires that a solution is easy-to-use and generates creativity in ways that cannot be intuited by the user. Oblique Strategies are for personal use - but they are ubiquitous in application as the people they work for. This means that flow state can be maintained while stagnant, habitual patterns of thinking are destabilised. Oblique Strategies are strategies which are external but can be absorbed with low-effort. Oblique Strategies are a trigger for promoting creative thinking.Įmotion clouding decisions and waiting impatiently for a good idea to ‘strike’ causes both frustration and poor decision-making. The deck was sold in limited quantities and became a cult icon. The text were ideas promoting lateral thinking which the two had collated over a number of years. They joined forces and distributed a set of cards, each with a short line of text. In 1974, musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt realised they were working on the same solution to this problem independently. All artists, and all people, are faced with ‘blocks’ which stagnate our progress and lead to feelings of being ‘stuck’.