A Whack on the Side of the Head

Roger van Oech has been writing about creativity for decades and I'm sure when he first started, it must have been quite difficult to get people to pay much attention. Not any more. Ears are pricked. The prevailing attitude now is ignore creativity and innovation at your peril.

I've been reading Roger's book, A Whack on the Side of the Head, and thoroughly enjoyed its lighthearted approach to creativity and its many examples from everyday life. The book emphasizes that everybody has the potential to be creative and that one of the biggest challenges facing us is reducing the limiting effects of our mental locks. Mental locks can be viewed as our default ways of thinking -- fine when we were running around as cavemen: "Look! Saber tooth tiger. Danger! Run!" 

Not so good in other environments: stock markets for one, where following default emotions can be very costly.

Though Roger doesn't talk much about this, I'd imagine that these mental locks are vice like in cultures whose education systems emphasize being "right." Cultures that emphasize 100% test scores. Cultures that emphasize rote learning. Cultures that condemn failure and having a go. 

Joseph Campbell distinguishes between cultures that emphasize "following the guru" and those that lean towards taking the path untrodden. Essentially, Campbell's discussing Asian and European approaches to life.

Back to the book.

One exercise (p. 21) on mental locks is really fun. Try it out on your friends to demonstrate how our thinking can be so limiting.

VII

Draw a line and turn this into an eight. Easy enough, I'm sure.

IX

How about turing this one into a six? Some people will draw a horizontal line, turn it upside down and cover the bottom half. Sure enough, it's a VI.

Better yet: How about drawing a squiggly line in the form of an "S" in front of the Roman numeral? Didn't think of that one, did ya? 

Want another solution?

How about writing "6" to the right of the "X," turning the numeral X into a multiplication sign?

Once again, we have a solution -- another right answer.

Of course, these are obvious if you've seen them before. If these mental locks affected you with this simple puzzle, you can imagine how limiting our mental locks can be when we're faced with really complex problems. This is especially true in business when just about every student around the world has studied the same syllabus using the same business books.