When stimulating creativity to develop your communications, consider embracing randomness.
Created by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies is a card-based method for promoting creativity.
Each card offers a challenging constraint to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.
These cards have been used by many artists and creative people worldwide since their initial publication in 1975.
Pick a card, any card from the set of 100, and you will get a random perspective designed to stir creativity.
"The biggest mistake is to wait for inspiration. It won't come looking for you. It's not so much creating something. It's noticing when something is starting to happen. Noticing it and then building on it and saying OK. That's new. That hasn't happened before. What does it mean? Where can I go with it?" -- Brian Eno
"So these really are just ways of throwing you out of the frame, of breaking the context a little bit, so you're not a band in a studio focused on one song, but you're people who are alive and in the world and aware of a lot of other things as well." -- Brian Eno
Watch: Musician Brian Eno on compelling ideas about the creative process
As Brian Christian and Thomas L. Griffiths wrote in Algorithms to Live By: "being randomly jilted, thrown out of the frame, and focused on a larger scale, provides a way to leave what might be locally good and get back to the pursuit of what might be globally optimal."
Want more randomness? Consider Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button bypasses that search results page and goes directly to the first-ranked page for the search phrase you entered.
But what if you're feeling something else?
When you first pull up the search page before entering your search term, hold your cursor over the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, revealing different moods.
The phrases change randomly.
For instance, you may see "I'm Feeling Generous" or "I'm Feeling Hungry."
Using this feature, you'll see what randomness comes your way.
Want even more randomness? Consider Wikipedia's "Random article" feature.
Per Wikipedia, "the Special:Random page is a link which will automatically (and randomly) take you to any article on Wikipedia. It is useful for random page patrollers, curious readers, and bored people."
Brillant.
I have been playing around with the feature located on the upper left of the start page.
Recent random articles presented: Macrochlidia major, Kanō Mitsunobu, Brent Daniels, Alain Durand, Lists of atheists, and Michigan's 34th Senate district.
Pretty random.
And true, none of these random articles have helped me in the short term, but it is nice to know I have one more tool for randomness to improve my communications.
Next time you are stuck, consider embracing randomness for stimulating creativity to develop your communications.
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Need help with your communications?
Caracal is available for solo executive advisory sessions, leading a team workshop, or conducting an organizational audit.
Happy to help.
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