Business Alternatives: Don't get 'blocked by openness' - find business alternatives through lateral thinking
Imagine that you have a person at point A and you want to make it very difficult for that person to get to point B. What would you do? You could put a wall around B. You could place a wall or a ditch between A and B. You could attach a ball and chain to the person's ankle. You could lock the person up. In all these cases, the person would remain conscious of point B and wanting to reach point B.
By far the most effective way of preventing the person from getting to B would be to make it very easy and attractive for that person to go to C. If the channel to C is easy, obvious and attractive, then the person forgets all about B. This is what I mean by being blocked by openness.
We are conscious of being blocked by obstacles and barriers. We are conscious of being blocked by gaps. Sometimes we cannot proceed further because we have run out of path. There is a need for information or for mechanisms. Being 'blocked by openness' is totally different. We are blocked from one path precisely because we are entrapped in a competing path.
PATHWAYSA girl is very good at mathematics at school. She is encouraged to take advanced work and certificates in mathematics. She ends up as a mathematics lecturer at university. Yet that girl might have been much happier as a business executive. Her excellence at mathematics has effectively 'blocked' the other pathways that she might have followed.
There are two broad aspects of creativity.
1. We do not know where to start to generate a new idea. All we know is that we want a new idea around a defined focus. There is no particular direction in which our thought is leading us. How do we get going?
2. In the second case our thoughts are so dominated by existing ideas and approaches that we keep getting dragged back to these established tracks. Tradition, habit, standard ideas and a personal sequence of experience set up the usual ideas. Once established, these ideas, like established rivers in a landscape, capture and control the flow. We are blocked by the very 'openness' of these channels.
You are rolling a heavy ball across the surface of the table. The ball leaves your hand and goes in the direction you intended. Now imagine a shallow dish inset into the table so that the rim is flush with the surface of the table. As you try to roll the ball across the table, the ball is captured by the dish.
In a similar way, existing patterns in the brain capture our perceptions and pull them into established tracks. In general, this is a very useful property of the brain, because it means that we look at the outside world through established perceptions. This means that we can understand the world and know what to do with it.
When we are trying to be creative, though, being pulled back into existing patterns does not help us to be creative. We have somehow to escape from these existing patterns in order to develop new ideas.
CHALLENGEOne of the simpler lateral thinking techniques is 'challenge'. There is nothing exotic about the challenge process. It is as much an attitude of mind as a formal technique. There is the willingness to focus. What are we challenging? This is not as simple as it may seem.
A person goes into a shop, buys some goods, pays for them and leaves. What do we challenge? We might challenge the necessity to 'go to the shop'. This might suggest video-shopping, mail order, party shopping, delivery service, etc.
We might challenge the fact that examining the goods and purchasing them are done in the same place. We might conceive a place where goods could be examined and a totally different place where they might be picked up - or home delivery. This suggests the concept of a 'goods examining service'.
We might challenge money payment for the goods. Various forms of money transfer would be considered. We might challenge the need to pay at all. We might challenge the fact that the price is related to the goods. We might challenge whether the purchaser now owns the goods.
Some of these aspects might seem obvious and impossible to challenge. But they need not be. If we challenge ownership, then one idea might be that the purchaser has the goods on an open-ended lease. So the vendor is responsible for repairs and for final disposal of the goods. Even in the simplest of situations there are many things to be challenged. There are aspects of the actual situation. Then there are the many concepts that are implicit in the situation. Then there is our 'current thinking 'about the actual situation.
FOCUSThis 'focus' part of the challenge process is really the most important part. It is usually not easy to pick out and focus on things that we take for granted. We take it for granted that the purchaser pays the price of the goods purchased. That is so obvious that we do not think to challenge it. In practice, there may be several different prices; cash, cards, installment, etc.
There might even be a substantial discount if the purchaser pays in advance - perhaps years in advance by purchasing APCs (Advance Purchase Coupons). The purchaser may also buy a 'service', and the goods are only part of the delivery of that service.
The challenge process itself involves the application of the three types of 'Why'.
Why/A: this stands for 'Alternatives'. We challenge uniqueness. Is this really the only way to do it? What alternatives might there be?
Why/B: this stands for 'Because'. What are the reasons we do it this way? Are these reasons still valid? Can we escape from these reasons? Sometimes the reasons are historic and are no longer valid.
Why/C: this stands for 'Cut'. Can we cut this? do we need to do this at all? What would happen if we simply dropped it?
PROVOCATIONThe provocation process usually takes an existing situation and then alters this to create the provocation. For example, the 'escape' type provocation drops or negates something we take for granted. We take it for granted that we have waiters or waitresses in a restaurant - so we get the provocation: so we have no waiters or waitresses.
This escape provocation may end up as somewhat similar to a challenge. We might think of self-service or of taking your own waiter or waitress to the restaurant (for example, a student hired for the evening). These are really alternatives to the normal waiters or waitresses.
We could also use movement to move forward from the provocation. There might be no waiters or waitresses because there was nothing to serve. This might suggest that the cooking takes place in a microwave oven under the table.
Provocations (escape, reversal, distortion and exaggeration) do serve to get us out of our normal thinking patterns. We then move forward to a new idea. This may be very different from an alternative. A typical reversal type provocation for the restaurant situation might be: 'Po we serve the waiters or waitresses'.
From such a provocation might come the idea that each table has a 'serving position' to which the food is brought. From that position onwards the diners serve themselves. There might even be a heated trolley that is brought to the table side for that purpose.
CONCEPTSIn order to generate alternatives we seek to identify the background concept first and then we find other ways of carrying out this concept. This is another way of escaping the domination of the traditional idea. Unlike provocation this method will give us a new way of carrying out the existing concept, but not a new concept. The challenge process is just an intention to find a new way. If no new way comes to mind, then we would have to move to concept extraction to generate alternatives. If we go back to the store example we might extract several concepts:
1. The availability of goods at a place convenient to the customer.2. The exchange of goods for money.
The availability of goods might also be carried through by periodic large selling exhibitions which would take over an exhibition hall for a month. This would be different from permanent shops. Another way of carrying out the concept of 'the exchange of goods for money' would be through a professional shopping service which supplies the goods and operates on commission.
SUMMARYPart of the deliberate process of lateral thinking is to identify those concepts and ideas which 'drain' off our thinking in a particular direction. We are blocked by the openness of such channels. We can use the methods of challenge, provocation and alternative generation to seek to move away from these entrapping ideas in order to find new ones.
Source: www.thinkingmanagers.com
