Oblique Strategies is a cool game (more or less) that encourages lateral thinking.
Back in the 70s, the composer Brian Eno and his friend Peter Schmidt invented a deck of cards in which each card contained a strange phrase or question such as “Honor thy error as a hidden intention” or “What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?” or “Disconnect from desire.” The idea was that when faced with a creative challenge, you’d whip out your deck of Oblique Strategies and find some thought-provoking non sequitur that gets your thinking out of a rut and closer to a creative solution. Here is how Eno describes his little game:
The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation — particularly in studios — tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case — it’s just the most obvious and — apparently — reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt this attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt that attitude.”
– Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, February 1, 1980
Being pressured by time, deadlines, and money often results in hurried, less than optimal thinking. It’s not only painters and composers and writers who face this kind of pressure — all work is creative, and all work requires some degree of thought.
Sadly, the deck is long out of print, and what copies do exist are hard to find. You can find some digital versions online; some are copies of the original while others are unique.
I sometimes use Oblique Strategies when writing or making lists of possible actions I could take. I come up with a lot of weird ideas. But I usually come up with at least one good or even great idea that is totally unexpected. While I don’t enjoy Eno’s music, which is mostly left to random chance, I’ve found that his thought provoking cards are very helpful to have in my problem-solving toolkit.
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