Creative Thinking

 

Way back in the 1980s, Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head became a cult book for advertising and marketing professionals who were always looking for means to stimulate creative thinking in their teams.

As a fresh-out-of-college Trainee Copywriter in one of India’s best-known advertising agencies (the one where the legendary Satyajit Ray, among many other luminaries, used to work once upon a time), I was introduced to this book by my Creative Directors and for a while, the book became my constant companion.

A Whack on the Side of the Head tries to teach you how you can be more creative. In one section Oech recommends asking yourself What if questions. “Asking what if,” he says, “is an easy and powerful way to get your imagination going.”

On page 74 of my much-fingered, dog-eared volume of Oech’s book he describes an answer to the “what if” question:
What if we lived our lives backwards?

Life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends, and what do you get at the end of it? Death, a great reward.

The life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, and get it out of the way. Then you live for twenty years in an old age home, and get kicked out when you’re too young. You get a gold watch and then you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy
your retirement.

You go to college and you party until you’re ready for high school. Then you go to grade school, you become a little kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating, and you finish off as a gleam in somebody’s eye.

Needless to say, this was decades before Benjamin Button!

Von Oech’s book is about thinking out of the box or making new lines of flight where there were none by getting away from the usual pairing and opposition associations and igniting fresh and unusual neural pathways.

If you’re going to be good at communication, you have to think creatively and know without doubt that there is more than one correct answer to everything and more than one way to approach and solve a problem.