Roger von Oech’s book addresses ten mental blocks that keep you from being innovative. The author shows methods to break through these blockades.
Von Oech describes his methods from experience working as a “creative thinking consultant” for companies such as Apple, ARCO, Colgate-Palmolive, DuPont, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, NASA, Pizza Time Theatre, Sears, Tektronix, Wells Fargo Bank and Xerox.
The main contents of A Whack On The Side Of The Head summarized:
– 36 tips to break through mental blocks.
– Use both “soft thinking” and “hard thinking” in a targeted manner after you have
difference understood.
– Breaking rules as a path to innovation.
– Use unusable ideas as stepping stones on the way to usable ideas.
– Find places and search fields to hunt for ideas.
– Practice playing the “fool” and understanding why this is a creative thinking strategy is.
– Finding out why creativity can be both constructive and destructive.
– Understand why “play” is the father of invention.
– Discover the “third right answer” as the often more creative one.
– Discovering both the “artist” and the “judge” within oneself and both in the correct
moment come to the train.
– Allow a certain dose of ambiguity/ambiguity in oneself in order to understand one’s own
Stimulate thinking.
– Discovering that sometimes “Light blows to the back of the head” are quite useful in a figurative sense.
These “blows” are all events that take us away from our routine ways and force us to go other ways of thinking. Changing routines helps us to find new points of view and perspectives. The book is full of suggestions, exercises, anecdotes, drawings and examples of how others have achieved creative success – and how the reader can do the same. As explained in the preface, it is not absolutely necessary to read the book from cover to cover – it is just as possible to pick chapters at random or at will and be inspired by them.
