Provocation
Carry out a "thought experiment" by inverting your thinking.
Martin has two days to come up with new product ideas before the next team meeting. However, he's stuck. No matter what he does, he keeps having the same, tired ideas. The clock is ticking!
Have you ever been in a situation like this? Many of us need to come up with innovative ideas from time to time. However, it's easy to get stuck in the same thinking patterns, which can limit our creativity. This is why using a technique like provocation can be useful. Provocation is a lateral thinking technique. It works by disrupting established patterns of thinking, and giving us new places to start.
A key way that we think is by recognizing patterns and reacting to them. These reactions come from our past experiences, and from logical extensions of those experiences; and it's often hard to think outside these patterns. While we may know a good answer as part of a different type of problem, the structure of our brains can make it difficult for us to access this.
Provocation is a tool that we can use to make links between these patterns. In this article, we'll review Provocation, and discuss how you can use it to come up with creative ideas and solutions to problems.
The Provocation technique was developed and popularized by psychologist Edward de Bono.
You use provocation by making deliberately wrong or unreasonable statements (provocations), in which something you take for granted about the situation isn't true.
For instance, the statements "Cars have square wheels" or "Houses have no roofs" can be provocations.
Statements need to be outrageous like this to shock your mind out of existing ways of thinking. Once you've made a provocative statement, you then suspend judgment and use that statement to generate ideas, giving you original starting points for brainstorming and creative thinking.
Understanding Provocation
Here's a useful way of thinking about the technique.
Imagine you take the same route to work every day. You're so used to it that you stop noticing the scenery, and you don't even have to think about which route to take to get to your office.
We can use this as an analogy for our normal approach to brainstorming, where we habitually follow the same track, or steps, when we brainstorm. This limits our creativity, because any forward movement is based on the step or idea we had before.
Now, imagine that you're leaving for work and, suddenly, you're magically transported to an entirely new location. You've never been to this place before, and nothing is familiar! If this happened, you'd have to start figuring out where you were, and how you were going to take a new route to work.
This is what provocation does, and it's why it can be so useful. Its purpose is to take you outside the routes that you normally think along, and put you in an entirely new place. Then, it's up to you to work back to where you want to be.
When you do this, you're addressing problems from a new perspective, and, hopefully, you'll generate new ideas.
Martin has two days to come up with new product ideas before the next team meeting. However, he's stuck. No matter what he does, he keeps having the same, tired ideas. The clock is ticking!
Have you ever been in a situation like this? Many of us need to come up with innovative ideas from time to time. However, it's easy to get stuck in the same thinking patterns, which can limit our creativity. This is why using a technique like provocation can be useful. Provocation is a lateral thinking technique. It works by disrupting established patterns of thinking, and giving us new places to start.
A key way that we think is by recognizing patterns and reacting to them. These reactions come from our past experiences, and from logical extensions of those experiences; and it's often hard to think outside these patterns. While we may know a good answer as part of a different type of problem, the structure of our brains can make it difficult for us to access this.
Provocation is a tool that we can use to make links between these patterns. In this article, we'll review Provocation, and discuss how you can use it to come up with creative ideas and solutions to problems.
The Provocation technique was developed and popularized by psychologist Edward de Bono.
You use provocation by making deliberately wrong or unreasonable statements (provocations), in which something you take for granted about the situation isn't true.
For instance, the statements "Cars have square wheels" or "Houses have no roofs" can be provocations.
Statements need to be outrageous like this to shock your mind out of existing ways of thinking. Once you've made a provocative statement, you then suspend judgment and use that statement to generate ideas, giving you original starting points for brainstorming and creative thinking.
Understanding Provocation
Here's a useful way of thinking about the technique.
Imagine you take the same route to work every day. You're so used to it that you stop noticing the scenery, and you don't even have to think about which route to take to get to your office.
We can use this as an analogy for our normal approach to brainstorming, where we habitually follow the same track, or steps, when we brainstorm. This limits our creativity, because any forward movement is based on the step or idea we had before.
Now, imagine that you're leaving for work and, suddenly, you're magically transported to an entirely new location. You've never been to this place before, and nothing is familiar! If this happened, you'd have to start figuring out where you were, and how you were going to take a new route to work.
This is what provocation does, and it's why it can be so useful. Its purpose is to take you outside the routes that you normally think along, and put you in an entirely new place. Then, it's up to you to work back to where you want to be.
When you do this, you're addressing problems from a new perspective, and, hopefully, you'll generate new ideas.