The Artist's Secret Weapon

Oblique Tactics

 Posted on March 19, 2014 by Nat Napoletano 

If you’ve chosen to read this article, you probably already realize that innovation is the life blood of any company. This blog will have much to say about the application, risks, approaches and realities of innovation. But for a start, let’s talk about something fun: the creative side of innovation.

On occasion problems emerge, so pressing, that our management may be willing to take on more risk or invest in solutions to the problem. They are willing to go outside of their comfort zone.They want us to pick up the pace with smart, on-target ideas. They want our creative new ideas.

Creativity is all about going outside of one’s comfort zone. I’m certainly not implying that that the desire to remain in one’s comfort zone is cowardly. When we operate from our comfort zones we are powerful. We don’t make mistakes. We are doing what we know how to do and know how to deliver the goods to our customer. But we need to recognize the right time and place to step out and lead our team into uncharted territory.

Those who know me know that I am involved in music production and have been for 40 years. When I was in my 20s, my musician friends and I would stay up until all hours, night after night working in different local music studios. We recorded underscore for videos, music for local theaters, and songs just for fun. I don’t do it so much anymore because of the tremendous amount of time it requires, and I can’t seem to find that time.

So why does it take 8 or 10 hours to produce a 3 minute song? When experienced musicians are recording, we tend to be perfectionists. During a live performance, we want every note, every vocal utterance to be right in the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic groove. If it’s not perfect, it’s horrid. There’s no territory in between. And when musicians record, our perfectionism only gets more intense.

So, having tens of thousands of hours performing and practicing under our belts, we excel at touching our instruments with certain techniques and styles that we know will work well. We cringe at the idea violating our musical instincts. In other words, we remain in our comfort zones.

But that can defeat the purpose of the recording session. Most of the time our quest is to create something new and fresh. So here lies the paradox. We need something innovative, but there are many more ways to go wrong than right. We may suggest to the drummer that he try accenting the off-beat, or we might replace the guitar with piano, or have the singer hum a verse. Most times it doesn’t work or may even sounds stupid. After hours of this, it becomes discouraging.

So how do we generate musically feasible ideas that don’t take that trip down the same old tired alleys? The innovative musician needs to let the sparks of inspiration bubble to the surface, lots of them and test them out quickly. This way we can rapidly travel down branches of the solution space, rapidly create inspired fixes for ideas fall just short of working, and quickly abandon branches that are a lost cause. Abandoning an idea that we have invested time into is much more difficult if we don’t have that constant stream of innovative sparks.

A very popular English band formed in 1971 called Roxy Music. They still perform as of 2014. The first keyboard player in the band was a man named Brian Eno. He is now a legend. He didn’t like traveling and apparently had artistic differences with the lead singer, Brian Ferry, so he quit the band in the early 1970s and settled in as a New York music producer.

What’s interesting is that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt used their vast experience to create a deck of 100 cards called “OBLIQUE STRATEGIES”.  Available for purchase in 1973, each card contained a phrase intended to help musicians and artists in general break out of creative blocks, encourage lateral thinking, and otherwise intelligently coax us from our comfort zones by stimulating sparks of inspiration.

Someone in my circle of musician friends owned this card deck, and I recently discovered that I still have a few of the cards. I can’t remember how my cards got separated from the rest but I surmise that I put them aside because these particular cards spoke to me.

I was looking through the cards for the first time in 30 years and was struck by how these statements can draw a person’s mind into a completely fresh thought stream. The first few that I read were decidedly for musicians:

Make what's perfect more human. Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element. Change instrument roles. Do the lyrics need changing? Give in to your worst impulse. Is it finished?

That last one is the best advice that I can give to new producers. When the vocal track is spot on, and the band has knocked it out of the park, you really need to say it’s finished or things will only get worse. A fledgling band member will often observe, “We only used 6 tracks on our recorder, what should we put on the other 18?” You must stop that craziness immediately.

Then I came across several more general cards:

Get your neck massaged. Go outside. Shut the door. Accept advice. Tape your mouth.

Good advice for anyone struggling with a problem. Now here’s where things get eerie. The next group of cards contained statements that sound like they are written for engineers and inventors rather than artists:

Use something nearby as a model. Faced with a choice, do both.You're not building a wall; you're making a brick. State the problem as clearly as possible. Don't avoid what is easy. What are the sections sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving. Use an old idea.

I was taken aback. I knew immediately that I wanted to create a similar set of thought shifting cards for myself, other engineers and technical innovators designed to stimulate sparks of inspiration.

I already use have some questions that I ask myself when I’m stuck for a smart, creative solution. The first 3 cards (although all of the cards need to be randomized or shuffled during use) will have to be 3 questions that most often break me out of my thinking traps:

1. What problem is our customer trying to solve?
2. What assumption am I making that, if false, would destroy my plan?
3. If I was an outsider trying to disrupt my company, how would I do it?

Number one has been very productive for me. The customer doesn’t come to my company because they want to own a lot of our cables and software; they come because they need to train their pilots. This question often produces solutions that seem obvious in hindsight.

Four other cards may each simply say Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide. Add, as in innovations that combine technologies (moisturizers with sunscreen, cell phones with GPS). Subtract like Post-it notes with chemically weak adhesive. Multiply like that picture-in-picture feature on modern TV sets. Or divide like separating the control buttons from the front panel of a machine and putting them on a remote controller.

I want to hear from readers of this article. Please leave comments with statements that you would put on your strategy cards. Some mind altering words that have changed the way you were thinking and lead to a great new idea. If I can collect enough good ones, we can create our own cards or an app that occasionally smacks our brain into seeing a sideways new approach to creative problems.