2 Thinking
Edward de Bono coined the term Lateral Thinking in 1967, as the beginning of a movement which promoted creative or lateral thought by contrast with linear or vertical thinking. Behind lateral thinking is the notion that ‘there’s always a better idea’. De Bono went on to develop a number of creativity techniques which are widely used (though less widely understood) across the whole spectrum of industries and organisations. Bono was not the first to experiment with creativity. Already in 1957 Alex Faickney Osborn published “Applied Imagination” in which he introduced the concept of Brainstorming. Tony Buzan later introduced the concept of Mind Mapping as a way of recording the creative process, and spurring further ideas. However you get your ideas, the thing which makes a strategy strategic, as opposed to merely an exhaustive exploration of current practice, is the idea at the base of it.
So, you are facing death by starvation or death at the hands of bandits. No other choices present themselves. What do you do?
If you are a Ten Minute Strategist, once you have got the situation straight, the next thing you do is think. You need an idea which will get you out of the situation if only it could be accomplished. One minute may not seem much time to do this, but often it is all you need.
Thinking of this kind is a creative process, and you need to reach for creative tools. In a single minute you only have time for one tool, so the most basic is the one you want, and that is a single question:
“What’s this like?”
You have a situation which appears intractable. But what other situation is it like, or what picture, or what story, or what film? At this stage it does not matter how far-fetched your idea is. Actually, in a minute — if you practice this regularly — you can come up with a dozen ideas: that is, you can come up with a dozen perspectives or ways of describing the situation, each of which suggests its own solution.
It’s just possible that having answered the question “What’s it like?” you are still left without a course of action or a strategic approach. If you are half way through your minute and there is no obvious solution, move on to the second creative question:
“What if?”
What if we varied part of the situation? What action would we take if we knew we could not fail? With this and the first question, you should have some kind of potential approach in your head. More likely you have a number of them.
You are in the last ten seconds of your minute. Either you have several ideas, in which case you need to pick the most likely (without agonising too much about it), or you still have nothing.
If you still have nothing, answer the third creative question:
“What could we do to make it worse?”
At this point you can ask yourself: how would we do the opposite of that, or, more radically, supposing we did the very worst thing, but in a way which made us winners? What would that be like?
Back to the question of the villagers. In the film the Seven Samurai, the villagers are bewildered and don’t know what to do. If they flee they lose their harvest and starve, if they stay and fight they wil be butchered. So they hold a meeting at which the oldest man in the village is present. Picking up the thread of “What’s it like”, he tells them that when he was a young man, he was fleeing from just such a village as theirs. But as he fled, he saw that there was one village which the bandits did not attack, because that village had hired Samurai to defend it. This notion provokes general consternation — but villagers begin to ask the question “what if we did hire Samurai?” This leads them directly onto the next stage: Resolve.
Incidentally, although the villagers do not reach the question, they could have found the same solution by asking “what is the worst thing we could do?”, which might very well have produced the answer: “neither flee nor fight”, or possibly “both flee and fight”. This would lead them to the inevitable question: how?
To return to Edward de Bono for a moment, although the solution produced a cracking film, as well a series of spin-offs including almost every episode of the A-team and Star Trek Insurrection, the single idea was not the only one which the villagers could have found. For alternatives, you could watch Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, or, more radically, Jeremy Irons in The Mission.