Putting your cards on the table
We love a good game at the The Curiosity Society. A deck of cards is never far away, but not always the kind you’d think of. Sometimes it’s a deck like the one from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt developed in 1975, famously used by David Bowie and others to spring the trap of orthodox thinking. Eno and Schmidt called the cards Oblique Strategies: over 100 worthwhile dilemmas. The idea is to draw a card at random, when you’re working on a project. You can do this when you get stuck if you like, but we like to do it even when we think we’re not stuck – just to remind us that there are other ways to think and we ought not to get too comfortable with how we’re doing things at the time. The aphorisms on the cards are designed to disrupt your thinking in a way that resets your creativity. We have lots of favourites, like these: “work at a different speed” “discover the recipes you are using and abandon them” “disciplined self-indulgence” “make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate” “tape your mouth” “emphasise the flaws” “use filters” “destroy nothing, destroy the most important thing” “ask people to work against their better judgment” “is it finished?”
Here’s a picture of David Bowie’s deck, courtesy of the V&A in London. By the look of the well-worn and taped-together box, it seems a good bet that Bowie got a lot of use out of this deck of cards.
If you’re the kind of person that prefers an app to old fashioned analogue cards you can, of course, go to the App Store or Google Play, or wherever you get your digital fix, to find a set of Oblique Strategies.
Curiously, cards had been a bit of a thing for us even before we discovered Oblique Strategies. We created a game called the Transformational Index a decade ago, using a deck of cards to tease out the purpose of an organisation drawn from the values of its people: building it into a theory of change; but a dynamic one rather than the more traditional linear variety. Life isn’t linear, so why would a theory of change be? We use the Transformational Index all the time in our work, as a fast and furious fun way to describe what an organisation exists to do, how it does it, and how it might know whether it’s going in the right direction. The game is to start with 56 cards and end up with just the five most essential characteristics of your organisation and the way it works to create impact in the world. The magic happens in the conversations people have when they are debating what to keep and what to discard, and especially, why.
More than 200 clients have played the Transformational Index. Not so much playing their cards close to their chest. More putting their cards on the table.
