Random insertion
‘Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few people engage in it.’
HENRY FORD
We couldn’t look at problem solving without considering lateral thinking, the term popularised by Edward de Bono.
It’s a way to ‘jump the tracks’ when we all start thinking along the same lines, solving problems the same old way.
The particular approach to lateral thinking I’m going to cover here uses aleatoricism (don’t ask me how it’s pronounced), which means using randomness. ‘The introduction of chance into the act of creation.’ I’ll just call it random insertion.
Visual
Ask someone to think of a number from 1 to 50 – there’s your random word to use. Or if you have the table printed out big, get someone to close their eyes and put a finger on the table.
Theory
This is something we looked at back in Part I: Insight. Namely, that the only way our poor overburdened brain can survive in this insanely complex, stimulus-heavy world is to find some shortcuts. It can’t think about everything from scratch every time. Imagine if your brain insisted on tackling shoelace-tying with fresh aplomb every morning. ‘There must be a better way,’ it says in earnest, making your fingers experiment with a hundred different knotting combinations. You’d never get to work on time. Or at all.
Our brains have a variety of brilliant tricks for coping with the enormity facing them every day, and autopilot and pattern-recognition are two of them. When we’ve got something that seems to work, we stick with it. We don’t keep investigating and exploring new things.
How to become a chess master
We get stupendously good at recognising patterns, and using that recognition to guide our next step. It’s how chess Grandmasters become Grandmasters (like Garry Kasparov, who I mentioned in Insight). They play so many games that their brains start to recognise and recall board layouts. They can see the pattern, and can draw upon the experience of those previous games to know what’s a strong move from that position.
But, when you’re trying to make a leap forward into uncharted territory (solving a problem you’ve never solved before, or developing a new innovation, for instance), a brain that only relies on what’s gone before is going to be limited.
If your brain relies on previous patterns, it’s going to come up with previous answers. Which presumably weren’t successful, otherwise you wouldn’t be holding your problem-solving session.
But if we give that system a jolt, by introducing something unexpected – a random insertion – into the mix, then letting our brain find an association between the current situation and that, well then. Now we’ve got a bit of magic going on. Now our brain’s brilliant ability to find connections and make patterns is working for innovation, not against it.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Try the ‘Mad Inventor’ exercise to get people thinking laterally. Split the group into teams of two or three. Each team has three pieces of paper. On the first they write down the name of an object (the fact). On the second they write down what it looks like (its form). On the third they write what it does (its function). Now you create three piles, Fact, Form and Function. Shuffle each pile. And now each team takes one fact, one form and one function at random and invents something that does all three.
So one group might end up with ‘camera’, ‘for digging holes in the ground’ and ‘soft and yellow’. Can you invent a soft and yellow camera that would be useful when digging holes in the ground? Congratulations, you’re the latest winner on Dragons’ Den. But more importantly, you’ve thought laterally: forced your brain to find a connection and relationship between ideas you’d never have put together without random intervention.
Action
RANDOM INSERTION TOOLKIT
- Use a dictionary or other ‘simple noun generator’ to create a seed word, plus the broader term which describes it, and an attribute it has.
- Use those three words as springboards to solve your problem, such as finding an association between the word and your problem; you may generate a ‘bridging idea’ first.
- Alternatively, come up with an interesting idea or fact from the list of supplied categories (giving you more control over the seed word), and see if you can find a useful link between that and your goal.
There are two ways I suggest you use random insertion. Both revolve around taking your original problem/opportunity and adding an element not normally associated with it, to inspire unexpected answers.
Be really random
The first route is to pick a word, at random (unsurprisingly). You can use whatever source you like for this; some are suggested on the visual aid, or alternatively use a dictionary or a catalogue – I’ve always found the Argos catalogue (or ‘Laminated Book of Dreams’, as I remember comedian Bill Bailey calling it) to be pretty useful.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Generally stick with simple, concrete nouns for your seed word. Things like shoe, balloon, apple, plaster. Complex or abstract nouns, or verbs or adjectives, will usually be a lot more difficult to work with, because they’re more difficult for our minds to visualise.
Choose a page at random, close your eyes and stick a finger on the page. See what you land on.
WHAT DOES A SLEEPING BAG MAKE YOU THINK OF?
Write the word up on the flipchart. Also write up the broader category it belongs to. And a third word: an attribute of that thing. So you might have flicked to the camping page of the Argos catalogue, and your finger might have landed on a sleeping bag. So you’d write sleeping bag, and the broader term, sleeping and an attribute of a sleeping bag, like snug or warm.
Alternatively, you can write up the seed word sleeping bag and then ask people to say words they associate with it, like zip or tents or scouts or Glastonbury. Write three of these up instead, if you wish. Either way, you’ve now got three words for everyone to look at, plus the original problem/opportunity.
Now you can use any of the three words to solve your problem – giving you a different kind of constraint (‘Your solution must be related to zips’ kind of thing). It’s forcing your brain to come up with an association between the problem/innovation and one of your words, giving you ideas you might never have otherwise had.
You may need to go back and research any involvement (however loose) the word might have with the background to your problem – some solutions require a detailed knowledge of the background in order to be ‘solved’ or worked around.
BRIDGING IDEA
I should also mention an intermediate stage you may use: developing a bridging idea to help the group in your session. Just take one of your seed words and look at how one of its attributes might be relevant to the problem. Then brainstorm around that. For instance, let’s say your problem is, ‘We haven’t got enough people to answer every phone call within our three minute service promise’. One of your random words is cake. So you say OK, an attribute of cake is that it tastes good. That’s our bridging idea. So what might we do to make not calling feel good for the customer, or only talking on the phone for a very short space of time feel good for the customer?
And suddenly people are brainstorming ideas where customers are encouraged and rewarded to email instead of call, or their call is free provided it’s under five minutes long or you create a FAQs guide that’s a fantastically entertaining pop-up book which means customers enjoy reading it, and having done so have much better knowledge – so fewer of them call to ask questions they could have found in the product guide in the first place.
Now you’re getting fewer calls and so are able to answer them more easily (and therefore faster).
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Random insertion is not always easy. I must say that; groups often struggle with this tool. It can feel very alien, and it can certainly be difficult to make quick progress, so people get discouraged. You might find a link, but not a way for that link to be a helpful solution. But persevere. A great solution is out there, and it is zip-based (or whatever random words you have). You’ve just got to push through the mental stitch until you get your second wind and the ideas start flowing.
Be semi-random
The second version of this tool is to be slightly less random. Instead of using a dictionary/catalogue/Google’s ‘I’m feeling lucky’ search, anyone in the group can suggest something, based on the following categories: nature, recent conversations, the news, culture, science, sport, nature, travel, technology, history, hobbies.
That way, people are suggesting words they have a vested interest in (because they chose them). It also means they’re coming up with words which, for whatever reason, are currently resonating quite strongly with them. Either because they’ve recently come into contact with that subject (recency being a strong factor in recall) or because it’s something that feels very important or interesting to them, so it’s on their mind.
Whatever the reason, it can make the brainstorming team feel more engaged with the process when the seed word is one they’ve come up with, rather than one that random chance has imposed on them. Just use the categories above (also on the visual aid) to prompt ideas for words.
As I said, this tool doesn’t always feel natural for some people. But nothing good comes easy, as they say. And you’ll certainly find this tool a useful springboard for innovation sessions; it really opens your mind to just how creative you can be when you force your brain to ‘jump the tracks’.
Example
Let me go back to the master of lateral thinking, Mr de Bono. He was asked by the Foreign Office to think about a solution to the Middle East crisis.
So, Edward de Bono is (let us imagine) looking at all the issues in the Middle East, all the politics, history, cultural and religious reasons behind the conflicts and instability.
And he’s looking to solve the issue with a simple, radical solution that no one else has thought of. So, using random insertion, one of the seed words he comes up with is banana.
He writes that down, and the broader term behind it, food, and also an attribute of it nourishes you.
Let’s say, exploring the idea of nourishing, he thinks about how comforting a bowl of hot soup can be – maybe the answer is lots of soup? But no – a bowl of hot soup is really only comforting when the weather’s cold, which it isn’t in the Middle East. Hmm, keep exploring …
Now I’ve imagined all of that – I don’t know what went through Mr de Bono’s mind. I’m just saying he could have used the random word method to aid his lateral thinking.
Because what I do know is that he certainly did, as an answer, suggest Marmite.
His reason for deciding that Marmite would reduce tensions in the Middle East? Because there they eat a lot of unleavened bread. Unleavened bread is low in zinc. And a zinc deficiency makes men irritable. Whereas Marmite is rich in zinc. Give that to men in the Middle East and they’d be a lot less tetchy … and a lot nicer to each other.
So Marmite was the idea he presented to the Foreign Office to help bring about – as one newspaper described it – ‘Peace in the Middle Yeast’.
And that’s the power of being random.
Summary
Random insertion is a useful tool when you want a very different answer; a solution far from iterative and which is unlikely to be arrived at with any other kind of problem solving.
It’s just as useful for innovating as it is for problem solving, because your brain can create a link between the current situation and your random trigger to create something new and innovative that may (may) have a useful benefit or advantage.
It’s often not easy so you may not want to try it as the first tool with an inexperienced group. However it is useful if you or anyone else has seen something interesting or stimulating elsewhere (such as an entertaining YouTube clip) that gets people excited, which you can then ask them to somehow connect to your problem/opportunity.
To use random insertion successfully, ask:
- Do we want to break out of our patterns of thinking, simply and quickly?
- Can we find a link between where we are and this random element?
- What’s the bridging idea for the random element, to spark relevant ideas?
- Can we use this random object/idea to achieve a solution/innovation?
- What have we seen that we thought was really interesting/exciting/powerful? How could we incorporate what’s good about it to achieve a solution/innovation?