A while ago we ran a workshop using one of Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking techniques: random input.
The workshop was held at a convention for all British zoo-keepers and those who attended were involved in marketing. They wanted some new marketing ideas that would make zoos more popular and had, to a greater or lesser extent, become frustrated by the usual response from their agencies.
Random input can take many forms but in this case we asked those taking part to pick a place – the most ridiculous being ‘motorway service station toilets’.
Laughable though this suggestion was, it provoked an idea storm, with over twenty-five ideas being deemed good enough for commercial examination in just under ten minutes.
For example: toilets in service stations smell. And there are a variety of smells in a zoo. Why don’t we tell visitors why different parts of the zoo smell the way they do? Can’t we do a scratch and sniff card to send to all schools to encourage children to experience the smells of a zoo?
You get the idea.
The results of this workshop were concrete, commercial and totally sensible. They were totally logical in hindsight, even though random input sounded silly to begin with.
In a speech on TED, Steve Jobs uses a very valid and appropriate expression to demonstrate how sometimes the path seems strange but the destination just makes sense: “you can only connect the dots looking backwards”.
Random input provokes us to create those dots.
Philip|Morley 