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My Sunday StumbleUpon routine hit upon Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies:

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt (a British painter …) tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure - either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you’re running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind.

So, of course, I made a list (!). Some examples of these mind-joggers:

• Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
• Lowest common denominator check -single beat -single note -single riff
• Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list
• Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
• Mechanicalise something idiosyncratic

I have decided that I will take a look at one of these “strategies” each week, to jog my own thinking and stimulate some creativity. This link leads to a page where you can go to “draw” a card yourself. This week’s card -

Back up a few steps.
What else could you have done?

Hmmmm….