Roger von Oech is the author of the best-selling creativity books A Whack on the Side of the Head, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants and Expect the Unexpected or You Won’t Find It. This latter book explores some of the provocative epigrams of Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher who von Oech calls the world’s first creativity teacher, and uses them as springboards to fuel your imagination and help you to break out of old, limiting ways of thinking.
The Innovative Whack Pack takes the principles from this book and distills them into a powerful, portable creative problem-solving card deck, similar in format and style to von Oech’s popular Creative Whack Pack.
This new card deck contains 60 cards. Each one contains a provocative insight about innovation from Heraclitus on one side, along with a whimsical illustration designed to help whack your thinking. The other side of the card contains a creativity strategy inspired by the insight or principle. At the end of these brief, thought-provoking vignettes, von Oech poses questions to stimulate your creative thinking. Here’s an example of one card:
- Insight: “You can’t step into the same river twice.”
- Strategy: Escape from obsolete ideas.
- Excerpt: “Like a river, the world is constantly changing… Thus, the strategies we employ need to be appropriate to the problems and opportunities before us…. Remember: Every right idea is eventually the wrong idea. Innovation means not only generating new ideas, but escaping from obsolete ones as well.”
- Questions: What assumptions should you update? What is no longer true and should be discarded? What’s now possible?
Other insights in the Innovative Whack Pack include:
- “Expect the unexpected or you won’t find it,”
- “Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the power of kings,” and
- “That which opposes produces a benefit.”
The Innovative Whack Pack includes instructions on how to use it as an “oracle” (i.e.. pose a question for which you’d like an answer, draw cards at random to sample new problem-solving approaches, and brainstorm ways in which each card’s message relates to your question or challenge).
Conclusion
Roger von Oech’s Innovative Whack Pack is a marvelous companion to its precursor, the Creative Whack Pack. The Innovative Whack Pack’s compact design and inspiring anecdotes make it the perfect brainstorming companion for individual or group brainstorming sessions. It’s also a lot of fun to scan the cards and enjoy von Oech’s colorful, insightful stories about each creative thinking principle.
If you’re a fan of creative thinking tools like I am, you will find the Innovative Whack Pack to be a welcome addition to your creative problem-solving toolkit.