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A new take on life
PAUL Sloane is the Sloane ranger of rational thinking. Right now he's riding to the rescue of those of us who like to look at life in a different way. He's quite like to see the resort show more "vision, leadership and innovation" too.
Blackpool-born Paul, of Design Innovation, is a lateral thinker. Arguably THE lateral thinker. Certainly he's one of the best known since Edward de Bono is said to have coined the term in the late '60s.
Broadly, it comes down to applying reasoning in a creative manner, seeing things in a different way, taking an indirect manner to problem solving or big ideas. Thinking out of the box.
Paul has a short "Wally Test", his term, to
determine how our brain works. Here are six of the best questions. Answers at the end. But we'll let you in on one telling reply sooner.
1) In what month do Americans eat the least?
2) Removing an appendix is called an
appendectomy, removing tonsils is called a
tonsillectomy. What is it called when they remove a growth from your head?
3) What three things that you can eat can you never have for breakfast?
4) If it took eight men ten hours to build a wall, how long would it take four men to build it?
5) If a ton of coal costs 30 and a ton of coke costs 25 what will a ton of firewood come to?
6) What do you always get
hanging from apple trees?
Hands up those of you who answered "sore arms" to question six. It makes you a lateral thinker, and Paul hopes to encourage you to become - brilliant.
His latest book How To Be A Brilliant Thinker, has just been
published by Kogan Page, at 9.99, and aims to belp those who wish to break out of the rut of conventional thinking.
Paul has become the world's leading author of lateral thinking puzzles, and offers practical methods, exercises, tips, stories, and puzzles.
He says it helped to grow up in Blackpool. He danced at The Tower as part of St Joseph's
College Irish country dancing team, worked as a bingo caller on North Pier and his family lived on Devonshire Road, Bispham.
His mother moved from there in 2007 but died the following year. She had three sons and a daughter.
All three brothers remain keen Blackpool fans.
"I just missed the Stanley Matthews years but I saw Jimmy Armfield, Alan Ball, Tony Green and Emlyn Hughes."
By his own admission, Paul was a "nerdy sort of kid" at St Joseph's College, Blackpool, with his NHS specs and short pants (first year only!), but it did no harm, as he left in 1968 to go to Cambridge to take a first in Engineering.
He is on the list of "notable alumni" at St Joseph's, was part of the team that launched the IBM PC in the UK, and later headed database leaders, Ashton-Tate.
He had elocution lessons from a portly teacher called Mr Priestley who had a hard task wrestling with "flat northern vowels and trying to get us to use the Queen's English."
Today Paul travels the world giving keynote talks on leadership and innovation and addresses large, prestigious, audiences.
He credits Mr Priestley for pushing him to learn a classic poem of the British Empire, Play Up, Play Up and Play the Game, to recite at a festival.
Others scooped prizes but it made Paul competitive, and gave him the confidence for public speaking. "Part of the reason that I can do that is because a teacher took the initiative and gave me a challenge. He asked me to do something I had never done and helped me to learn how to do it.
"Education is not about league tables or exam results. It is about opening doors for
people and showing them rooms that that would otherwise be hidden.
Paul says we are creatures of habit. "Each day we wake up on same side of the bed. We put on the same type of clothes we wore the
previous day, we eat the same type of breakfast,
we sit in the same car and take the same route to work or school.
"Most of our thinking is in the same groove: analytical, convergent, critical, left-brain thinking. It is hard to appreciate just how severely we hamper ourselves thinking in this way.
"How can you think of things that no-one else thinks of? By deliberately taking a different approach to the issue from everyone else. The innovative thinker purposefully challenges dominant ideas in order to conceive new possibilities."
Paul draws on such inspirational examples as Jonas Salk, who, when asked how he
invented the vaccine for polio, replied: "I imagined myself as a virus or cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like."
He adds: "Instead of looking at the scene from your view look at it from the perspective of customer, product, supplier, child, alien,
lunatic, comedian, dictator or anarchist.
"Apply the what if? technique. Challenge common assumptions. If you had to study a valley, you would look up and down, scan it from the river, look across from each hillside, walk it, drive along the road, take a boat, study a satellite photo, peruse a map.
"Each gives you a different view and adds to your understanding of the valley. Why not do the same with any problem?
"Great geniuses, Picasso, Einstein, Darwin, did not take the traditional view and develop existing ideas. They took an entirely different view and transformed society.
"Jeff Bezos took a different view of book
retailing with Amazon.com, Stelios took a new perspective on flying with Easyjet, Swatch transformed our view of watches, IKEA changed the way we buy furniture.
" If we can attack problems from entirely new directions then we can think of things that conventional thinkers miss.
"Blackpool desperately needs three things: a vision, leadership and innovation."
Answers: 1) February – it is the shortest month, 2) a haircut, 3) lunch, dinner and supper, 4) no time at all - it is already built, 5) ashes and 6) sore arms.
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Wednesday 30 May 2012
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