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Why It Makes Sense To Think Like a Fool
Thinking like a fool can help ‘whack’ our typical thinking patterns into breakthrough ideas
From Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head:
“Looking at the fool’s wildly-colored clothing and donkey-eared cap, it’s easy to regard him as a simpleton, an imbecile whose proverbial “elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor,” or a moron “whose bell has no clapper.” Don’t be fooled! The classical fool is no dunce. It takes intelligence, imagination, cleverness and insight to play this role. A good fool needs to be part actor and part poet, part philosopher and part psychologist.”
Indeed, the fool’s job was to ‘whack’ the king’s thinking out of typical thinking patterns.
What are some ways that a fool can help us think better? Why might thinking like a fool make us more creative? The following is what Roger says about foolish thinking.
The fool will reverse our standard assumptions
“He’ll say, if a man is sitting on a horse facing the rear, why do we assume that it is the man who is backwards and not the horse?”
In other words, what seems like a dumb question may be a reversal in how we see the situation.
