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You know how it is, some­times when you’re try­ing to come up with ideas you get stuck. Just plain old-fashioned stuck. Every­thing you think of comes back to the same worth­less thought you had an hour ago. You can see only one route to a solu­tion and frankly it’s head­ing nowhere. And, of course, the dead­line isn’t get­ting any fur­ther away.

While I cover a cou­ple of ways out in Cracked, there’s a really use­ful one that wouldn’t fit in: oblique strate­gies. Orig­i­nally oblique strate­gies was a card deck cre­ated by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help jog the mind when the fog of work pres­sure descended (details here).

It con­sists of over 100 cards (or as the deck terms it “Over one hun­dred worth­while dilem­mas”) and the idea is that when you get stuck you pick a card at ran­dom and con­sider your prob­lem in light of what it says. And they are oblique. So flip­ping my own deck at ran­dom gives me, “Go to an extreme, come part way back.” Now of course, if you are stuck that might be just the help you are look­ing for. What is the extreme con­se­quences of the prob­lem? What would be an extreme solu­tion? How far back would we need to come to cre­ate a work­able answer? Work that train of thought until it goes no fur­ther and then select another card.

While there are a few such cre­ativ­ity decks around, for me oblique strate­gies works because it doesn’t try to solve the prob­lem for you. It still gives you room to think. And it can take you off in unex­pected and use­ful directions.

You can still buy the phys­i­cal deck (it comes in a lovely under­stated black box) and costs £30. But you can also down­load it free as a wid­get for Mac, PC and Linux.

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