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Order: A Cage of Context

By Peter Lloyd

This is the third in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Order.
The line it is drawn/The curse it is cast
The slow one now/Will later be fast
As the present now/Will later be last
—Bob Dylan
Like group affiliation, order reassures us. When we examine it, however, we find that we've created all of it arbitrarily. All order turns out to be artificial. We use it to help us better deal with the complex, chaotic world around us. In the context of creativity, we can call order a cage.

Order forces us through hierarchies, puts things in boxes, rows, and columns. This serves us admirably when we need to sort, rank, and calculate. It blinds and chokes us, however, when we attempt to break the mold. And we have to break the mold in order to create.

For example, developments in understanding dyslexia support the "disorderly" work of Dr. Helen Irlen, a California psychologist. She has successfully treated dyslexia with ordinary colored filters. Why they worked was a mystery. What's worse, she discovered her treatment by accident.

Accident, the opposite of order, the natural result of chaos, takes credit for some of our most successful inventions. Like the English language. Why is English the most widely spoken, richly worded language in the world? Anarchy or lack of order helps explain why.

Nonsense, another antagonist of order, also deserves credit for successful creativity. A Columbus, Ohio, businessman, Don Winkler, says, "The dumber the question—the more people laugh at you—the more likely it will lead to a breakthrough." And he should know. Don does lots of things backwards, not necessarily on purpose. He has a dyslexic brain.

Nothing discourages order more than entropy. Simply put, entropy guarantees that everything gravitates inexorably toward disorder. Fill a jar half way with white sand and top it off with red sand. Shake. From the time you begin shaking and forever more, the sand will become pinker and pinker. Never will red or white re-emerge, just as we will always grow older, never younger. Sorry.

All of us ended up here by accident. The law of entropy tells us that all of our attempts to order will end up in vain. So why deny the disorderly spontaneity of our existence? When solving a problem, escape the cage of order. Upset, rearrange, reverse, and randomize the artificial order to find hidden solutions.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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