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How to Play Ricliché

By Peter Lloyd

People believe a lot of what they believe because that’s what they’ve always believed. A solid set of beliefs, especially if they derive from solid research and critical thinking, make modern living possible.

If you stopped to verify whether or not every email or text you send really goes to where you addressed it, you’d never accomplish anything. So you click Send and believe your message will arrive. But when it comes to generating breakthrough ideas, your beliefs can get in the way.

Creative people understand that beliefs don’t just get in the way, they can also be wrong. Paul Kirchner has written a book, Everything You Know Is Wrong. More obviously, some everyday beliefs directly contradict each other. Steve Allen demonstrated this in his book Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking with 101 Ways to Reason Better & Improve Your Mind by comparing contradictory aphorisms. You can see see a few of them in Dumbth Rule No. 9.

So why not take advantage of these shaky beliefs in the pursuit of breakthrough ideas? Ricliché, an app in the Creativity Toolbox, forces you to twist well-known adages and proverbs into their logical opposites or playful transformations.

In simple forced association, a widespread and well-known creative technique, creative people make random combinations of words related to a problem and consider what the combinations suggest as solutions to the problem. Ricliché goes a step further and challenges problem solvers to consider the possibilities suggested by challenges to generally held and sometimes deeply rooted beliefs. It’s a good tool to use at the beginning of a problem-solving venture, because it addresses broadly believed assumptions.

As well as we know that we must challenge the assumptions that anchor us to a problem, we have to force ourselves to do so. Everyday life demands that we maintain working beliefs. Creative tools like Ricliché simply make it easy and even amusing to break and shake loose the chains connected to the anchor.

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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