This is for the bloggers who think they have nothing to write about today, or the creative talents who have a deliverable in the queue but they just aren't getting anywhere closer to it: Ralf Zeigermann, aka The Cartoonist, hips us to some online editions of cool and hip Oblique Strategies, the brainstorm scaffolding flashcard system devised by pop icon Brian Eno and the late painter Peter Schmidt.

Faced with a choice, do both.

On the official website Brian Eno says of the deck

"These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we are doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

Which is a sure nice sentiment, but is it really a novel idea or even a new technique?

Within reach of my workstation here I have my own 'deck' of mind-unjamming, look-at-things-differently brainstorming cards that I euphemistically call my "advanced debugger" -- only it's just a little older, and maybe even a tad wiser given it's been debugged in real-world deployment by a wide and cross-cultural user-base.

That sort of makes me pause to wonder why, in the usual business thinktank brainstorm $1500/day seminar environment, only one of these two brainstorm decks might be considered as an innovative hip intellectual fast-companyish catalysm, while the other raises eyebrows and gets shunned as some kind of voodoo hockus 'divination' ...

oh sure, it tells your future ... if that just so happens to be the future you choose to take from it!

Interestingly, the Eno/Schmidt method deals in starting points, in dilemmas and in seeds of the beginnings; this other seems (to me anyway) more tuned to conditions and consequences, to the growing and harvest of ideas. Both are tools to get yourself out of fixed and linear freight-train thought-ruts, and while one is a copyright product, this denegrated oracle is pure public domain and does it's job with at least 36% fewer pages ...