Page 94 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

Creative Problem Causing in Action 85

ple or so (see Chapter 19 for tips on group brainstorming). I began by
posing questions about how to improve the news—questions that
made them stretch their minds:
How do we do a newscast in one minute?
How do we do a newscast with no anchors?
How do we do a newscast with no sound?
How do we do a newscast for 24 hours with no repeats?
This Ask a Better Question process forced them into places where
they didn’t “know” the answers. If you look at the questions, you’ll see
that a lot of the answers I was trying to elicit were graphical in nature.
In a short amount of time you have to get a lot of data on the screen. If
there’s no audio, you have to get data on the screen. If you have no
anchors, there has to be something on the screen.
Little did I know how prophetic was my exercise. If you look at
newscasts today compared to 10 to 15 years ago, the whole industry
has gone in that direction. People are quicker on the uptake today and
take in greater amounts of data with more ease than ever before. The
whole world is more graphic today, more jam-packed with informa-
tion. Just look at a 30-year-old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or
The Andy Griffith Show. Things move faster, there’s more editing, more
information jammed in. I bet if you did a word count on dialogue in
today’s sitcoms versus those of 30 years ago, you’d find about 30 per-
cent more words. But I digress.
These TV station executives glimpsed the future when they
stretched their minds. By not looking at how things “are,” they clari-
fied their forward vision.
Well, there is some good news, some bad news, and some sad news
in the outcome to this story. The good news is that the TV station made
some changes and soon overtook their nearest competitor in the rat-
ings war. The bad news is that they got cold feet on immediate imple-
mentation of many of the leading-edge ideas that emerged from this
brainstorming session. The sad news is that the general manager of
this TV station, the visionary who was leading the charge, died sud-
denly. The station has been mired in poor ratings ever since, currently
under their fourth general manager in six years.
Many of the ideas we came up with in that session are common-
place today. The news ticker on the bottom of the screen. Time and
temperature in the lower corner. The station logo as a permanent
bug in the other corner, and so on. This group saw the future when
they stretched their thinking, thanks to Ask a Better Question. You
can, too!

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