Card #29 – ”Be Whacky” from the Creative Whack Pack
Available on the iOS App Store and as a physical deck of cards

One day a new product design team got into a really whacky mood and made fun of their product. They were zany and off-the-wall. The meeting was a great success, and many new ideas were generated.
The next week, everybody was in a serious mood and no new ideas were generated.
Moral: there’s a close relationship between the “aha” of discovery and the “ha-ha” of humor.
If you can laugh at a problem, perhaps you’ll overturn a few assumptions and come up with some fresh ideas.
Indeed, the mental strategies underlying humor — combining different ideas, asking unusual “what if” questions, parodying the rules — are congruent with effective problem-solving techniques.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said it well: “As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.”
— What crazy, zany things can you do to your issue?
— What can you take less seriously?
One exercise I use to loosen up my seminar participants’ thinking is to have them make up humorous and irreverent mottos for their products and organizations. You might try this with your own issue.
Here are some of my favorite mottos:
“Where you’re not alone until you want a loan.”
— Bank of America
“Where innovation is acceptable just as long as it’s been tried before.”
— Procter & Gamble
“Where creative people meet, and meet, and meet.” — IBM
“A leader in technology whether the customer needs it or not.”
— Hewlett-Packard
“We put the ‘cuss’ in customer.”
— Sears
“We’re arrogant and we should be.”
— Microsoft
“Lean to the left. Lean to the left. Stand up! Sit down! Strike, strike, strike!”
— National Education Association (a teachers union)
“In tuition we trust.”
— Stanford University
“We’re the glue that holds your problems together.”
— Intel
“You’ll have a good time if you’re lucky.”
— Harrahs Casino
“We’ve got you by the calls!”
— AT&T
“We are behind the customer every step of the way.”
— General Mills
“We’ve got our customers by the bulbs.”
— Pacific Gas & Electric
“Not only are we smarter than you are, we’re also younger than you are.”
— Accenture (a consulting company)
“We’ve got a product for every hole in your body.”
— Kimberly-Clark (a paper products company)
“Good people, good medicine, good luck.”
— Kaiser Permanente (health insurance company)
“Customer service is our number one priority: please leave your complaint at the beep.”
— United Airlines
— What offbeat slogans can you make up to describe a current project?