Every once in a while I come across something I’ve been doing for a long time, but never realized it actually had a name. It’s not always important to know the names of things like this if you’re already doing them. But it can be nice because it can sort of give what you’re already doing a nice boost and some new directions to take it in.

“Provocative operations” sounds like some kind of secret government plots, but it actually is a term used to describe a creative problem solving technique I use all the time. It’s part of what Edward De Bono termed “Lateral Thinking.” Lateral thinking basically deals with approaching a problem from a variety of indirect angles to come to a new solution, rather than the usual head-on approach. A provocative operation then is sort of a brainstorming technique where you come up with ideas to solve a problem. But you recognize that the ideas themselves don’t solve the problem. The ideas are actually meant to push you outside your normal thinking, and point you towards a better solution. Apparently the term “provocative operation” is often abbreviated to “po”. Wikipedia adds this about “po”

an initial po may seem silly, but a further development may seem very good indeed. The intermediate silly idea is a necessary step to find the good idea. If silly ideas are not allowed to form, the subsequent good idea will be undiscovered. Po allows silly ideas to form so that good ones can follow.

This is something I do all the time with my writing. I’ll sometimes ask a question I know the answer to, or take the position of devil’s advocate to force something loose. De Bono also seems to have come up with a silly-seeming provocative operation of his own to aid in lateral thinking exercises. He came up with something called the “Six Thinking Hats“, each of which symbolizes a particular type of approach to solving a problem. I guess the idea is that you go through and put on all these different hats, one at a time, exhaust the possibilities each one offers, and then combine pieces from each approach to come to a new solution. The Six Thinking Hats are:

1. White hat (Blank sheet): Information & reports (objective)
2. Red hat (Fire): Opinion & emotion (subjective)
3. Yellow hat (Sun): Praise, positive aspects, (objective)
4. Black hat (Judge’s robe): Criticism, negative aspects, modus tollens (objective)
5. Green hat (Plant): Intuition, new approaches & ‘everything goes’ (speculative)
6. Blue hat (Sky): “Big Picture,” “Meta hat,” overall process (overview)

There’s definitely some interesting stuff here. I’ll have to find out more about De Bono and his work. In the meantime, there’s also lots of sites out there with lateral thinking puzzles. Some are kind of cool and some are kind of stupid.