CORKSCREW THINKING

 

Straight-line thinking is the way we were taught to think at school: A to B to C to D, and so on…

We were taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

The good part about straight-line thinking is it’s easy to teach.

The bad point about it is it’s predictable and therefore easy to copy.

At the lowest point of WW2, Britain had lost everything, they’d left all their weapons at Dunkirk.

In desperation, Winston Churchill said we couldn’t afford straight-line thinking. We needed what he called ‘corkscrew thinkers’.
We had less soldiers, less tanks, less guns, less of everything than the enemy. So, if we carried on thinking in the same straight-line way they did, we must lose.

What we needed was people who could approach a problem in strange, unexpected, roundabout ways, thinking that the enemy wouldn’t see coming.
What we would now call creative thinkers.
Churchill’s corkscrew-thinkers gave us Bletchley Park, where mad,  eccentric geniuses cracked the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code and won the Battle of the Atlantic.
Corkscrew-thinking gave us 3 million Sten gun, made from bicycle pumps by a children’s toy manufacturer, because we left all our weapons at Dunkirk.
Corkscrew-thinking gave us anti-shipping mines, made from children’s sweets, that sank Japanese warships.
Corkscrew-thinking gave us 8,000 bombers made of wood, because we’d run out of metal, which flew so fast the enemy couldn’t catch them.
Corkscrew-thinking gave us a dummy army made of inflatable tanks, which fooled the Germans about where the D Day invasion would really happen.
Corkscrew-thinking gave us a dead body purposely washed ashore and carrying ‘secret’ information, which caused the enemy to move their army many miles away to a harmless location.
Luckily for us the enemy didn’t bother with corkscrew-thinking. They didn’t think they needed it.
But corkscrew-thinking did beat straight line thinking. Which is where we find ourselves today.

AI is an excellent example of straight-line thinking.

It can scrape the internet to replicate and fabricate anything faster than any human possibly could.

AI is unbeatable at straight-line thinking.

However, what AI can’t do is corkscrew thinking, ideas that you can’t see coming, aka real creativity.

You need an unpredictable, undisciplined human mind for that.

Of course, being creative isn’t easy, you won’t get much agreement because most people are straight-line thinkers.

But not fitting in is the price of being creative.

As Steve Jobs said “Why would you want to join the navy when you could be a pirate?”