Don't Panic
I am greatly enjoying re-listening to the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” radio series. I am a fan of Douglas Adams. I love the books and his writing style but it was originally written for radio. The other formats have some merit. The TV series depicted ‘The Guide’ beautifully and Zooey Deschanel in the movie was more like how I imagined Trillian, but radio is still arguably best. I used to work in Islington, London just around the corner from Douglas Adams’ house and I saw him out walking one lunchtime.
When you think about it, the series comments on many themes: The idiocy of bureaucracy, capitalism and politics, philosophy, psychology, and a lot of science and technology jokes. The Guide was conceived as a literary device to explain concepts and context which would be too clumsy to cover with dialogue. However, It is a near perfect prediction of the iPad, internet and search engines - written in 1978. Today, AI is close to simulating ‘Genuine People Personalities” in robotics and real time translation, both also predicted.
I don’t know his writing process but his ideas follow the established creative thinking technique of ‘reversal’, popularised by Edward de Bono. It flips a problem on its head by asking “how could we make this worse?” Rather than glossing over the plot holes in science fiction with technobabble, Adams tackles them head on as exaggerated, unsurmountable problems. He then uses the opposite of the problem as the solution.
Let me explain with an example. Ford and Arthur are thrown out of an airlock into space. With no spacesuit, they will suffocate and die in a matter of seconds. Adams explains how vast the distances are in space and how the chances of rescue are hugely improbable. They are picked up by a ship powered by the new ‘infinite improbability drive’. Where Adams’ writing stands out is not only the idea, but a description of how it was invented. (Fitting with Quantum Mechanics and probability theory)
Another massive plot hole is that all aliens speak English. Adams solves this with the small, yellow Babel Fish which acts as a universal translator. Adams describes the problem of how the likelihood of something so incredibly useful evolving by chance are so remote, that God must have created it. (a parody of the ’Blind Watchmaker’ analogy) He then turns this on its head too:
“The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
These kind of flawed thought experiments are a recurring theme.
How can you use reversal to solve real life problems?
State the issue – Think about how you can make it worse. What are the consequences and the worst outcome? Capture these on a Mind Map, then do the opposite to mitigate the problem. It vanishes in a puff of logic!
Happy Creative Thinking.
[Image: GabboT, CC BY-SA 2.0
