Oblique Strategies

Encouraging lateral thinking.

How to use: To approach a problem with a new outlook, pick a random card from the original Oblique Strategies deck (or from the Collective Strategies contributed by users) and apply the proposed strategy to solve it. If you feel inspired to do so, please contribute a strategy of your own for others to benefit from in the future. Read more about the history of Oblique Strategies in the About section.

Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas

Collective Strategies

Draw a card from the Collective Strategies deck

Add to Collective Strategies

If you're like me, you've often turned to your friends, family members, mentors, and even strangers on the Internet to ask for the best advice they can give you when trying to solve a problem, or overcome a challenge. The Collective Strategies deck is just that! A collection of advice, from you, and anyone who wishes to share their most valued strategy.

I hope that you find this deck just as useful as the origin Oblique Strategies, and that you will be inclined to share a piece of advice. I've included some tips in order to guide this process.

Submissions will be added to the Collective Strategies deck once they've been approved. Submissions are reviewed daily, therefor you should see your strategy in the deck within 24hrs.

Tips for contributing a Collective Strategy

1. Contribute kindly

Our goal is to create a high impact deck that many can enjoy. Let's provide advice in an inclusive manner by using that is free from words, phrases or tones that reflect prejudiced, stereotyped or discriminatory views of particular people or groups.

2. Be a generalist

Oblique Strategies are know for having a neutral and general tone that can apply to a large number of situations. They can be relatable to anyone who picks them up, without having to know who the author is. Let's make our Collective deck just as accessible.

3. Avoid acronyms and jargon

Writing in full words with clear and concise vocabulary will prevent fellow strategists from having to overthink the meaning of your strategy. And that's the goal!

About Oblique Strategies

Oblique Strategies, subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by musician/artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975. While these strategies normally take the form of a card measuring roughly 3 in x 3.5 in, what you find here is a digital version sourced from a website widely acknowledged as the authoritative source and put together by musician and educator Gregory Alan Taylor. Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists, especially musicians, break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. The deck contains an instruction card, describing itself as follows:

These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.
They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case, the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

Photos of the original handwritten cards can be found in this article.

The cards are open-ended but offer direct advice.

The Oblique Strategies are part of a long tradition of lateral thinking techniques. The basic principle behind lateral thinking is that by approaching a problem from a different angle, we may be able to find better solutions. Utilizing imagination and inspiration to generate unexpected solutions to the problems you face means not simply going for the obvious solution. There’s rarely only one solution to the problem. Ideas should not compete against each other, but instead should clarify our methods until we have chosen the optimal solution for an individual problem.