Dwapara Yuga - Scamper technique

Several years ago, the author remembers being introduced to de Bono's classic book on lateral thinking.

Flash forward to this year and the recent DNA of Innovation book, mentioned in the last post.

Within it, a well known consulting technique is detailed - known by the acronym SCAMPER.   A product or idea can be reformulated along the following lines -

• Substitute: What elements of this product or service can we substitute?
• Combine: How can we combine this with other products or services?
• Adapt: What idea from elsewhere can we alter or adapt?
• Maximize or minimize: How can we greatly enlarge or greatly reduce any component?
• Put to other use: What completely different use can we have for our product?
• Eliminate: What elements of the product or service can be eliminated?
• Rearrange or reverse: How can we rearrange the product or reverse the process?

The SCAMPER technique is a wonderful metaphor for the higher ages, creative, expansive and a great antidote to the tedious, constrictive and traditional (lack of) thinking of Kali Yuga - the "comme il faut" type of idea, not what is best, rather what has always been done.

The picture is from the House of (so-called) Lords in England, a Kali Yuga hold over from the courtly consigliere of the Middle Ages, today largely about playing dress up under a great deal of pomp and circumstance while citizens riot in the streets... "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!"

In the French Revolution, upon hearing that  peasants had no bread to eat, the Queen replied well let them eat cake instead, a perhaps allegorical story that captures well ossified thinking and an inability to turn around ideas or situations).

Aside on recorded music - a potted history of product development

In the depth of Kali Yuga, it was thought impossible to capture music on paper, although it was known to have been done as recently as the with the Greeks.   As the age ascended, notation began and progressively improved.    Old European monasteries contain early examples that are quite charming and beautiful, resembling the colorful  music lessons given today in early education.

The harpsichord, a relatively inexpressive instrument became the piano, able to play loudly and softly as its full name in Italian implies, later the player piano able to read special scores and in recent decades became the synthesizer able to express the sound of any instrument and exactly capture every nuance using MIDI.   

In terms of technique itself,  how-to YouTube videos and tab/chord sites abound for popular songs.   In a generation, rights of passage like being able to play some or all of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" (or "Brothers" by Swami Kriyananda according to taste/background) have become accessible to anyone with an interest in doing so, although the truly musically talented drawing on past lives are able to pick up an instrument they've never seen before and play it and most music purely by ear, even having heard it only once, or in part before.

In terms of recording, over the last century, we have moved from analog drums (used for recording Yogananda's voice, for example), to analogue disks (78s, 45s, LPs, 12"), to cassette tapes, to digital tapes, to digital CD, SACD, DVD, BluRay and in the most recent times disk-based storage using FLAC, Apple Lossless and Windows Media 9 Lossless that do not lose detail in recordings as earlier formats such as MP3 did (even at high kbps).

Essentially all music is available to everyone, everywhere today, the only parameters being the quality (most downloads are not lossless, often an unwitting trade-off of size/download time against quality since lossless storage takes up more space) and legal rights of use.