Mental Lock – The ASLAN phenomenon

This weekend, I picked up an interesting book titled “The Smart Crow Never Goes Thirsty” by Moid Siddiqui.It is a very short book which stresses on some of the finer points of creativity [starting from the initial period of Childhood , where parents have the maximum chance to unlock their child’s locked potential].

One of the interesting lines in the book is “Ask your child not only to think WISE but also think OTHERWISE ” The book than talks about the corporate culture, the changes that can be made and the effects of those changes…. In few words, it is a book which talks about “INNOVATIVE Culture Building”. One of the interesting topic’s in the book is “The Mental Lock” and for most of us,the reason is closely related to The Aslan Phenomenon.

Below are some of the excerpts from the book :

The Aslan Phenomenon:
If we don’t challenge the existing practice, there is every likelihood of two potential dangers.The first is that you get locked in one approach, method or strategy without noticing the other approaches that might be more appropriate.As a result, you may tailor your problems to the preconceptions you hold and which enable you to solve them in your own way.The fact that rules should be challenged is called the Aslan Phenomenon ,which runs as follows:

A person liked to jog every morning.He had many different routes he could take but he invariably took the longest route as his friend used to stay in the neighbourhood where he used to stop and gossip.His name was Aslan.So, stopping at Aslan’s house became a rule for having some fun.One day, Aslan moved out of the neighbourhood but the man continued taking the same long route to stop at the same place even though Aslan no longer lived there.

This is what happens to most of us and since that time, the name Aslan became a phenomenon.

QWERTYUIOP:
As many say : The best ideas strike ,when you think the weirdest kind of things

The QWERTYUIOP configuration of the keyboard is just one of the examples that aroused because of the so called Ani-Aslan thinking.In 1870’s , Sholes & Company, a leading manufacturer of typewriters received many complaints from users about typewriter keys sticking together if the operator keyed too fast.The solution was to slow down the typists.

The result was an inefficient keyboard configuration and the most commonly used letters ‘A’, ‘I’ and ‘O’ were positioned in such a way that the relatively weaker fingers were used to depress them.Since then, the QWERTY logic has been used in all the keyboards !!!

The bottom-line is :

Many organizational practices are a result of the Aslan Principle.There are many business practices that are obsolete or dead or being followed for many years.Once a rule is used in practice, it is very difficult to be eliminated even though the original reason for its coming into force has disappeared.Creative thinking involves not only generating new ideas, but escaping from the obsolete ones as well.