Sometimes it pays to play

When Brian Eno and David Bowie collaborated on the song “Moss Garden,” their approach was… unconventional.

Eno had co-created a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies,” each card containing a simple but often bizarre creative prompt intended to get their user to surrender to play, experimentation, and a little randomness in their project. The deck contains prompts like “use ‘unqualified’ people,” “what are you really feeling right now,” and “go to an extreme, then move back to a more comfortable place.”

Eno and Bowie each pulled a card kept unknown to the other and worked on the song using the cards they’d picked as their guide.

The result was a pretty damn magical ambient track that helped define the fledgling genre in its own quiet way.

What’s cool is that these two weren’t aimless burnouts just messing around with no external pressures or expectations; they were world-class professionals renting expensive studio time on their record labels’ dime, facing similar time and budget constraints a lot of us do in our work and lives. Even so, they proved the value in allowing some play to figure into their work.

Three lessons from Eno & Bowie’s example:

1) It pays to think inside the box. 

Constraints can help us parse the ambiguity in big, formless projects, and unusual constraints can lead our thinking in directions it never would’ve otherwise wandered.

2) Our work is often more resilient to play than we think. 

The card Bowie pulled instructed him to “destroy the most important thing,” while Eno’s told him to “change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.” Together, those priorities sound like a recipe for disaster— but with the right creative and collaborative flexibility, they didn’t have to be.

3) Experimentation is an investment in future innovation. 

Moss Garden wasn’t a commercial breakout, but it helped lay the groundwork for an entirely new genre of music that has only grown more popular in the half-century since the song’s release. It’s great when experiments lead to immediate breakthroughs, but even those that don’t help us see new, bigger, and better possibilities the next time we tackle a challenge.