Random Idea As Oracle

Now this gets my attention for several reasons. One is that it reminds me of one of De Bono's lateral thinking exercises for generating creative ideas. The other is that I think that it actually explains what is really happening in a lot of popular divination and actually gives an explanation for why it could be useful for Christians to follow the 'Beyond Prediction' route. It is worth noting too that Jung reputedly used the I Ching in a similar sort of way. So here's Roger Von Oech's take.

There once was an Indian medicine man who made hunting maps for his tribe. When game got sparse, he'd put a piece of fresh leather in the sun to dry. Then he'd say a few prayers, fold and twist it, and then smooth it out. The rawhide was now etched with lines. He marked some reference points, and a new map was created. When the hunters followed the map's newly defined trails, they usually discovered abundant game.
Moral: by letting the rawhide's random folds represent trails, he pointed the hunters to places they had not looked.
We can create an oracle in the same way the medicine man did. We’ll need three things:
1. A question that we address to the oracle. (The medicine man asked: “Where can more game be found?”) This question focuses your thinking.
2. A way to generate a random piece of information. (The medicine man twisted and folded a piece of leather.) The random selection is important. Since people tend to use the same problem solving approaches repeatedly, they come up with the same answers. Since a random piece of information is unpredictable, it forces us to look at the problem in a new way.
3. An attitude that interprets the resulting random piece of information as the answer to your question. (The medicine man interpreted the lines as representing new hunting trails.)

I get to wondering how often this actually applies to some uses of scripture or 'prophetic words'. What do you reckon?
Creative Think: Use A Random Idea As An Oracle:
Filed in: oracle, divination, thinking, DeBono, VonOech