Grimsby Fish Dock Number 2, 8Way Thinking and the Around Deeply Project

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
 but in having new eyes - Proust

It was in Grimsby that 8Way Thinking really came into its own. To be somewhere as run down as Grimsby’s derelict fish docks and find it the most fascinating place in the world was quite a challenge. But it’s amazing what your brain can come up with when it tries.

We were en route from London to London the long way, a 2500 mile circumnavigation of the British coast to look at the smallest  - grains of sand and the teeming, flicking plankton in the water; the biggest - the second largest fish in the world and the world’s heaviest bony fish; the oldest – some of the most ancient rocks in the world, battered by the North sea in Scotland; the sublime - sunset over John o’ Groats, sunrise over Land’s End and the Milky Way in between; and even the ridiculous –the population of Weymouth playing sardines on the beach during their regatta.

Around Deeply was a three-month project to create a multi-dimensional snapshot of the people, places, history, sights, sounds and nature of our breathtaking coastal heritage. Led by Independent Thinking founder Ian Gilbert, this unique project was, in essence, a thinking skills project, encouraging people to think, to reflect, to look more closely.

After all, the root of the word ‘curiosity’ is the same as the word ‘curator’ – to care for.

But, asking someone to stop and think is easier said than done. It’s a bit like asking them to speak Polish or be slim or think ‘outside the box’. It’s possible, just not straight away. However, what the De Bonos of the world have shown is that, given a structure, we can think better – more effectively, more thoroughly, more creatively and more deeply.

The structure we had developed for the project drew on Howard Gardner’s famous Multiple Intelligence theory. With at least eight different intelligences to play with the question isn’t ‘How smart are you?’ but ‘How are you smart?’. We then combined this with our work on Philosophy for Children, encouraging children to ask questions rather than just to settle on answers. P4C develops (or, perhaps, taps into) the natural curiosity of children and, from a ‘push:pull motivation’ standpoint, the learner starts to pull towards them answers to their own questions rather than trying to fend off answers to questions they hadn’t even thought about.

Bringing together MI theory with P4C questioning led in a direct line to the multi-dimensional, polycognitive enquiry tool (for those of you writing your thesis) that is 8Way Thinking.

In an office in the middle of Ipswich waiting for the bank manger who said he would be back in a minute,  Ian spent half an hour doing an 8Way Think on a derelict church on a busy roundabout outside the window.

By working systematically through each intelligence and asking questions about the church he was immediately able to think differently about what he saw, creating a deep and tangible connection to something that he had driven past frequently and never really noticed. Questions like: What wildlife lives in the old churchyard? Naturalistic; Where are the bricks from and how was it made? Physical; What was its name and how did it get it? Linguistic; What different geometric patterns are there in the structure of the tower? Visual Why did it close and when? Logical/mathematical; How does it feel to stand in such a place? Interpersonal

Even though we may never know the answers to all these questions that doesn’t make asking them any less powerful. As an Australian rabbi once said, ‘I’m not looking for answers that make the questions go away’. Just by being curious in this structured way you make Proust a happy man.

Remember, an answer is a ‘.’ A questions is a ‘…’

The next step was to simplify the vocabulary from concepts like ‘verbal/linguistic’ and ‘visual/spatial’ into the following easy to grasp terms:

People, Numbers, Words, Nature, Sounds, Feelings, Sights, Actions

This can then easily be transferred into a physical model such as an octahedron or, if your origami is as goods as ours, a simple octagon (see opposite page).

Then for anything in the world you want to think about from dogs to love to cheese to Manchester United to weather to the Egyptians to the rainforests and yes, even to Grimsby, you have a model for asking questions, being curious, thinking deeply and seeing with new eyes.

Which meant that in the Dickensian squalor of the Grimsby Fish Dock Number 2 we could ask such questions as:

People: What sorts of jobs did people do here and what was there daily life like? (‘Lumpers’ used to walk to work in their clogs every morning on the way to hump boxes of fish between the quayside and the boats.)

Numbers: How many people worked here in its heyday? (75,000 in the 1890s with 700 trawlers. Interestingly, more fish is brought in now than ever before but by road from Scandinavia to be processed, the rotting heads left outside in large bins for curious thinkers.)

Words: What local accents and dialogues were there? (We spoke with Bill, a former trawlerman talking in his broad local accent and we saw the signs in the old ice factory asking you not to ‘eat, drink, smoke or spit’.)

Naturalistic: Which different species of birds and plants live here? (You’d be amazed what this apparently barren wasteland held, including meadow pipits and a huge one-eyed seal.)

Sounds: What can you hear now compared to 100 years ago? (The meadow pipits were the loudest sounds now. In its heyday the celebrated ice factory would send 1,100 tons of ice a day crashing down the ice shoots into the holds of the waiting trawlers or into the fast train to the London restaurants.)

Feelings: What did it feel like to see this place now knowing what it was like even 30 years ago?. (‘Sad’ is the word Bill came back with when we asked him, describing how he helped his father ‘pull the fires’ on the one of Grimsby’s last steam-driven trawlers.)

Sights: What did it look like in its heyday and what makes it beautiful now? (We were shown a picture of the spot where we were berthed from 100 years ago. It was solid forest of masts. Photography threw up the pictures you see on these pages including the one of the engines in a wrecking yard where we watched the ritual disembowelling of scrapped cars.)

Actions: What was the physical process of trawling? (Bill shared with us how he would go fishing alone in a time before electronic navigational equipment with just a lead-line and a compass. He also explained how we was seasick nearly everyday of his working life.)

This process of asking questions formed the essential structure of Around Deeply and allowed us to create a unique overview of our wonderful coastal heritage. (We are currently re-vamping the Around Deeply website and working on a pilot project with the Geographical Association to build on this amazing resource.)

But you don’t have to go to Grimsby to contemplate the wonders of the world. The template opposite is based around a model I put together with my ten-year old daughter for a presentation to her class on London. By putting ‘London’ in the middle of the octahedron we then worked our way around the edges with three questions per section. She then found out as many answers as she could and used the entire document as the basis for her class talk. For a child who isn’t too comfortable with lines of text on a page, this proved itself to be a very useful tool (and one we haven’t seen since the curious teachers took it away to use it herself).

Once you get the hang of the 8Way Thinking you don’t have to use the octahedron model all the time – think big! One primary school we were in recently was going to turn their hall into one big MI area to do 8Way Thinking on a large scale. So, rather than having a display on, say, weather, covering one wall and a display about animals on another, they were going to take one theme and spread it around the entire room. So, on one wall a display about what weather looked like with famous pictures of weather and paintings by the children; on another statistics about weather; on another weather words and poems and so on…

I could try and make 8Way Thinking more complicated for you if you wish. The truth is it is very simple and the best way of getting to grips with it is to have a go yourself. Feel free to adapt and play around with it and let us know how you get on.

And if ever you’re in Grimsby, head down to Fish Dock Number 2 and have a good deep think.

Ian Gilbert

To download a pdf copy of this article complete with some of Ian Gilbert's stunning photos and a useful 8Way Thinking planning wheel click here.