Lateral Thinking

Lateral thinking is something we may heard of, and maybe vaguely know about too. As a term it was coined by Edward de Bono in the late nineteen hundreds.

It almost read like an alternate way of thinking......thinking ingeniously......like he says, thinking not to be right, but to be more effective. He says, a few people were considered 'creative', but the rest had to plod along within established mental grooves, and he promoted the concept of lateral thinking as the first 'insight tool' for problem solving.

                                      

The human mind is 'a special environment which allows information to organize itself into patterns' and the mind continually looks for fitting all new information into patterns it already knows. Given these facts, De Bono noticed that that a new idea normally has to do battle with old ones to get itself established, and that's a space of conflict.

Lateral thinking is contrasted with the normal logical or patterned thinking, also called 'vertical thinking', which is good most of the time, but when we have a particularly difficult situation may not give the leap forward we need to 'think out of the box'. Or as de Bono puts it, 'Vertical thinking is used to dig the same hole deeper. Lateral thinking is used to dig a hole in a different place'.

He lists techniques for creative thinkers:

• Generating alternatives - to have better solutions you must have more choices to begin with
• Challenging Assumptions - though we need to assume many things to function normally, never questioning our assumptions leaves us in thinking ruts
• Quotas - come up with a certain predetermined number of ideas on an issue. Often it is the last idea that is the most useful
• Analogies - trying to see how a situation is similar to an apparently different one is a time tested route to better thinking
• Reversal Thinking - reverse how you are seeing something, that is, see it's opposite, and you may be surprised at the ideas it may liberate
• Finding the Dominant Idea - not an easy skill to master, but extremely valuable in seeing what really matters in a book, presentation, conversation and so on
• Brainstorming - not lateral thinking itself, but provides a setting for that kind of thinking to emerge
• Suspended Judgment - deciding to entertain an idea just long enough to see if it might work, even if it is not attractive on the surface

"It is characteristic of insight solutions and new ideas that they should be obvious after they have been found". He calls it 'the glorious obvious' !