Lateral Thinking
Created | Updated Feb 3, 2002
Lateral Thinking, or "thinking outside the box" is a powerful device to help stretch the capabilities of your little grey cells, and to improve your ability to think creatively about problems.
The concept behind lateral thinking is simple - the creative process is not logical. Most of the great discoveries in life came about because people made a crazy connection in their minds and asked the question "what if...". So,if you want to solve a problem or come up with a good idea, you need to the problem from a really different point of view. You have to stop trying to be correct all the time, and actually focus on being wrong for a change!
Lateral thinking was conceived by Edward de Bono in the 1960's and there are reams of books available on the subject.
Here are a sample of lateral thinking techniques that can be used :-
Random Stimulation
You try to relate the problem to completely random information to see what the result is. Get out a dictionary, open a random page, and randomly point at an entry. Then start to make connections.
Say you are thinking about buying somebody you like a present, but you don't know what to get them.
Think of the following items and relate them back to the problem at hand : Sharks; Boulder, Colorado; Bad acne; Surfing and Teaching Mathematics (you can keep on going if you like : just make sure the ideas are random). Now try to relate these concepts to your problem. What linkages can you find? How does this help your problem?
Reversal
This is a really simple, and surprisingly worthwhile technique. Consider the problem at hand, then consider the opposite or just reverse something about it.
You are thinking of going on holiday this summer, but where?
Reverse the issue : Where is the worst place you can think of to go on holiday? Where would you go on holiday if it was winter?
Stepping Stones
Many people discard their initial ideas when trying to solve a problem. These ideas are discarded because they won't work or because they are illogical or ill-thought out. The idea of the stepping stone method is to record these ideas, no matter how ridiculous they might be. Their use may lie in the fact that they could point the way to a better idea, and eventually the agreed solution to the problem. (Stepping stone techniques can be performed alone, or in a group as part of a Brainstorming session).
Say you need to double sales in your company next year.
Initial ideas might include a big promotion on television (too expensive), a door to door salesman (too intrusive and time consuming), a cut-price sale to increase customer loyalty (too risky). Now, start to fiddle with these ideas. Combine them together. Rearrange them. Look for alternatives. What do you come up with? Forget about television, what about radio? What about newspapers? Even if the answer you get is still not the right answer, record it and come back to it. Using stepping stones you can arrive at a very good answer.
Abstraction
Relate your problem to a different (but somehow, similar) scenario, and see how that scenario might be addressed by the participants involved.
Say you want to reduce your loan to the bank.
Link this to fireman fighting a fire, or a doctor trying to cure a patient, or a policeman looking for a bank-robber. How would they go about it? Could you use similar techniques for your problem?
These techniques take a little bit of practice, but it's good fun and you can use the techniques on just about any problem. Feel free to submit your problems to the forum!
