Lateral Thinking

“Lateral thinking  is like the reverse gear in a car. One  would  never try to drive along in reverse gear the whole time.  On the other hand one needs  to have it and to know  how  to use it for maneuverability and to get out of a blind alley.”
“The purpose of thinking  is not to be right but to be effective.”

Edward  de Bono is inevitably  associated  with the word  “thinking,” and no one is better  known  for getting people to work  on the effectiveness of their thought patterns and ideas.
De Bono’s early books  were among  the first in the popular psychology field. The writing  style is not exactly bubbly,  but the quality  of the ideas made them bestsellers. De Bono coined the term “lateral thinking,” now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, in The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967),  but it is Lateral Thinking (subtitled  Creativity  Step by Step in the United States and A Textbook of Creativity  in Britain) that  is more widely read and still in print.

What is lateral  thinking?
When de Bono started  writing  in the 1960s  there were no practical,  standard- ized ways of achieving new insights. A few people were considered  “creative,” but the rest had to plod along within  established  mental  grooves. He promoted  the concept  of lateral  thinking  as the first “insight  tool”  that  anyone could use for problem  solving.
The lateral  thinking  concept  emerged from de Bono’s study of how the mind works.  He found  that  the brain  is not best understood as a computer; rather, it is “a special environment which allows information to organize  itself into patterns.” The mind continually looks for patterns, thinks  in terms of pat- terns, and is self-organizing, incorporating new information in terms of what  it already  knows. Given these facts, de Bono noticed  that  a new idea normally
has to do battle  with old ones to get itself established.  He looked  for ways in which new ideas could come into being via spontaneous insight rather  than conflict.
Lateral  thinking  is a process that  enables us to restructure our patterns, to open up our mind and avoid thinking  in clichéd, set ways. It is essentially cre- ativity, but without any mystique.  It is simply a way of dealing with informa- tion that  results in more creative outcomes.  What  is humor,  de Bono asks, but the sudden  restructuring of existing patterns? If we can introduce the unex- pected element, we need not be enslaved to these patterns.
Lateral  thinking  is contrasted with “vertical  thinking.” Our  culture  in general, but in particular our educational system, emphasizes the use of logic, by which one correct  statement proceeds  to the next one, and finally to the “right” solution.  This type of vertical thinking  is good most of the time, but when we have a particularly difficult situation it may not give us the leap forward we need—sometimes  we have to “think outside  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.”
Lateral  thinking  does not cancel out vertical thinking,  but is complemen- tary to it, to be used when we have exhausted the possibilities of normal thought patterns.

Techniques of creative  thinkers
It is not enough  to have some awareness  of lateral  thinking,  de Bono asserts, we have to practice  it. Most  of his book  consists of techniques  to try to get us into lateral  thinking  mode. They include:
❖  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 or final 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 its 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.

One of de Bono’s key points  is that  lateral  thinkers  do not feel they have to be “right” all the time, only effective. They know  that  the need to be right pre- vents new ideas forming,  because it is quite possible to be wrong  at some stages in an idea cycle but still finish with great outcomes.  What  matters  most is generating  enough  ideas so that  some may be wrong,  but others  turn  out right.

The glorious  obvious
De Bono remarks, “It is characteristic of insight solutions  and new ideas that they should  be obvious  after they have been found.”
Brilliant yet obvious  ideas lie hidden  in our minds, just waiting  to be fished out. What  stops us from retrieving them is the clichéd way we think, always sticking to familiar labels, classifications,  and pigeonholes—what de Bono describes as the “arrogance of established  patterns.”
To get different  results, we need to put information together  differently. What  makes an idea original  is not necessarily the concept  itself, but the fact that  most other  people, thinking  along conventional lines, were not led to it themselves.
We have the cult of genius, glorifying famous  figures like Einstein, only because most people are not taught  to think  in better  ways. For those who practice  lateral  thinking  all the time, the flow of original  ideas never stops.

Final comments
Though  de Bono’s books  are the progenitors of many of the sensationally written  “mind  power” titles available  today, Lateral Thinking itself has a dry style. Unlike many of the seminar  gurus who followed  him, de Bono has degrees in psychology and medicine,  so there is more rigor in his approach.
If you have never got much out of de Bono before,  the chances are you are already  a lateral  thinker. But everyone can become a better  thinker, and his books  are a good place to begin.
People take jibes at de Bono’s invention  of words  like “po” to simplify his teachings,  but he has probably done more than  anyone  to get us thinking about  thinking  itself. This is an important mission, because among  the many things that  make the world  progress,  new and better  ideas are always at the heart  of them.

Edward de  Bono
Born in 1933  in Malta, the son of a professor of medicine  and a magazine journalist,  de Bono  was educated  at St. Edward’s  College and gained a medical degree at the Royal  University  of Malta at the age of 21. He won  a Rhodes Scholarship  to Christ Church,  Oxford, graduating  with  an MA  in psychology and physiology and a DPhil in medicine. He completed his doctorate  at Cambridge  and has had appointments at the universities  of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Harvard.  He became a full-time  author  in 1976.
De Bono  has worked with  many  major corporations, government organizations, teachers, and schoolchildren, and is a well-known public speaker. He has written  over 60 books,  including  The Mechanism of Mind (1969),  Po: Beyond Yes and No (1973),  The Greatest  Thinkers  (1976),  Six Thinking  Hats  (1986),  I Am Right, You Are Wrong  (1990),  How  to Be More Interesting  (1997),  and How  to Have a Beautiful Mind  (2004).