Once you understand that outstanding creativity is not always innate, but can be learned by anyone, you are well on your way to gaining an advantage by integrating creative techniques into your everyday work, and not just in terms of increasing your competitiveness.
Developing New Ideas Through the Power of Lateral Thinking appeals primarily to executives who want to move their companies forward by developing brand new concepts.
Edward de Bono is considered the inventor of the concept of lateral thinking. The basis of this method is “lateral” thinking, the deviation from traditional thought patterns. De Bono describes his idea of lateral thinking in a figurative aphorism: “As long as you dig an existing hole deeper, you can’t dig a second hole in a different place.” Lateral thinking (as opposed to vertical, logical thinking), according to de Bono (1967), means consciously “thinking around corners,” “illogically” and unconventionally. “This way of thinking I call lateral thinking: the ability to break out of the prison of old ideas and develop new ones.” Most intelligent people don’t think as well as they think they do. Instead of finding the best possible solutions, many of us think along familiar lines.
Four principles guide lateral thinking:
1. recognizing dominant ideas and habitual ways of thinking
2. search for other ways of looking at things
3. relaxation of the strict control (inner censor) exercised by rational-logical (vertical) thinking.
4. deliberate use of chance
In logical thinking, every step of thinking must be correct, but not in lateral thinking. For Edward de Bono, lateral thinking is about delaying and deferring judgments, letting information interact in new ways, and thus allowing a free space for new ideas to emerge.
Therefore, his method uses information provocatively, restructures patterns intuitively, and challenges commonly accepted concepts. For de Bono, restructuring thought patterns is necessary to use information that is already available more effectively.
We tend to break down unfamiliar situations into familiar elements. “It is disturbing to imagine how many situations are poorly understood because the attempt to explain them is exhausted in the use of familiar patterns.”
While vertical (logical) thinking presents sequential, logical steps, lateral thinking increases its effectiveness by presenting alternative starting points.
So the two styles of thinking are not mutually exclusive at all. De Bono paraphrases these styles as follows: “Vertical thinking pushes forward the ideas that lateral thinking has generated. You don’t dig a second hole when you deepen an existing one. Lateral thinking is applied to digging a hole somewhere else.”
Lateral thinking changes patterns, creates a rearrangement of information. You don’t look for the right answer, you look for the different arrangement of the information.
For overcoming dominant ways of looking at things, Edward de Bono recommends several techniques:
a) Reverse the point of view
b) Use visual thinking
c) Decomposition of a problem into smaller and smaller units in order to then attempt a new composition.
d) Intentional reversal of relations
e) Analogy, transferring the relations of one situation to another situation that is easier to handle.
f) Shifting attention from the obvious to less significant aspects.
A typology of logical (vertical) thinking and lateral thinking is shown in the following overview:
Vertical thinking
– selective
– sets itself in motion only when a direction is present,
into which it can move
– analytical
– every single step must be correct
– consequently
– everything trivial is excluded
– Categories, classifications and identification marks are defined
– Suggests the most likely and successful path
Lateral thinking
– generative
– sets in motion to find a direction
– provocative
– not every step has to be right
– by leaps and bounds
– everything is welcomed that happens to come up
– no specifications
– explores improbable paths
