Lateral Thinking

Solving Problems

Lateral Thinking: An Introduction by Edward de Bono was first published in 1967, before the dawn of the personal computer revolution. This book does something more powerful than any computer: it helps you figure out solutions when you have the questions all wrong. There’s no computer in the world that can give you the right output if you are giving it the wrong input.

The first computer I ever used was called the Kaypro II. It was a funny machine: one slice of it unclipped and exposed a keyboard within, leaving the main body of the computer exposed, displaying its floppy ports. You would stick in two floppy disks, and then it would do a mysterious activity it called “swapping.” You typed a bit; it swapped a bit. You typed a bit more; it swapped a bit more. You had to wait for it. There was a little screen that glowed green and made you feel as if you were monitoring some wonky piece of equipment on a Cold War submarine.

But in the mid-1980s it was still amazing. You wrote and it saved what you wrote. And you could change it. And then, when you were really ready, you hooked it up to your dot-matrix printer, and magic would happen as—line by laborious line—it reproduced whatever it was you had so carefully written and revised.

Soon, however, frustration set in. Sometimes you could get in only a few words before the endless swapping began. There was nothing you could do while it was performing this mysterious procedure. You just had to wait for it to do its thing.

Often, it wouldn’t stop, and you were faced with a dilemma—sit there and watch it endlessly swap, hoping it would finish; or reboot. To reboot, you had to kill the power. You either turned it off and then back on or unplugged it from the wall, waited, and plugged it back in. Rebooting was always a gamble. It gave you the immediate satisfaction of bringing the swapping to a close, but you didn’t know what you would find when power was restored. At best, everything you had written to date was there with all the latest revisions. At worst, it was all gone. But often you found yourself in purgatory—after the reboot, the machine was still swapping.

I often think of that Kaypro in relation to a bad habit I have. It’s my inability to disengage from a topic that is causing me anxiety. A friend told me that there’s a psychological term for this—“perseverating.” I thought she’d made it up, but then I discovered that there really is such a word.

My talent for perseverating is epic and usually fixes on a choice I’ve made that it’s too late to change. The intensity of my perseveration has no connection to what’s at stake. Should I take a 6:00 a.m. flight or an 8:00 a.m. flight? I’ll choose the 6:00 a.m. (because it assures me of being at my destination in plenty of time), but then I’ll perseverate for days over whether I’ve made an error. Will I be exhausted when I get there? I should have gone at 8:00 a.m. But then again, what if the 8:00 a.m. was delayed? Then I’d miss the event. But what if I oversleep and miss the 6:00 a.m.?

I have certain tricks to stop myself from perseverating. As I did with the Kaypro, I can attempt a reboot. This usually involves a sleeping pill. The hope is that if I go to sleep in the middle of a fit of perseveration, I’ll wake up knowing the right choice or reconciled to the decision I’ve made or no longer concerned at all. Often this works. But often I’m like the purgatory version of the Kaypro—as soon as I’m awake I’m right back into the mental swapping, this or that, this or that.

Lateral Thinking often helps me snap out of it. I just need to remind myself to reread it.

Edward de Bono is a medical doctor, a psychologist, and a writer. Among his constant topics are creativity, language, and logic.

De Bono begins the book with the story of a merchant in debt. The banker who holds the debt wants to marry the merchant’s daughter, against her will. He suggests a game of chance to determine her fate. They are standing on a “pebble-strewn path,” pebbles everywhere, so the banker proposes that he place into a bag two pebbles: a white one and a black one. If the merchant’s daughter draws the white one, she doesn’t have to marry the banker and the debt is relieved. But if she draws the black one, then she must marry him. If she refuses to draw, then the merchant will go to debtor’s prison.

They all agree. But the daughter notices that the banker has actually slipped two black pebbles into the bag, not a black and a white. If she draws, she can only get a black pebble and she will have to marry the banker. If she refuses, her father goes to jail. And if she tries to reveal the situation, she’ll be accusing the banker of lying. He’ll probably then cancel the whole idea of the game and send the father to debtor’s prison, as is his right.

If you are a vertical thinker, Edward de Bono points out, those are the only choices.

Lateral thinkers, however, see other paths. They don’t just work with the tools they are given, assuming that no other options exist. They challenge assumptions and find new tools.

The merchant’s daughter is a lateral thinker. She draws a pebble, but before anyone can see what color it is, she drops it on the pebble-strewn path. Clumsy her. But by showing everyone that the pebble left in the bag is the black one, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that she chose the white. For the banker to dispute this, he would have to admit that he cheated. So the debt is discharged, and she’s free to marry whomever she likes.

Another example comes from a parable in The Jātaka (Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births). Written originally in Pali, the sacred language of Buddhism, the parable tells the story of a young man with a golden complexion who has grown up in a forest hermitage, looking after his poor, blind parents. Over the course of his childhood, he has become friends with all the animals, but especially a golden deer, who helps him find streams so he can fetch water. One day, a king is out on a hunt and sees the golden boy with the golden deer and accidentally shoots the boy and not the deer with a poison arrow. The poisoned young man, slipping into a coma, asks the king to bring his parents so they can say goodbye to their dying son. When the couple reach their son, they are in complete despair, sobbing, believing that all is lost. But then, miraculously, Indra, the king of all celestial beings, appears in the sky. Indra announces to the blind couple that they can have any wish granted but only one wish. And Indra gives them three suggestions: the first, their sight returned; the second, their son restored to health; the third, a pot of gold. The couple confers briefly and then makes their one wish: “We want to see our healthy son carrying a bag of gold.” Indra rewards their ingenuity: their son and their sight are restored—with money to last them the rest of their lives.

For Buddhists, this is a tale of effective speech. For me, lateral thinking.

Which flight should I take? The 6:00 a.m. that gets me up too early but assures my being there in time, even though I’ll be exhausted? Or the 8:00 a.m., which is cutting it way too close? How about neither—how about I fly in late the night before, stay with a friend so I can catch up with her over breakfast (nice!), and be assured of arriving at my event well rested and on time?

De Bono believes we aren’t born lateral thinkers; that we can train ourselves to think this way. Among the strategies he proposes, there’s one I find particularly appealing: introducing truly random elements and ideas to force yourself to think differently about a problem you are facing. He calls it “random input.” It can be as simple as opening a dictionary and putting your finger on the first word you find and trying to see if that helps you gain a new perspective. Anything that jolts you from your thinking rut.

And if we are searching for that random input, it can always come in the form of a book. Even one that doesn’t seem the slightest bit relevant to the problem at hand: a novel or biography or book of poetry. The worst that can happen is we are still swapping, still perseverating, and still confused. But at least we’ve just read an interesting book.