Generating alternatives—to have better solutions you must have more choices to begin with.“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.”
In a nutshell
Learning how to think more effectively is not difficult and can dramatically improve our ingenuity in solving problems.
In a similar vein
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Creativity (p 68)
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.
When de Bono started writing in the 1960s there were no practical, standardized 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 patterns, 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 creativity, but without any mystique. It is simply a way of dealing with information that results in more creative outcomes. What is humor, de Bono asks, but the sudden restructuring of existing patterns? If we can introduce the unexpected 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 complementary to it, to be used when we have exhausted the possibilities of normal thought patterns.
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 prevents 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.
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.
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.
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).