By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index
I’ve never liked the term “lateral thinking”. The word “lateral” is just a fancy word for “sideways”. A plant might grow to each side instead of primarily upright, for example.
In business or career development, a “lateral move” would be a change in position roughly equivalent in status, as distinguished from a promotion or demotion. Lateral thinking is kind of the same, except it’s different.
Traditional thinking is not lateral, it’s vertical; moving step-by-step to a logical conclusion or solution based on the immediately visible and available data. And the primary assumption is that the officially recognized “data” is complete, total and authoritative. And permanent.
If you study history, you know that, in virtually every area of human endeavor, that is not, and never has been, true.
A straight line might be the shortest distance between two points, and vertical thinking is often seen as the most direct solution to a compelling, even overwhelming problem. If only life were that simple.
And if only problems – or, in fact, any problem, could be permanently, finally solved.
Consider any human social dilemma, from war to addiction, to a relatively stable and equitable distribution of opportunities and resources to a hundred more; how many have ever, even temporarily, been “solved”?
The person who had much did not have too much, and the person who had little did not have too little. – 2 Corinthians 8:15
A stable, fair and enduring economic system, for example, has been the elusive pursuit of planners and dreamers for centuries if not millennia.
Vertical “solutions” have been applied in a variety of historical and political circumstances. Some have worked. For some people.
For a while.
“Lateral” solutions, by definition not laser-focused, tend to be, by necessity, more diffused and comprehensive.
And durable.
Lateral thinking (and problem solving) puts the emphasis on generating many ideas (some ridiculous or impossible) while de-emphasizing the details of how those ideas could be implemented – or how “practical” they might be.
We need lateral and vertical thinking.
Both forms of thinking work together and depend upon the other.
Without lateral thinking, vertical thinking would be too narrow-minded; without vertical thinking, lateral thinking would produce many possible (if not unrealistic) solutions but no plans (or even potential) to implement them.
Our cultural bias has been toward vertical solutions – the one, best answer to a plethora of problems.
The difficulty is that our “problems” tend to be moving targets – and the same solution, however great or insightful, is limp and useless in the new situation.
We have come to value specialists, with ever-narrower focus.
We are convinced that intense training on specific techniques and systems will produce the most effective engineer, lawyer, or doctor.
And when it comes to that speciality, we astound the world.
It’s the big picture that baffles us.
Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true. – Niels Bohr, 1922 Nobel Prize in physics
Any lasting solution, especially for problems that never seem to go away, could, by necessity, NEVER be a rehash of previous attempts.
Psychologist Edward de Bono, who developed and popularized the concept of lateral thinking, argued that the brain thinks in two stages. The first is a perceiving stage, where the brain chooses to frame its environment in a certain way, identifying a particular pattern or story. The second stage uses that pattern, that particular way of defining the issue, and builds upon it to reach a seemingly satisfactory solution.
In short, no matter how effective the second stage is, it will only work if the first stage, the framing and defining of the problem, is complete.
Consider one of the most pressing problems upending life in almost every major city around the world, one that foments crime and disease in every corner of our cities; homelessness.
Homelessness is far more than a question of shelter. Or affordability. Or income. Or employment. Or mental health. It is all of those – and much more.
Housing is a social issue as much as it is a personal issue. It is as political as it is philosophical. As pragmatic as it is economic. As private and individual as it is public.
Edward de Bono described four techniques to address any similar seemingly intractable issues.
The first step is awareness; what is the real story of how people become homeless, for example.
The second step is random stimulation. This is where insights come from. Sometimes paying attention to completely unrelated topics can unleash our thinking and propel our thought processes to new perspectives.
The third step is to consider the alternatives: de Bono argued that even if there is an apparently, perhaps even tried and true obvious suitable solution to a problem, it can be useful to set it aside and deliberately consider alternative approaches, regardless of – or maybe even especially because of – how ridiculous they might seem. Doing so will force you to consider a problem from all possible angles.
The forth strategy is to play the “what if” game. This technique consists of the deliberate alteration of available options, like doing the opposite of an implied direction or reversing any relationship between elements of the problem.
What if we were on the receiving end of services for example? Flipping the script between end-user and engineer has created multiple new technologies. This could include denying elements that are taken for granted, the “way it’s always been done” or breaking large patterns (and problems) into manageable smaller pieces.
I’m not sure why I’ve never liked the term “lateral thinking”. It might be my dislike of jargon and corporate-speak, but it turns out that I employ those strategies all the time.
It might be true that, as Niels Bohr put it, my suggestions and ideas tend to be on the crazy side – but in a world where the most common and well-worn solutions don’t work anyway, perhaps my suggestions aren’t crazy enough.
