HOW TO APPLY

LATERAL
THINKING TO
YOUR CREATIVE
WORK
Pretend that youre trapped in a magical room
with only two exits. Through the first exit is a
room made from a giant magnifying glass, and
the blazing hot sun will fry you to death. Through
the second door is a room with a fire-breathing
dragon. Which do you go through?

than Van Goghs impressionismand any other

new form, for that matter. Apple turned the tech
world on its head by radically simplifying music
and mice when everyone else equated more
buttons and more megabytes and more jargon
with better. When we look at great inventions and
solutions to problems throughout historythe
kinds that make what came before instantly
obsoletewe see this pattern again and again.
Breakthroughs, by very definition, only occur
when assumptions are broken.
The trouble for most of us is that even if were
creative, our default setting is linear thinking.
But that default can be overridden. Here are five
steps to train yourself to think a little more
laterally with any challenge:

The first door, of course. Simply wait until the sun

goes down.
The answer to this puzzle is an example of what
psychologists call lateral thinking. The most
elegant solution presents itself when you
approach the problem sideways, rather than
answering it head-on. Though the question is
presented as a binary choiceone option or the
otherwhen you disregard the assumption that
you must act immediately, the best answer
becomes obvious.
Like our magical room, marketers have a bad
habit of charring great terms to death. In
business, we tend to tout creativity and
innovation and thinking outside the box until
they mean nothing. However, when you unwrap
all of its buzzwords and euphemisms, history
shows that creative breakthroughs all have one
thing in common: they occur when people employ
lateral thinking.
We assume certain perceptions, certain concepts
and certain boundaries, explains Edward de
Bono, who coined the term in 1967. Lateral
thinking is concerned not with playing with the
existing pieces but with seeking to change those
very pieces. Its the art of reframing questions,
attacking problems sideways. They way a
computer hacker or, say, MacGyver would think.
Breakthroughs, by very definition, only occur
when assumptions are broken. In creative fields,
this often happens when people break rules that
arent actually rules at all, but rather simply
conventions. Pablo Picasso changed art forever by
smashing the rules of perspective, color,
proportion. His Cubism took hold in Paris faster

1) List the assumptions

When confronted with a question (problem,
challenge, etc.), write out the assumptions
inherent to the question. In the case of the
puzzle above, the list might include the
following:

You want to get out of the room

You have to choose one of the two

options

You have to do something now

Room One will kill you no matter what

(or so we think!)

Room Two will kill you no matter what

2) Verbalize the convention

Next, ask yourself the question, How would
a typical person approach this problem?
Map out the obvious, straightforward
solutions. Then ask yourself, What if I
couldnt go this route?

3) Question the question

Ask yourself, What if I could rewrite the
question? Rearrange the pieces, as de Bono
suggests, to form a new scenario. In the
trapped room scenario, instead of, Which do
you go through? you might rewrite the
question to ask, Will you go through one of
them? or Will these really kill you? or Do
you even need to go through one of them?

4) Start backwards
Often the route to solving a problem is
revealed when you start with the solution
first, and try to work backward. For example,
asking the question, How would I get into a
trapped room if it were adjoined by a room
made out of a magnifying glass? By
reframing the challenge in this way, youll
notice that I stripped away the details that
cause you to overthink the answer to the
trapped room example. But in a real-life
scenario, this question might sound more
like, How could we renewably generate 10
gigajoules of electricity? rather than How
could we make the city more energy
efficient?a vague question that often
results in straightforward, but ineffective
answers like, Get people to turn off their
lights more.

5) Change perspective
Finally, one of the reasons innovation often
happens when outsiders enter a new
industry, or when disparate groups bump
into one another, is because fresh

perspective are convention-ignorant. To

kickstart lateral thinking, you might do well
to pretend you were someone else trying to
solve the problem. Say, if you were a
magician, or a scientist, or a track and field
starhow would they escape from the fire
room? Or how would the fire-breathing
dragon answer this question? Etc.
***
Before the Earth was a sphere, it was flat.
Before it revolved around the sun, the
universe revolved around it. Before Einsteins
relativity we had only Newtons gravity. With
every such advance we broke assumptions
that were so ingrained that most people
didnt think to question them. And writing
the new paradigms often took more work
than one might expecteven though the
solutions themselves often proved simple.
In our modern work culture, we generally
cling to two conventions when solving
problems: 1) put your head down and work
relentlessly until fortune strikes; and 2)
spend as little effort as possible. The problem
with each of these philosophies is actually
somewhat lazy. Mental work is more difficult
than rote physical work, though we often fool
ourselves into thinking that because you can
see the latter, its just as or more valuable.
Conversely, no one ever changed the world
by cutting corners. Its the combination of
the two, hard work and mental flexibility,
that leads to revolutions.
In other words: though they say that the
shortest distance between two points is a
straight line, if there are enough people
standing
in
that
linefollowing
the
conventional wisdomthe fastest path
between those two points might involve a
few steps sideways.