Lateral Thinking

This book is about lateral thinking which is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring.

Is important to remember that practice is far more important than understanding of the process.

It is easy to combine patterns or to add to them but it is extremely difficult to restructure them for the patterns control attention. Insight and humour both involve the restructuring of patterns. Creativity also involves restructuring but with more emphasis on the escape from restricting patterns. Lateral thinking involves restructuring, escape and the provocation of new patterns. Lateral thinking is closely related to creativity. But whereas creativity is too often only the description of a result, lateral thinking is the description of a process.

Lateral thinking is concerned with the generation of new ideas.

Lateral thinking is also concerned with breaking out of the concept prisons of old ideas. This leads to changes in attitude and approach; to looking in a different way at things which have always been looked at in the same way.

Lateral thinking is quite distinct from vertical thinking which is the traditional type of thinking. In vertical thinking one moves forward by sequential steps each of which must be justified. The distinction between the two sorts of thinking is sharp. For instance in lateral thinking one uses information not for its own sake but for its effect. In lateral thinking one may have to be wrong at some stage in order to achieve a correct solution; in vertical thinking (logic or mathematics) this would be impossible. In lateral thinking one may deliberately seek out irrelevant information; in vertical thinking one selects out only what is relevant.

Lateral thinking is not a substitute for vertical thinking. Both are required. They are complementary. Lateral thinking is generative. Vertical thinking is selective.

Lateral thinking enhances the effectiveness of vertical thinking. Vertical thinking develops the ideas generated by lateral thinking. You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. Vertical thinking is used to dig the same hole deeper. Lateral thinking is used to dig a hole in a different place.

Vertical thinking is concerned with proving or developing concept patterns. Lateral thinking is concerned with restructuring such patterns (insight) and provoking new ones (creativity).

In the younger age groups the visual form is much more effective than the verbal since a child can always attempt to express something visually and, more importantly, to understand something that has been expressed visually.

In the mind which is a cumulative memory system the arrangement of information as concepts and ideas tends to make less than the maximum use of the information available.

It is by insight restructuring that one can move towards the maximal level.

The mind is good at establishing concept patterns but not at restructuring them to bring them up to date. It is from these inherent limitations that the need for lateral thinking arises.

Vertical thinking is selective, lateral thinking is generative.

Vertical thinking moves only if there is a direction in which to move, lateral thinking moves in order to generate a direction.

The vertical thinker says: ‘I know what lam looking for.’ The lateral thinker says: ‘I am looking but I won’t know what I am looking for until I have found it.’

Vertical thinking is sequential, lateral thinking can make jumps

Vertical thinking follows the most likely paths, lateral thinking explores the least likely