– What is lateral thinking?
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It basically means to approach a problem from a different angle. Most of the time the best thing to do is just approach straight on. Try the obvious answer. If you hear hoofbeats, try to find the horses. However, if you do that and it doesn’t work, then you may need to adjust your approach. Instead of just plowing straight ahead and banging your head against the wall step back and try a different angle, laterally.
If all attempts to locate those horses have failed, maybe we should at least check for zebras? Yeah it’s probably not zebras, but if it’s not impossible, and we’ve struck out with horses. So instead of stubbornly insists it MUST be horses let’s check for an alternative.
A real world example might be when they first started to work on the space shuttle. They needed to find a way to get through re-entry. The initial approach was to try and find a material that was light enough to make into the skin of the shuttle, but sturdy enough to survive reentry. It proved impossible. Such a material just didn’t exist and was beyond our tech to make. The solution was to change the question. We don’t actually need a material that can survive reentry, what we need is a material that can protect the shuttle during reentry. The thermal tiles that they came up with do not in fact survive reentry, at least not completely, but by burning off slow enough they allow the shuttle as a whole and the crew to survive by being the sacrificial lamb. The tiles had to be periodically replaced, but the shuttle overall was fine. (Aside from the infamous incident where the tiles were damaged of course and Columbia was destroyed on reentry)
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