– What is lateral thinking?
In: 499
is it when your reading a book and as u read an entirly seperate story is playing out in your head, its tie’d to wat ur reading but definatly another story is playing out
like gods talking to you as u fill ur mind with stories
THE CENTER CANT HOLD!!!
less info plz
Lateral thinking isn’t going straight forward but pausing and thinking about how to go around a roadblock.
Example from my work. Ordering a bunch of specialty lighting fixtures. Shipping was free if order was over $5000. There was going to be a 2.5% charge for using a credit card on any amount over $10,000. My order was at $14,000.
Solution? Make two orders each for $7,000. Avoid the CC fee. Still get free shipping.
Lateral thinking is the opposite of linear thinking. A linear thinker follows established steps and goes through channels to get to the correct answer. A lateral thinker connects the dots in a new way, or uses dots nobody noticed before and connects those instead, and gets a completely different answer, maybe one nobody was looking for. The baker who first connected “crackers” and “goldfish” was thinking laterally, but it may have been a linear thinker who said “I know how to make them orange like goldfish too! Cheese, people, cheese!”
In the Watchman comic book series, the character Ozymandias tells a story of the Gordian Knot, which no one can untie. According to legend, Alexander the Great takes a look at the knot, and then cuts it in half with his sword. “Lateral thinking.”
Cowboy rides into a town Tuesday, stays 3 nights and leaves on Tuesday….how?!
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…Tuesday is the name of his horsie
Thinking outside of “the box”.
“The box” is (the 4 walls) where average people find answers to problems.
Lateral thinking is a more intelligent/creative/sophisticated level of problems solving that “most” people wouldn’t think of.
I think.
Basically seeing a problem and thinking of ways to solve it in non-obvious ways.
Imagine a maze, regular thinking has you going through it normally.
Lateral thinking has you walk around the maze to the other side.
Mad lad thinking has you burn the maze down.
Question: determine the height of a building with a barometer.
Expected Answer: Measure the atmospheric pressure on the ground and on the top of building, the height of the building can be determined from the difference.
Lateral thinking: Drop the barometer from the top of the building and see how long it takes to get to the bottom. Use the time to determine the height of the building.
LATERAL THINKING: Find the building superintendent tell him “I have a really cool barometer…I’ll give it to you if you tell me the height of your building”.
Consider watching the show Taskmaster. It has many examples of comedians/celebrities solving dumb problems in different ways. Mostly for comedic effect.
Arguably the best use lateral thinking to find creative or not obvious ways to solve the problem.
The point of lateral thinking is to remove the normal constraints on your thinking, so that you don’t eliminate possibilities that might turn out to be useful. One example I remember is reworking the windshield wiper on a car. Almost all the ideas presented had a blade attached to an arm. But when they were told to design without an arm – i.e. freed from that mechanical arm constraint – new ideas, such as using airflow to provide a clear view over the window, emerged. Edward de Bono, who popularized the term, suggested a number of techniques to make lateral thinking easier.
One was the use of the word “po” as a short hand for ‘possible’ which lets you look past initial problems/constraints. For example, when discussing EV’s, a common objection might be “batteries are too small”. So you might say “po you have a battery with 1,000 km range; what happens then?”, which might spark off some whole new ideas.
Another was “Six Thinking Hats” in which he advocated people wearing different coloured hats during different parts of a meeting (metaphorically, I think). For example, the “Green” hat is all about new ideas and free association. If one were to start criticizing an idea during the “Green hat” time, the moderator (who wears a “Blue” hat) might remind the critic that it’s Green hat time, and he can air his objections during the Black hat period. The idea is not to cut off the critical (Black hat) function, but not to deploy it until you have generated some new ideas for review, instead of cutting off most new ideas before they can be expressed.
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