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?
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
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:

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 reallife 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.
[Ed. note: this post is inspired by Shanes book Smartcuts: How Hackers,
Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, available on Amazon now.]

How about you?

How have you applied lateral thinking?