Sideways Intelligence: Lateral thinking

 

Photo: Pixabay

“Lateral knowledge is knowledge that is from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that is not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.”

 -- Robert Pirsig, writer and philosopher

 

Here is a minimal-information problem, challenging assumptions about the possible. 

A man living in a 30-story building decides to jump from his living-room window.  After doing                this, he survives the fall with no injuries.  How could this happen? 

Answer:  Although the man may live in a tall building, he jumped from a first-floor window.  No problem at all.  His fall and the building’s height aren’t related.

Puzzles

Another classical lateral thinking puzzle involves a driver and three potential passengers.  On a windy stormy night, you are driving your two-seater car in the far suburbs when you spot three people waiting at a bus stop outside the city.  One is an old lady looking like she is about to die.  One is a friend who once saved your life.  The third is the perfect romantic partner you’ve been dreaming about for years.  Your car can take just one passenger.  Who gets a ride from you? 

This scenario challenges your assumptions.  It looks as though you will be forced to let people down by excluding two of the three from your car.  But how about rethinking your assumptions – that you must pick up just one passenger?  Maybe you don’t have to pick one at all – just speed up and keep on driving past.  But that creates a social problem as well as leaving behind social capital to be mined. 

However, there is an answer in the lateral (side-ways) direction.  How about this: give your car keys to your important friend and ask him to drive the old lady to a hospital or help center.  This allows you to maximize the crisis in seating space by waiting with the perfect partner potential to catch the next bus together, with ample opportunity to chat and connect. 

By flexing the requirements of the situation, an elegant solution is allowed to emerge.  Taking this advantage is an example of sideways intelligence—a turnaround of the vertical, straight-on mode.  Now you can consider other “irrelevant” potentials looking 360 degrees to think about definitions and relationships you might not have thought about before.  As in another classic puzzle, “Would you jump from an airplane?”  “Question:  Is the airplane parked on the ground, or in flight?”  Not too different from the high-rise question above. Such minimal-information questions are typical of the Wally problem-solving test, which assesses children’s ability to solve problems using indirect approaches.

Lateral thinking, developed by psychologist Edward de Bono, involves examining problematic situations from unexpected angles to discover unsuspected creative solutions (The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1967).  Rather than following the logic of “vertical thinking,” each step following from the last in sequence, it approaches things from the outside, from other domains, entering from the side (lateral dimension).  Lateral thought does this by eclectically gathering ideas from outside the box, seeing what might be productive solutions by looking at other fields with far off-center definitions and associations.  De Bono termed this ability “displacement,” meaning to shift perspective to reveal an entirely new landscape of possibility.  He has cited the exemplar case of King Soloman from the Old Testament.  Faced with two women who each claimed a baby was theirs, the king proposed cutting the child in half—and revealed the true mother, who offered to give up her claim in order to save him.   

Examples

As one example, Uber rideshare was not developed by taxi companies.  It was the outcome of looking at consumer needs, computer programming, and cars and the drivers who owned them as a giant untapped resource. At a conference in Paris where taxis were hard to find, Travis Kalanick asked himself why this resource couldn’t be leveraged to the advantage of both passenger and driver. Uber didn’t own a single taxi and had nothing but criticism to offer as knowledge of the taxi business.   Another instance is that YouTube was originally launched as a dating site through home films.  And this: the Jacuzzi water massage tub was a therapy device until it was recognized and positioned as a luxury in-home spa. 

When Art Fry at 3M “discovered” Post-it notes, he was taking a failed experiment in adhesives that the company considered a failure.  He fiddled with the potential of some hard-to-attached but easy to detach slips of paper to explore their potential.  Then he explored the potential of his own situation in 3M, which involved the secretarial ranks.  He began to distribute these “loose adhesion” products around the office, and the clerical staff did the rest, making proof of concept up front for an accidental product.  With the usefulness of these notes established, it was then quick work to sell the concept to upper management, which greenlighted this famous invention to let it loose on the world.  What would we do without our Post-its?  Go back to paper clips holding paper scraps?

Disney’s Imagineering team created a completely novel public artform that was first conceived by Walt as a travelling educational museum of American folklore and heroes.  There was no precedent for it, and it did not derive from the amusement park model, which Disney despised and succeeded at replacing with a new-school idea.  Theme parks have far more to do with animation and filmmaking than with the carnival midway.    

Challenging assumptions is not only good therapy for the mind and the boardroom.  It is a way forward by indirection, “from the side,” a new route forward that can open vistas for problem-solving that have not been tried.  Disney’s Imagineering team called this blue-sky thinking, and it has been a model for creativity enhancement for thousands of organizations since the 1950s when practiced at the Burbank studios.  It turns out that avoiding straight-forward thinking has many benefits just not visible from the vertical-thinking perspective. 

Lateralism takes “outside” information inside to provoke a new but not yet stable structuring of the situation—the solution isn’t yet clear or determined.  Only then does this thinking attempt to develop outside insight into a solution that is fitting and actionable.  The highly popular “I Love Lucy” reversed the paradigm of the sitcom: the unruly husband fighting for control with a sensible wife.  Instead, Lucille Ball was the chaotic (but charming) wife at odds with Desi Arnaz as the voice of reason--switching the character of their real-life relationship). 

“Themeatics: The Art of Hyperreality” JPC, February-April 2025.

 Image: Statue of Liberty at New York New York hotel casino in Las Vegas

                                                        (Photo: J.G. O’Boyle)

Abstract

Since Disney Imagineering introduced the theme park in 1955, themeatics has ruled public space, becoming a mixed reality of virtual and nonvirtual, media and built design, as hyperreality. This “unified field theory” of the arts consolidates many styles and disciplines as mixed media, conferring meaning and engaging attention in immersive experiences that readily embody innovation. Through hyperreality, themeatics works as the dominant aesthetic now merging imagination with the experienced world. The fit between art-informed places like theme parks and the brain expands the life of the mind in culture through the scope of lived and virtual experience alike.

King, M. J. (2025). Themeatics: The art of hyperreality. Journal of Popular Culture, 58 (1-2), 7-25.

Table of contents

link to JPC article 

Mobility Equals Freedom, Part 2: Driving and Quality of Life

“Everything in life is somewhere else—and you get there in a car.”  -- E.B. White

“Twentieth-century urban America didn’t belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car.  Transportation technologies have always determined urban form.”

– Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011)

 

The following are factors that diminish quality of life as listed in the Pennsylvania Advance Health Care Directive.  The lead question is this: “When you think about the following scenarios, what would be considered an unacceptable quality of life?”

                         

Not being able to drive a car                 

Not being able to get out of bed

Not being able to leave the house or move around and interact with people (e.g., a coma state)    

 Not being able to have meaningful relationships or recognize family or friends

*

Not being able to think for myself or make my own decisions

In other words, not being able to drive is incompatible with quality of life: If I can’t drive, living is no longer worthwhile.   Losing the driving license is the lead-in to a dependent life.  And for Americans, loss of independent mobility equates to a severely compromised state of being. 

The way people move around, and for what reasons, has much to say about opportunity.  How that opportunity is recognized and acted upon, in turn, provides clues about what cultural values are, how they act as deep motives, and how change is seen - as enhancing or blocking the top operating values.  The ability to drive is considered the gateway to many opportunities, and especially to the ability to hold a job—even with remote work as an option. 

In the US, staying put is not regarded as advantageous to individual development.  We all know that to progress, go to a decent school, build a career, get a family started, meet partners and leverage relationships, use marriage as a driver of social capital, we have to seek out new places.  Our country was founded on these tenets as Europe looked west to the new world to realize freedoms not to be found in locked-in Old World centers. 

License to move

The driver’s license is a rite of passage in the US, marking the start of true independence away from the family and obligations to parents.  Independence is the American measure of mental and physical well-being, and also, in a seeming contradiction, the basis for social health and upward mobility.  Independence is a signal of intelligence and social viability through mobility, and the car provides that most effectively.  

What about public transit?  Five percent or less of the American public use commuter trains and buses; even Washington D.C.’s excellent Metro system has just a 10% ridership.  High usage correlates with population density, as in Japan, Hong Kong, New York City, and much of Europe. Edward Glaeser estimates that commutes by public transit are twice that of cars, 48 minutes against 24 minutes, which is why 86% of US commuters opt for the time-saving route.  He gauges the best commute as the brief walk of 15 minutes, less than a mile (Triumph of the City, p. 13).  The time burden is independent of actual distance: “The problem with public transportation is the time involved in getting to the bus or subway stop, waiting to be picked up, and then getting from the final stop to one’s ultimate destination” (179).    

In between is the hybrid of semi-private car services such as Uber and Lyft and vans powered by smart phones at rates closer to taxis than buses.  For most middle-class Americans—and 95% call ourselves middle-class—the price of public transit is not the ticket but the stress of riding with below-middle classes than we’d like to see around us.  In Honolulu, with one of the leading bus systems island-wide, class-mixing is less an issue in the nation’s most diverse state with more equal incomes, but tourists still favor car rentals.  Wills Eye Hospital, in its literature on “Preparing for Hospital Discharge,” warns that “Public transport is not an acceptable form of transportation home from the hospital.”  You need access to a private car and driver just to return home from your treatment.

Mass transit leaves the rider dependent on schedules and stop locations, going against the autonomy principle that one should be able to go wherever and whenever they want, one of our leading cultural core values.  The need to live by someone else’s schedule, often requiring transfers to other parts of the routing, takes a toll on the rider’s time, and this is the core of the problem.  Even waiting in traffic is seen as an acceptable exchange for the ability to travel point to point once the blockage clears.  It is the main advantage of an Uber ride. 

Since Ford’s Model A, cars took off, making the ability to travel long distances the hallmark of the free life.  The driver’s license is the turning point for adolescents into independence and autonomy.  Car ownership makes independence possible.  One car per family of two employed adults is considered a disabled system, just waiting to finance the second car.  Losing that license is the start-point of life’s end, giving up independence to rely on the wheels of others.  For these nondrivers, a city’s dependence on cars is the leading factor for livability.  Los Angles is famous as its own car culture, because of the far-spread geography, but Florida is just as car-centric, as are Seattle and Washington, DC., and even the sprawling Las Vegas strip.   

Quality of life   

In summary, the Pennsylvania’s Advance Health Care Directive (above) features a listing of quality-of-life factors (quality of life being a major measure of wellness in medicine).  Each factor is to be checked only if it is a deal-breaker in end-of-life quality so that the Power of Attorney can see what the patient has determined he/she can’t tolerate.  The list includes: “Not being able to move around and interact with people (such as in a coma)”; “Not being able to think for myself or make my own decisions”; “Living in a nursing home”; “Living in constant severe pain,” or--wait for it-- “Not being able to drive a car.” 

This is in line with other measures of life quality.  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) qualifies inability to drive for medical reasons as a disability if it limits performing a major life activity, such as working or engaging in daily tasks.  For a broad class of jobs (including driving itself), driving is a major life activity.  The largest class of male workers are those employed in driving activities.

The car question is the only item on the list of 13 that is not a medical issue, including “Not being able to live on my own.”  And, in deference to the American bias toward independence, “being able to live on my own” is the last right the aging population is willing to give up, the strong bias being independence, as in "aging in place."  In many cultures, this would be a highly unwanted state of things--being unable to live with relatives would be the non-starter.  For Americans, NOT living alone and not driving to and from that home are the deal-breakers.  But before independent living, independent driving takes first place in defining quality of life.  Even teens of driving age can create a world of their own away from the family home.

In a world increasingly urban and densely populated, and in the face of climate change, the power of the automobile to dictate mobility and housing options is coming under increasing pressure to resolve the issues of cultural values: autonomy and independence.  Already these issues are showing high costs to society as well as the individual.  What eventual solutions can be devised to resolve the pragmatic costs that threaten our embedded beliefs?

* Images from KODA, Pennsylvania Advance Health Care Directive (2024)