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).
