Sideways Intelligence: Lateral thinking

 

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“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).