Lateral thinking
THE classic work about improving creativity from world-renowned writer and philosopher Edward de Bono. In schools we are taught to meet problems head-on: what Edward de Bono calls 'vertical thinking'. This works well in simple situations - but we are at a loss when this approach fails. What then? Lateral thinking is all about freeing up your imagination. Through a series of special techniques, in groups or working alone, Edward de Bono shows how to stimulate the mind in new and exciting ways. Soon you will be looking at problems from a variety of angles and offering up solutions that are as ingenious as they are effective. You will become much more productive and a formidable thinker in your own right. 'If more bankers and traders had read Lateral Thinking and applied the ideas of Edward de Bono to their own narrow definitions of risk, reward and human expectations, I suspect we would be in much better shape than we are'Sir Richard Branson Edward de Bono invented the concept of lateral thinking. A world-renowned writer and philosopher, he is the leading authority in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. Dr de Bono has written more than 60 books, in 40 languages, with people now teaching his methods worldwide. He has chaired a special summit of Nobel Prize laureates, and been hailed as one of the 250 people who have contributed most to mankind.
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What Hacker News says
- Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono
- Totally agree with the sentiment of this post. My crazy pile is named “My Half-Bakery”.
I revisit it often to refine and ponder and/or add. It has helped inspire patents and given me insights in connecting things that otherwise would nag me to a point of being distracted. I’ve found the “Lateral Thinking” ideation approach championed by Edward De Bono [0] helpful as a tool to realize disconnected concepts that nag me as related in someway means their is something interesting there. While not always obvious, after entering the vague thought it gives me a mystery to solve as to “why do I sense a relationship there”. Many times that eventually leads to an “aha” and then validation that it feels so obvious now in retrospect. Those moments are rare but exhilarating when they happen.
- While the article is making some good points, I don't agree with the overall article or its conclusions. A lot of the arguments in the article made against brainstorming are what I would consider implementation failures.
The corollary to Production Blocking occurs when a person realizes that the supposedly crazy idea that they were holding on to themselves for fear of being judged is not as crazy as they thought it is when they hear another person in the room say the same thing. It might even build allies and consensus leading to offline collaboration outside of the brainstorming context.
Evaluation Apprehension is a real concern. If a brainstorming session is run well, the facilitator would have established the ground rules (no interruptions, no judgments etc.,) and would quickly bring any conflicting behavior to an end.
The most important benefit of brainstorming, imo, is the fact that introverts are not drowned out by extroverts or junior team members being overruled on the spot by experienced people. This is not a bug, it is a feature.
In many scenarios, the person who comes up with the idea is not the same one who implements it. For eg: an end user of a system, a software engineer, a product manager etc., Having a diverse group where individuals play different roles tends to bring out differing perspectives. If you can't bring them out in the open in the early stages of idea generation, you are clearly missing out.
Edward de Bono, the person who coined the term Lateral Thinking has developed a lot of tools for creative thinking. His book, Serious Creativity changed my mindset and taught me that creativity, the kind we use every day as opposed to artistic creativity like painting/acting etc., is something that one can practice everyday and get better at. One such method / tool that he developed is Six Thinking Hats. In the book, he goes on to explain that the underlying cause of perceived lack of psychological safety is the human brain's ability to get into conflicting thinking modes for eg: when one person is in creative mode, another person is in evaluation mode or what de Bono calls as Green Hat and Black Hat respectively. Much of his work in Six Thinking Hats is around getting the entire group in the same thinking mode, what de Bono calls as Parallel Thinking. Here's a nice video of him explaining some of the thinking processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbsKQQGwsMg
Recognizing this (different thinking modes) is key to having a productive group brainstorm and avoiding pitfalls.
- + 100.
the idea that sustained practice till you become fluent in the use of specific mental models is missing in much of the literature.
Just like learning any other skillset, using mental models effectively takes a lot of work.
This is often the missing key to effective use. It is one thing to read about a mental model (say Donella Meadows's systems thinking), and be able to recall the material from memory and quote it and so on. It is quite another to be able to apply that model (here systems thinking) to real life situations and get useful results.
I know many people who can quote chapter and verse of literature about mental models, but their thinking remains confused and ad hoc when it comes to dealing with real life problems.
To practice, one can also apply mental models to case studies/situations from the past and compare to the outcome predicted by the model and the actual outcome.(To be fair, there is a risk of making mental models fit the known outcome here, so one has to be aware of that)
EDIT: (not the same as mental models, but since someone mentioned ARIZ/TRIZ above) Edward De Bono's "Serious Creativity" and "Lateral Thinking for Management" (yes terrible title) are full of thinking tools that can be practiced systematically. Most of his books are repetitive and have varying ratios of fluff to core material, but these two together have most of his useful ideas.
- lateral thinking - edward de bono http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/829616.Lateral_Thinking
- If it’s all about thinking then being restricted by the vocabulary of your language[s] might be a limitation. As a bilingual, a common question from friends in primary school was what language I was thinking in. My answer was I don’t think words, I think images. I later read Edward de Bono Lateral Thinking. I might be out of context here but I thought someone might be interested in the book.
