What if the key to breakthrough thinking lies in doing the opposite of what we usually do? Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step introduces a revolutionary approach to problem-solving that challenges our conventional thought patterns. Instead of following predictable logical sequences, lateral thinking encourages us to explore unexpected connections, embrace temporary confusion, and generate multiple possibilities before settling on solutions.
Continue reading to get an overview of this groundbreaking book and discover how shifting your mental approach can give you access to creative insights you never knew were possible.
Overview of Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking
For centuries, logical and analytical thinking has been the cornerstone of problem-solving methodology. While this has led to remarkable achievements in science, mathematics, and technology, it sometimes fails to address challenges that require creative breakthroughs or novel solutions. Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step (1970) shows us how to move beyond the limitations of traditional “vertical” thinking to embrace more creative and unconventional thought patterns. De Bono presents lateral thinking, not as a replacement for logical thinking, but as a complementary tool that enables us to view problems from new perspectives.
De Bono (1933-2021) was a Maltese physician and scholar with advanced degrees in medicine, psychology, and physiology. He worked at multiple universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Malta, and Dublin City University. He wrote 70 books, including The Use of Lateral Thinking (in which he coined the term “lateral thinking”), The Mechanism of Mind, Six Thinking Hats, I Am Right, You Are Wrong, and Teach Your Child How to Think. In 2005, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics.
In our overview of the book Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, we’ll explain de Bono’s concept of lateral thinking, contrast it with vertical thinking, and describe how the mind’s style of processing information lends itself to lateral thinking. We’ll also discuss practices for promoting lateral thinking and share some structured exercises for teachers to use in the classroom.
What Is Lateral Thinking?
To understand lateral thinking, we first need to define vertical thinking. De Bono explains that vertical thinking is a logical, step-by-step process of reasoning based on established patterns of thought. It’s focused on a specific objective—something to be “figured out”—and concerned with finding the best or most correct option. In contrast, lateral thinking is an exploratory process that challenges established patterns of thought and focuses on coming up with many ideas, even after finding a workable solution.
In vertical thinking, each step must follow logically from the previous one, and each step must be correct. Lateral thinking, however, can jump to a potential solution and then work backward to fill in the gaps. It allows for temporary incorrectness as long as the final result is valid. Lateral thinking is particularly useful for coming up with new ideas and solving problems that require you to challenge existing assumptions or functional-but-not-ideal solutions (as opposed to problems that simply require more information, for which vertical thinking is better suited).
Lateral thinking lets you avoid inflexible thinking or being dismissive toward alternate ways of thinking. However, de Bono emphasizes that vertical thinking and lateral thinking aren’t at odds with each other. Rather, the two styles work together: Lateral thinking produces new approaches while vertical thinking develops them. This complementary relationship makes both styles necessary for effective thinking and problem-solving.
Judgment in Vertical and Lateral Thinking
De Bono explains that an integral part of vertical thinking is evaluating ideas as they come up. Because vertical thinking can only proceed if each step is correct, the process must include judging correctness for each of those steps. This is so you can dismiss and remove incorrect ideas from the thinking process. In this way, de Bono argues, vertical thinking is about rejecting ideas.
However, judging and dismissing ideas in this way leads to two problems: First, you prevent yourself from using some ideas in your reasoning. Second, this presupposes that you have ideas in the first place. This is where lateral thinking comes in: While vertical thinking demands correctness at every step, lateral thinking is about producing ideas and allows for being temporarily wrong as long as the end result is effective.
A Note on Teaching Students How to Think
De Bono explains that schools tend to place a heavy emphasis on vertical thinking and fail to adequately teach students how to think laterally. Students are taught that their reasoning must always be correct, which prevents them from practicing lateral thinking. He recommends that teachers devote class time to teaching lateral thinking, suggesting that a dedicated hour once per week would be sufficient to instill this practice in students. Later in the guide, we’ll describe some ways to practice lateral thinking, as well as specific exercises that teachers can use for students of all ages.
How the Mind Processes Information
We’ve defined lateral thinking and explained how it differs from vertical thinking. Next we’ll look at how the brain creates patterns from information and how lateral thinking plays into that process.
De Bono explains that the human mind operates by generating and identifying patterns. It does this by creating recurring series of activity between neurons in the brain. While some patterns are innate (such as instincts), the mind’s most important capability is creating patterns. These patterns, whether right or wrong, become the basis for recognizing and responding to situations, allowing us to quickly receive and react to stimuli in our environment. For example, if an ancient human heard the sound of a rattlesnake just before encountering one, their brain would form a connection between that sound and the dangerous animal. The next time they heard the rattle, their brain would quickly tap into that pattern and alert them to the danger.
The more a pattern is used or activated, the more likely the brain is to continue to use it. This makes the system efficient, but it also makes it resistant to change. The purpose of lateral thinking is to challenge this system, prompting you to reconsider or revise these patterns, giving way to novel ideas that would otherwise be constrained by your ingrained ways of thinking.
The Role of Sequence in Pattern-Making
Because the brain arranges information as it comes in, explains de Bono, the patterns the brain forms depend heavily on the order in which it receives information. This means that it can become difficult to rearrange old information that’s been formed into patterns even as new information flows in. Using our example of the human encountering a rattlesnake, that person’s mental association between the rattling sound and the sense of danger would persist even if they began hearing the sound in a safe context where no snakes were present. It would take numerous exposures to the sound in this context before the pattern in their mind changed.
How Patterns Can Hinder Thinking
While the patterns our brain forms can serve us well as mental shortcuts, de Bono writes that they can also impede our ability to think creatively and solve problems. One reason for this is that once we form a pattern that’s functional, we continue to rely on that pattern even if it’s not the most optimal one. For example, you might have learned to type with just your index fingers, and over time this became an ingrained pattern. You’d likely continue to use this method as long as it accomplished the desired task. Moreover, if you had never seen anyone else type with all ten fingers and weren’t aware there was such a method, it might never occur to you that there’s a more efficient way of typing.
Labeling
In addition to relying on suboptimal but functional patterns, the mind creates labels for ideas, a tendency that’s useful for communication and comprehension but can hold back thinking. This is because labels become permanent, which prevents us from thinking about them in new ways.
For example, imagine you applied the label “musical instruments” to “objects that make melodies when strummed, plucked, bowed, or blown into.” While this covers a large portion of musical instruments, it leaves out percussive instruments, which make sounds by striking and don’t always produce melodies. If you were then tasked with inventing a new instrument, you’d be missing out on many potential innovations because of the constraints of your label. Imagine a world with no drums! It may be much quieter, but it would also be more boring.
Binaries
The mind also tends to create binaries out of information, sorting ideas into categories with little overlap or nuance between them. If we take in information that should create a new pattern, but that new pattern resembles an already existing pattern, we’re more likely to distort this new information to make it fit our old pattern than to let it create a new one. If there are two such existing patterns that appear to be opposites in any way, then our minds reshape this new information to fit into one of those categories. This allows us to quickly categorize new information so we know how to react to it (the same way we react to everything else in the matching category), but this can also lead us to manipulate and misrepresent information.
To illustrate this, imagine you’re sorting animal pictures into two piles: one for mammals and one for reptiles. You come across a picture of a bird, and without a third category, you have to classify it as either a mammal or a reptile. If you place it in the reptile pile, you’ve made the determination that birds are the same as reptiles, which preserves the patterns of the categorization system but conflicts with reality.
The purpose of lateral thinking is to challenge these patterns so information can be restructured to create more optimal or less limiting ideas. Next, we’ll look at some specific ways you can practice lateral thinking and turn it into a habit.
How to Practice Lateral Thinking
According to de Bono, lateral thinking is both an attitude and a skill that can be cultivated and practiced. The core tenet of lateral thinking is recognizing that any single view of something is only one of many potential views. The purpose of lateral thinking is to seek out these alternative ideas by considering different arrangements of existing information.
De Bono explains that understanding the concepts and purpose of lateral thinking is essential to making use of it. In addition, you can deliberately employ specific techniques to prompt you to restructure information. These can help you develop the habit of lateral thinking in general, and they can also help in specific cases to get your mind started on complex problems while breaking free from patterns that may hold you back. We’ll cover some of those techniques next.
Technique 1: Idea Generation
The first technique for practicing lateral thinking that de Bono describes is idea generation. Lateral thinking aims to produce as many ideas as possible rather than finding the best one, continues to generate options even after finding promising approaches, and considers even unreasonable ideas. This is because any idea, regardless of its correctness, can lead to new and better ideas. Practicing idea generation helps you cultivate cognitive flexibility, understand that there are always other options, and turn pattern-restructuring into a habit.
Using Quotas
To make idea generation a habit, de Bono recommends using quotas: Set a specific number of ideas you want to come up with before you begin. Setting this quota beforehand forces you to continue producing ideas even after finding an apparently good solution, and it requires you to make an effort to find ideas rather than just waiting for them to present themselves. This prevents you from getting stuck on the first promising idea.
Exercises to Teach Idea Generation
De Bono provides many structured exercises for teaching lateral thinking to students. We’ll highlight and briefly describe some of these throughout this section. As a reminder, make sure you don’t evaluate students’ ideas as they come up. If they don’t seem to make sense, ask the students to explain them, but avoid labeling them as incorrect.
1) Describe a geometric figure: Present students with a shape and ask them to come up with as many ways of describing it as possible. For example, the image of a hexagon might elicit the following descriptions:
- A six-sided shape
- A square with the four corners cut off
- A cube with the front edges not shown
- A combination of four triangles
- A cell in a beehive structure
- A silhouette of a 20-sided die
2) Story interpretation: Present students with a brief story, such as one from a newspaper article or a classroom text. Have the students come up with different interpretations of the characters’ perspectives or the meaning of the story. You can also have them take a positive description from the story and change the emphasis to make it a negative one.
3) Problem description and solving: Present students with a problem, such as a conflict in a story or a problem they’re familiar with (like overcrowded school buses). Have the students state the problem in as many different ways as possible. As an added exercise, have them generate as many different solutions as possible.
Technique 2: Challenging Established Patterns
Another way to practice lateral thinking is to challenge the patterns that we assume to be true in our thinking processes. De Bono explains that people often accept foundational ideas as valid before trying to arrange them into new patterns. However, these fundamental ideas are also patterns that warrant reexamination.
We must take many things for granted to function in daily life, writes de Bono. Our assumptions serve a purpose in pattern-making reasoning, which is to create boundaries for problem-solving. Boundaries and assumptions make it easier to reason through a problem, as they leave us with fewer factors to consider. For example, if you were trying to train yourself to be a faster runner using a treadmill, you’d likely assume that the speed sensor and clock on your treadmill are correct. Without that assumption, the boundaries for how you’ll measure your progress would become useless, and you’d have to spend time and energy finding a different way to measure them.
However, as mentioned earlier, there are flaws in our pattern-making processes that prevent us from making optimal use of the information we receive (such as how much we rely on the sequence in which information arrives and how hard we find it to change frequently used thought patterns). These flaws lead to incorrect assumptions, and incorrect assumptions can make a problem unsolvable.
De Bono explains that most assumptions exist because they’ve historically been accepted as true, not because they’ve been thoroughly examined and restructured over time. Challenging these patterns isn’t about proving them wrong or even suggesting better patterns. Rather, it’s about examining them, identifying the ideas underlying them, and considering how all of those ideas could be rearranged to form different patterns.
Asking Why
To challenge established patterns, de Bono recommends repeatedly asking why each piece of information is considered true. For each answer, ask “Why?” again. At no point should you simply say, “Because it’s true,” no matter how obvious the idea seems. While it may not be possible to question every facet of every assumption you make, exercises like this can train you to examine assumptions in your reasoning instead of blindly accepting them as true.
For example, you may begin with the statement, “Birds have wings.” Asking “Why?” might elicit responses like “So they can fly,” “Because they evolved that way,” and “Because they don’t have arms.” In response to these questions, you can ask “Why do wings help birds fly?”; “Why did they evolve that way instead of some other way?”; and “Why don’t they have arms?” Each of these questions leads to further “why” questions, all aimed at the core objective of questioning why your current understanding is what it is.
Technique 3: Thinking in Reverse
Another method de Bono describes for practicing lateral thinking is to think about things in reverse: Take a thought process and reframe it in different directions—whether that be backwards, from the inside out, or upside down. This can create unique arrangements of information, and it can also help you get started on an open-ended problem, especially those requiring a lot of creativity. The goal is to break free from the standard way of viewing a situation, conquer the fear of being wrong, and create provocative rearrangements of information that might lead to new insights.
For example, you may start with the following assumption: The legal system uses policing to fight crime. You could reverse it as follows: Police use the legal system to fight crime; crime fights police; crime creates police; police create crime through the legal system; the legal system creates crime for police to fight; and many more variations. While some of these may be absurd, they can still help you understand and restructure the patterns of thought that underlie the initial statement, and one of these new patterns may prove useful in solving a problem.
Exercises to Teach Thinking in Reverse
Consider using the following exercises to teach students how to think in reverse.
1) Reversing stories and problems: Present students with a story or problem and have them reframe it in reverse. For example, the classic story trope of “The knight saves the princess from the dragon” could be reversed as “The dragon protects the princess from the knight,” “The princess saves the knight from the dragon,” “The princess lures the knight to fight her dragon,” “The knight abducts the princess from her friend the dragon,” and more. Have your whole class discuss these reversals and highlight particularly inventive reframings.
2) Follow through on reversals: Present students with situations and their reversals, and have them carry the reversal through to its logical conclusion. For example, using the earlier example about police, you may take the reversal “the legal system creates crime for police to fight” and have students list what ideas this could lead to. They may come up with things like reducing the stringency of laws, reducing police quotas, creating other tasks for police to do besides fighting crime, and so on.
Technique 4: Shifting Your Attention
Similar to the practice of thinking in reverse, de Bono also suggests that you can change your thinking patterns by focusing on different pieces of information or approaching the situation from a different angle. As explained earlier, the patterns our brains create from new information depend heavily on the sequence in which we take in that information. The patterns we use repeatedly also become dominant, so we tend to approach problems from the same familiar starting point. This means we’re often not using the information in the best way possible. To counteract this, try shifting your attention to parts of the problem that you may have overlooked or starting your reasoning from a different place than you did initially.
For example, if you’re learning about a conflict in another country, your standard approach might be to research the event that triggered the conflict, what each side says they’re fighting for, and how it impacts people today. However, to understand the situation more comprehensively, you’ll need to direct your attention to what was going on before the triggering event: Who was in power leading up to the event? What were their objectives and motivations? How did they convince others to follow them? Additionally, you may have started your reasoning from the belief that side A was in the right, but you can challenge your thinking if you approach it instead from the belief that side B was in the right or that both sides were equally right or wrong.
De Bono emphasizes that attention is a passive activity that needs active direction. He suggests several methods for managing attention, including intentionally redirecting your attention from what stands out naturally. You can also write down all the aspects of your topic and then pay special attention to each aspect one by one. He stresses the importance of considering seemingly meaningless aspects, since the properties we perceive aren’t objective reality but instead exist in our perspectives and mental patterns.
For example, if you’re a parent trying to help your child with anxiety about school, they might tell you that there’s too much homework, they don’t like how another child is treating them, and they feel uncomfortable during gym class. You initially assume that “uncomfortable” is the same as “anxious” and so ignore that detail. However, if you consider it more closely, you might learn that they’re referring to physical discomfort because they’re having trouble breathing during gym class. Exploring this further, you eventually discover that they have asthma, and that this ailment is worsening their anxiety. You’ve uncovered a problem (and thus, a potential solution) that you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t paid special attention to each detail.
Exercises to Teach Attention Shifting
Use the following exercises to teach attention shifting:
1) Find missing information in a story: Present students with a brief story and have them identify what information is missing. For example, consider the classic children’s rhyme about Humpty Dumpty: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Students may note the following omissions: Why was Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall? Was he supposed to be there? Why does it matter that he fell? Why were the king’s horses and men trying to put him back together? This trains students to pay attention to things they might otherwise take for granted.
2) Find missing information in a picture: Give one student a photograph and have them describe it to the whole class. Based on the description, the other students draw what they think the image looks like. The details in the photograph that don’t make it into any of the students’ drawings will show what details the describer didn’t pay attention to.
3) Solving a mystery: Present students with a mystery story that has enough clues to be solvable, but not enough to be obvious. Have the students try to solve the mystery. Then have them write their own mystery stories with the same guidelines; read those in front of the class and have everyone try to solve the mystery. This helps students notice how paying attention to some clues over others can aid or hinder their thinking process.
Technique 5: Using Analogies
De Bono explains that an analogy is a concrete, familiar idea or story that serves as a comparison for another idea. It features some type of change, relationship, or activity that can be applied to something else. You can create an analogy for something you’re thinking about, advance the analogy to its conclusion, and then compare it to the topic you started with. The analogy doesn’t have to fit perfectly; in fact, imperfect analogies can be more valuable because the challenge of connecting them to the problem can generate new insights.
For example, say you’re a manager struggling to get your team to work together on an important project. You analogize your situation to an orchestra that can’t get their starting note right. As you follow through on the analogy, you imagine the conductor investigating by looking at the musicians’ sheet music—they find that there’s an error on some of the sheets that instructs the musicians to play at the wrong time. Returning to your own situation, you may consider that you’ve miscommunicated your expectations for what each person should be doing (even though it’s not a perfect analogy). Clarifying your expectations may then solve your problem.
De Bono distinguishes between using analogies for lateral thinking versus using them for argumentation. In argumentation, the goal of an analogy is to demonstrate that an occurrence or phenomenon in the analogy is reflected in the situation it’s being compared to—for example, because A led to B in the analogy, A (or whatever it represents) must also lead to B (or what it represents) in the real situation. However, in lateral thinking, analogies serve as idea generators rather than proof mechanisms: The goal isn’t to prove a similarity between the analogy and the situation, but instead to provoke new perspectives on the problem.
Technique 6: Random Stimulation
De Bono also recommends using random stimulation to encourage lateral thinking. This involves intentionally bringing in other ideas or information to provoke new ones. This practice is distinct from vertical thinking: While vertical thinking focuses on selecting only pertinent information, random stimulation deliberately incorporates irrelevant information to spark new patterns of thought. Random stimulation works because of the brain’s pattern-making processes. When you hold two different pieces of information in your mind at once, the brain naturally works to form associations between them, which can alter or even completely restructure its existing patterns.
De Bono writes that there are many ways to provide your brain with random inputs to spur lateral thinking. You can deliberately expose yourself to others’ ideas through brainstorming, or you can explore subjects unrelated to your topic (often referred to as “cross-disciplinary fertilization”).
De Bono says another way you can access random stimulation is to put yourself in environments that provide random inputs, such as a museum or a fair. It’s important not to go into these environments with the intention of looking for or finding anything in particular, as that predisposes you to a fixed idea of what’s pertinent and can make you overlook useful stimuli. Instead, let your attention wander and don’t dismiss anything as useless.
However, since our brains naturally look for relevant information, these techniques won’t produce truly random inputs. While it may seem counterintuitive, to access true randomness, you’ll need a more structured approach. One method is to take in random inputs from sources like dictionaries or encyclopedias: Simply open to a random page and choose the first word or entry you see. Alternatively, you can roll some dice and choose the entry that corresponds to the number you roll (for example, if you roll a five, open a reference book to a random page and choose the fifth entry).
For example, a thought process relating the problem of “how to increase worldwide literacy rates” with the random word “bell” might look like this: “bell–Belle–fairy tales–storybooks.” This could lead to the idea for a program that distributes storybooks for free in areas with lower literacy rates. Another possible sequence would be: “bell–ring–band–party–celebration.” This could suggest that seeking ways to celebrate literacy across cultures might help propagate it. As with all lateral thinking practices, most associations probably won’t lead to a solution to the problem, but they’ll still provide helpful stimulation for challenging your mental patterns.
Exercises to Teach Random Stimulation
Here are some exercises for teaching random stimulation. You may have to choose inputs deliberately for the sake of instruction, but they will still serve as random stimulation for the students.
1) Relating problems to a random word: Present students with an open-ended problem and a random word from the dictionary. Students then suggest different ways to connect the random word to the problem. Have them succinctly explain the connection.
2) Relating problems to a random object: Present students with an open-ended problem, then assign them a random object. As with the previous exercise, have the students suggest ways to connect the object to the problem, concisely explaining their reasoning.
