Getting Out of Your Own Way: Lateral Thinking To Solve Product Problems

In 1967 Edward de Bono coined the term “Lateral Thinking”.  Where critical, or vertical, thinking is designed to judge the truth or value of statements and assumptions,  lateral thinking is concerned with the generation of new ideas, of new thoughts, new insights.   Vertical thinking  is about developing the ideas generated through brainstorming or lateral thinking.  Lateral thinking is the way out of the constricting prisons of our current thinking and the way in to innovation and creative solutions to our problems.

Any one in the product development life cycle inevitably gets stuck.   We work day in and day out focused on delivering products that solve a defined problem in the market.  We work to understand our market and make assumptions about it so that we can all ‘get on the same page’ and deliver our solution.

And then something happens:  the market changes.  Maybe a new technology appears, or a new competitor emerges, margins slip, sales cycles lengthen, or production levels fall off.  The team is ready to rally and tackle the new challenge.  The only problem is that they are tackling new problems with old thinking and old understandings.  Solutions often look like doing more of what we’ve always been doing.  We begin at the beginning with vertical thinking and make logical conclusions based on information and data we have.  We propose a plan and go off and do it.  And likely, we will fail.

With vertical thinking, one has to be correct at every step.  We think critically, discard that which doesn’t fit, and pare away everything except the true next step.  Logic demands it.  Mathematics would not function if this wasn’t true.  Lateral thinking though doesn’t work this way.

When brainstorming (a lateral thinking process) solutions for product and market problems try using a lateral thinking techniques to burst open the prison doors and generate innovative, creative solutions.  Two of my favorites:

1.       Provocation
Provocation is designed to shock the mind into thinking differently.  Make deliberately stupid statements in which something we take for granted about the situation is not true.   Let’s explore this statement:  Photographs don’t have to be printed.  Wow.   In 1925 this statement would have seemed stupid, outrageous, and heretical.  And yet….   So make them stupid.  Make them outrageous.  Once a provocative statement has been made, explore the ‘what if it were true’ aspects of that outrageous statement.  Explore consequences, benefits, special circumstances that would make it sensible, what else would be different.

2.       Random Input
Select a random noun from a dictionary or a prepared list of nouns.  Make them concrete (box) rather than fuzzy (intuition) and from a field other than your own.    Consider the problem of providing affordable clean water to people in the developing world.    With the word box, someone trying to solve this problem make come up with the Solar Box Cooker.  For about $5 in supplies (a cardboard box , aluminum foil and a piece of glass), families can build a Solar Box Cooker.  It will boil water without burning trees, without using toxins or chemicals.  It’s affordable, reliable and non-harmful.

Problems are hard to solve when we keep looking at them the same way.   Try implementing some lateral thinking into your next product brainstorming session and see if you can’t provoke an ‘ah ha’ moment that unleashes the creative energy of your team.

To learn more:  

• Creating Minds