A Guide to Understanding and Training Lateral Thinking

Normally, we tend to find solutions through a deductive logical process. We start from what we know, we use familiar associations and from these we draw conclusions. When logic gives us a promising direction, we tend to follow it in order to work out an answer to the problem.

Even though this kind of reasoning is very useful, the solutions it produces are usually limited by the way we see and interpret the reality around us, because of the very nature of the deductive process they come from.

And when the most obvious answers fail, it can be a good moment to try applying lateral thinking.

Thinking is like a river

When we face a problem, our thinking tends to follow an already established path, like the flow of a river. We rely on assumptions based on our previous experience, without even realising it, and we automatically sense which solutions seem the most natural and sensible to us.

When we find a path that looks promising, we tend to develop and refine it for the specific problem we have in our hands. The more used to a certain type of problem we are, the more we will rely on predetermined routes.

Obviously, like everything that happens in our brain, the reason for this is a cognitive advantage: our brain is lazy (we also talked about this in this article) and following an already known pattern helps us draw conclusions more quickly. This is comparable to walking through a field of tall grass where the grass that has already been trodden down guides us to our destination.

The shortest path is not always the best one

On the other hand, resorting to so-called vertical thinking also entails less exploration: the solutions we arrive at are more or less always the same, or at least similar to one another.

This means that this thinking pattern is unlikely to produce innovative ideas. Our thinking is in fact caged in preconceptions, in the associations that come spontaneously to us, and it is unable to explore new horizons.

But what is worse is that when the obvious solutions turn out to be ineffective, without a new direction our problems remain unsolved.

What lateral thinking is

Even if you are not familiar with the concept, you have certainly found yourself solving problems that require lateral thinking, such as the one about the man who marries twenty women. But it is not for the ability to solve riddles that we are interested in exploring lateral thinking.

Its real usefulness, especially for tech companies, can be convincing users to complete onboarding, increasing the number of active users, collecting feedback on a specific feature… All these problems have standard solutions, but when those fail there is nothing left to do but find alternative paths.

Lateral thinking is the opposite of vertical thinking because it is based on the idea of looking at the problem from different angles, setting aside what appears to be the only possible solution and finding insights that do not follow the rigid logical scheme (or the course of the river, to keep to our earlier metaphor).

So, rather than limiting ourselves to improving a “potentially good” solution, lateral thinking leads us to ask whether there is a completely different way of solving the problem.

Why lateral thinking is difficult to use

By its very nature, lateral thinking is not spontaneous. Deliberately stepping outside the patterns of vertical thinking takes practice. After all, who as a child has never played “hot and cold”; adopting lateral thinking is like deliberately choosing to head further and further towards the “cold”.

Fortunately, there are ways to train the ability to find these alternative solutions. It is worth putting them into practice in order to be able to face, with an open mind, new or particularly complex situations that may arise in our future.

How to train lateral thinking: 3 exercises

How do you get better at coming up with innovative solutions to problems? The answer is that there are specific exercises that help make choosing an alternative path more natural.

Here we propose three of them, which can be carried out alone or in a group. One fundamental rule is common to all these exercises: it is essential to suspend judgement. When it comes to lateral thinking, no idea is a bad idea. The aim, in fact, is precisely to move as far away as possible from the most beaten path.

The alternative uses exercise

The exercise involves choosing an everyday object and coming up with uses for it other than the one it is normally associated with.

Why it works. Being forced to stop associating every object with its usual function makes you reason about its characteristics, such as shape, texture and size.

The random word exercise

For this exercise you need a problem you want to solve. You then choose a random word that has no connection with it. The aim is to make associations starting from the random word and arrive at a solution to the problem.

Why it works. Choosing a random word forces our mind to make unnatural associations between ideas that are distant from one another. Introducing into the discussion concepts that we probably would not have come across otherwise can open up new directions.

The challenging assumptions exercise

Here too we start from a problem. You begin by listing all the assumptions taken for granted in the process under examination. Then, forcibly, one of them is removed and you think of an alternative way of reaching the same result.

Why it works. It helps to distinguish the necessary constraints from those that are merely mental limits. Many innovative solutions become possible precisely when certain features we consider “mandatory” are instead taken out of the equation.

Do you know any other exercises for training lateral thinking? If you would like to know more or would like to organise a workshop on the subject, don’t hesitate to contact us!