Edward DeBono And His Concept Of Lateral Thinking
Edward DeBono was Maltese physician and psychologist, who most notedly coined the term “Lateral Thinking”. Lateral thinking is a concept described as problem solving through a creative approach that is not the obvious/direct method that may come up in your thinking. This can be broken down more into creative and out of the box thinking that takes the parts of information we know and formulating them into something new that may not have been seen before.
For example, a coffee table, in nature, is something that you use to store items or place items on top of, and a bottle opener is strictly used to open tops of beverages that cannot be opened with strictly force. If you were to use the table, in a way that it was not intended to (opening the bottle), by exerting force onto the top of your bottle onto the side of the table, you would be able to get the cap off. This would be a way of lateral thinking that the individuals who made the coffee table did not intend for it to be used. When we look at problem solving, DeBono speaks about how when defining a problem, it is important to think laterally so that we can discover alternatives and looking at responses in a more broader sense. We can also take that perspective when we are meeting new people and not leaning into stereotypes. If we were to jump to conclusions when first meeting people based on clichés, then we would be thinking too direct and too vertically, whereas we want to see the bigger picture within somebody, laterally.
One of DeBono’s most renowned works is titled “The Mechanism of the Mind” where he describes how neurons work together with input stimuli to create the understanding of how we think. This provides the reader with concepts that canhelp open up their eyes about how we go about thinking and how we can use lateral thinking to open up the larger sections of our brain capacity that we do not use on a daily basis. His most popular work, “Six Thinking Hats”, are broken up into six directions that are broken up into colors; Managing (blue), Information (white), emotions (red), discernment (black), optimistic response (yellow) and creativity (green). These six hats are represented as metaphors and when you decide to go a certain direction and they can only be used for a certain period of time. An interesting point of view that DeBono brings up is that when starting sequences of thought, people always begin with the blue hat, that represents managing certain things, people, and ideas. With this knowledge you can break down every hat into what you can do when making decisions as a manager. Starting with the blue hat, you assess the control limits that you will be dealing with, which is usually worn by higher level executives. With your white hatyou use it to analyze on available data, see what you are missing and account for that. With the red hat, you use your emotions to see what your gut is telling you is incorrect.
The black hat is used to look at the negatives, or the possible downfalls that could derail your plans. Moving onto the yellow hat, that is the opposite of our black hat. We use it to look at all the optimistic ideas that come from the decisions you make. Lastly we look at the green hat, which is used to establish our creativity. It is where our freewill and free thinking takes place. The biggest thing to realize is that upper management, who use the blue hat most of the time, can be asked to use different “hat thinking” to get past obstacles that may present themselves midway through our thinking process. DeBono laid the groundwork on how we go about brainstorming and thinking in today’s society, now that we are more a proactive community, and we have to be willing and able to think more laterally to experiment with new ideologies that may create the next big thing.
