Mention the subject of creativity, or the task of coming up with ideas, and many people think of ‘lateral thinking’ as the route to being creative. It has almost become a generic description for a different way of looking at a problem: ‘What we need is some lateral thinking on this’. While it is an important element, it is essential that practitioners should understand its proper meaning, role and context in creativity. Convergent thinking believes that the mind’s natural processes are ordered and logical; creativity, in contrast, is haphazard and illogical. It considers rationality and creativity to be different mental processes that are generally in conflict. Most problems are not new – the challenge is to view the problem in a new way.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines lateral thinking as: ‘Seeking to solve problems by unorthodox or apparently illogical methods’. It was a concept defined by Edward de Bono in his book, The Use of Lateral Thinking (de Bono, 1990). In essence there are two modes of thinking, he says: the vertical mode and the lateral mode (identified in the previous section as Red and Green Light thinking). 

Vertical thinking looks for what is right. It maintains that one thing must follow directly from another, concentrates on relevance and moves in the most likely direction. Lateral thinking changes: it looks for what is different, makes deliberate jumps, welcomes chance intrusions and explores the least likely possibilities. This may best be explained by the analogy of digging holes looking for treasure: vertical thinking makes a hole bigger, while lateral thinking leads you to dig a series of new holes in different locations.

Lateral thinking is about moving sideways when working on a problem, by trying different perceptions, different concepts and different points of entry. The term ‘lateral thinking’ can be used in two ways: as a specific set of systematic techniques used for changing concepts or perceptions, and for generating new ones; or it can be defined as exploring multiple possibilities and options instead of pursuing a single approach. 

In the analogy of our buried treasure, if you had an accurate map showing its precise location then the obvious strategy is to dig vertically. However, if there are few sources of reference to guide you, then a strategy of many holes in different locations may yield the treasure you seek. 

Lateral thinking is not the same as, or the sum of, creative thinking. It harnesses techniques that can be used in order to come up with a new idea. Although some writers take de Bono to task, arguing that his concept is in fact centuries old, he at least deserves credit in the way he has helped to popularize and promote the use of creative thinking techniques. Where lateral thinking and creative thinking part company is that true creativity is not the process of thinking of, for example, a hundred uses of a brick. Rather, it uses both Green and Red Light thinking to solve new problems by creating and acting upon ideas that offer added value to a task.