Lateral Thinking for People Who Run Things, With Real Examples

Forty minutes into the meeting, the team is still arguing about which of two suppliers to choose. Both options have been costed twice. Every new argument digs further into the same two answers. Lateral thinking is the habit of stopping at that moment and asking whether the problem has been set up wrong.

The short version: lateral thinking means deliberately changing the starting point of a problem instead of working harder from the one you have. Edward de Bono coined the term in 1967. In practice it is a handful of techniques, such as reversing the problem, borrowing a solution from an unrelated field, or making a deliberately absurd proposal, that force a group out of the answer it keeps returning to.

It is most useful when a team is stuck, and least useful when the team simply needs to execute.

Where the Idea Came From

Edward de Bono was a Maltese doctor and Rhodes Scholar who spent most of his career writing about how people think. He introduced lateral thinking in his 1967 book The Use of Lateral Thinking and went on to write dozens more, including Six Thinking Hats in 1985, which is still used in boardrooms. His obituary from Rhodes House records how widely businesses and schools adopted his methods.

His central image was a hole. Logical thinking, which he called vertical thinking, digs the same hole deeper. It is the right tool when you are digging in the right place. Lateral thinking looks for a different place to dig.

The two work together. Vertical thinking tests and develops an idea step by step. Lateral thinking supplies new ideas to test. Most management training teaches the first and leaves the second to chance.

Lateral Thinking Techniques You Can Run in a Meeting

De Bono described many techniques. Five work well in an ordinary business meeting, with no special training and no props.

Technique	What you do	The question to ask the room
Reversal	Turn the problem upside down	“How would we make this worse?”
Challenge	Question why something is done the current way	“Why do we do it like this at all?”
Random entry	Bring in an unrelated word or object and connect it to the problem	“What does a hotel lobby have to do with our onboarding?”
Provocation	Make a deliberately unreasonable statement and see where it leads	“Suppose customers paid us nothing for the first year”
Borrowing	Find a field that has already solved a similar problem	“Who else has to do this fast and without errors?”

Reversal works because people find it easier to list ways to fail than ways to succeed. Ask how to make customer complaints double, and the room will produce a precise list within minutes. Reverse each item and you have a plan.

Challenge targets the steps nobody questions because they have always been there: the weekly report, the approval layer, the standard contract term. Some survive the question. Some turn out to have no reason left.

Random entry sounds like a party game and works better than it should. The forced connection between an unrelated object and the problem pulls the group away from the ideas it has already rejected.

Provocation was de Bono’s signature. He marked such statements with the word “po”, to show they were not proposals, only stepping stones. The value lies in what the statement leads to, never in the statement itself.

Borrowing is the technique with the best real-world record, as the first example below shows.

Six Thinking Hats, the Version Boardrooms Use

De Bono’s best-known method is a structure for meetings rather than a single technique. Six Thinking Hats asks everyone in the room to think in the same mode at the same time, instead of one person attacking an idea while another defends it.

• White: facts and figures only. What do we know, and what do we need to find out?
• Red: feelings and gut reactions, with no need to justify them.
• Black: caution. What could go wrong, and why might this fail?
• Yellow: benefits. Why could this work, and who gains?
• Green: new ideas and alternatives. This is where the lateral techniques above belong.
• Blue: the process itself. Which hat comes next, and what have we decided?

The value is in the sequencing. Most meetings run the black hat and the yellow hat at once, in a debate between the cautious and the enthusiastic, and the green hat never gets a turn. Giving new ideas their own protected ten minutes, before anyone criticises them, is often enough to break a deadlock.

A chair who uses the hats openly can also cut short a person who keeps returning to objections: “We will get to the black hat next. Right now we are in green.”

Real Examples of Lateral Thinking

A hospital learned from a pit crew. Surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London were worried about the handover of children from heart surgery to intensive care, a crowded few minutes in which equipment, information and responsibility all move at once. They noticed that a Formula 1 pit stop solves a similar problem in seconds, and they worked with Ferrari’s team to study it. The redesigned handover gave every person one defined job and a fixed sequence. When the results were published in 2007, the team reported fewer technical errors and fewer missed pieces of information during handovers.

A weak glue found its job. In 1968, 3M scientist Spencer Silver developed an adhesive that stuck lightly and peeled off cleanly, which was not what anyone had asked for. Years later his colleague Art Fry used it to keep bookmarks in place in his church hymnal. The product that followed, the Post-it Note, went on national sale in 1980. Nothing about the glue changed. The question changed, from “what is this for” to “where would weak be an advantage”.

A pair of scissors started a company. Sara Blakely wanted the smoothing effect of control-top pantyhose under white trousers, without the feet. She cut them off. That small reversal of what pantyhose are supposed to be became Spanx.

The same moves work on ordinary problems. When an employer says the salary budget is fixed, the lateral move is to negotiate what is not fixed: a sign-on bonus, an earlier review, a better title. Our guide on how to negotiate salary walks through it. A career change works the same way: instead of starting from zero, you ask which parts of your experience already belong in the new field, which is why our guide to online courses for career change starts from the job ads and works backwards. Even packing has a lateral answer. When a suit and shirts share one bag, the bundle method stops folding them flat and wraps everything around a soft core instead; it is in our guide on how to fold a business shirt for travel.

Running a Lateral Thinking Session

Keep it short and give it a clear edge. Twenty minutes is enough.

1. State the problem in one sentence. Write it where everyone can see it. Half of stuck meetings are stuck because the group is solving slightly different problems.

2. Pick one technique. Reversal for a process problem, borrowing for a speed or quality problem, provocation when every idea in the room sounds the same.

3. Separate generating from judging. For ten minutes, nobody evaluates anything. The judging comes after, and it is the vertical thinking de Bono said was still essential.

4. Choose with a method. New options are only useful if the team can then pick one. A structured decision making process turns a long list into a decision without reopening the argument.

Most good ideas, though, arrive outside meetings: on a walk, in the shower, early before anyone else is up. An unhurried hour at the start of the day is a reliable source of them, which is one reason our guide on how to become a morning person recommends protecting it. So is unscheduled time in general; our piece on productivity hacks argues for keeping a few blocks a week free of meetings for exactly this.

When Lateral Thinking Is the Wrong Tool

Lateral thinking is for problems where the obvious answers have failed or keep colliding. It is a poor fit for problems that already have a known, correct process.

Managing a difficult employee is one of those. A clever reframe does not replace a specific conversation, a clear expectation and a written plan, and inventive shortcuts there tend to create legal and morale problems. Our guide on how to manage difficult employees sets out the straight route.

Compliance, safety and accounting fall in the same group. Creativity belongs in how you design the process, then the process runs as designed.

There is also a cost. Teams that brainstorm every decision become slow and tiring to work in. Use lateral thinking when you are stuck, then return to normal speed.

Questions Readers Ask

What is the difference between lateral thinking and critical thinking? Critical thinking evaluates ideas and arguments. Lateral thinking generates new ones, often by breaking the assumptions critical thinking takes as given. A good team uses both, in that order: lateral first, critical second.

Can lateral thinking be learned? Yes. The techniques are mechanical by design, which was de Bono’s point. Using one technique in one meeting a week builds the habit faster than reading about creativity.

What is a classic lateral thinking puzzle? A man pushes his car to a hotel and tells the owner he is bankrupt. Why? He is playing Monopoly. The puzzle works because the listener assumes a real car and a real hotel, and the answer only appears once that assumption goes.

Change the Starting Point

Lateral thinking is a practical tool for a specific moment: when the meeting has gone round twice and every argument lands on the same two answers. Reverse the problem, borrow from another field, or make one deliberately absurd proposal. Then switch back to careful judgement and choose.