Lateral Thinking - Journaling Tool
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at
things in a different way.” – Edward De Bono
Edward de Bono popularised lateral thinking. Lateral thinking uses systematic
techniques to seed and stimulate creativity.
The steps for lateral thinking are:
- Pose your question or define the situation you wish to address.
- Use a SEED or different perspective or what he calls a ‘PO’ for Provocative
Operations. Examples are POssibilities, opPOsites or supPOsitions.
- Be willing to move, to explore new ways (without judging) of how the SEED
triggers thoughts about the question or situation. Let the movement occur
naturally and have fun with it.
EXERCISES
Identify a problem you want to resolve. Now play with using the following
lateral thinking techniques and approaches to seed your thoughts and stimulate
new solutions to your problem:
Getting started:
- Pick words at random out of a dictionary to trigger new ideas.
- Set up new parameters. Enhance or restrict concepts, challenge assumptions,
break rules, e.g., a railway company raising its vision from only railways to
transportation.
Go deeper:
- Reversals - Collect ideas and then reverse them, e.g., How could I really ruin
a relationship?
Reach higher:
- Future perfect – What would a perfect scenario relative to your question or
situation look like? (eg. Immediate results, no pain, lots of fun, no effort)
- If God were your personal advisor or on the Board of Directors for your
company, what would God say?
“When patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.”
– Tuli Kupferberg
Go back and check out our other 50 Journaling Tools.
