Lateral Thinking for Every Day summary

Now that you understand why lateral thinking matters, how do you actually practice it? Four key approaches can reshape how you solve problems.

The first approach is to contemplate the opposite. When progress seems stalled, the obvious move is to tweak what exists. Instead, flip it entirely. Encyclopaedia Britannica dominated for over two centuries. By 2000, it comprised 32 volumes created by 100 editors and 4,000 contributors. Yet it was expensive, hard to update, and ultimately doomed. Wikipedia launched in 2001 with a radically opposite model: free, built by unpaid volunteers, constantly evolving. The opposite of costly wasn’t simply cheap – it was free. The opposite of a small paid editorial team wasn’t a slightly larger one; it was thousands of volunteers. Wikipedia now holds nearly six million English articles and thrives in 300 languages.

You’ve just seen that conformity and groupthink can trap us in dominant ideas. History reveals something harder to accept: experts are often the worst offenders. Those most educated frequently resist new ideas most strongly. Let’s look at some examples.

In 1847, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis proposed hand washing to reduce childbirth mortality. The medical community rejected the notion that their hands could kill patients. He died in an asylum, vindicated only after his death. In 1912, German geologist Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory was dismissed as outsider thinking by others in the field. Acceptance came only in the 1950s. History is littered with similar patterns: established expertise breeds resistance to fresh thinking.

There are many different tools you can use to facilitate lateral thinking. Here are two practical tools you can use to help make decisions or generate new ideas.

Use the Six Thinking Hats when your group needs to decide on a proposal. Developed by Edward de Bono, this method replaces adversarial thinking – where people defend positions and egos obstruct judgment – with parallel thinking. Everyone wears the same colored hat at the same time. With the white hat, the group examines facts together. With the red hat, each person expresses feelings freely – no argument possible. The yellow hat forces optimism: list benefits even if you dislike the idea. The black hat reverses this: identify risks and downsides even if you love it. Cynics and optimists both stretch beyond their comfort zones here. Next is the green hat which invites creative solutions to mitigate those risks. Finally, the blue hat reviews the process itself. The result? You’ve examined the proposal from every angle without a single argument. Decisions emerge naturally, with genuine buy-in from all participants.

Everyone gets stuck. Progress stalls. Momentum dies. When this happens, you need concrete steps to reignite action. 

The first step is to identify the real barrier. Don’t settle for superficial reasons. Dig deep and find the real obstacle. Next, redefine your goal. Who are you solving for? What’s the end result? Is it still important? Articulate the reasons clearly – this will reignite your motivation.

In 1995, two Stanford students met during orientation. Larry Page, a computer science student whose parents were academics, wondered: How do you measure the importance of a webpage? He borrowed a concept from academic research – papers gain importance when other papers cite them. So, what if you could capture the entire World Wide Web and track how each page connected to every other? It was audacious. It crashed Stanford’s servers. But it worked.

Page and Brin, the second student, had discovered something revolutionary. They didn't initially realize they were building a search engine. When they approached major players – Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite – offering to license their technology for one million dollars, they were rejected. The industry leaders believed search wasn’t important. They thought people wanted content and exploration, not shortcuts. They were catastrophically wrong. Google went on to dominate them all. Page and Brin succeeded because they borrowed ideas from unexpected places and asked lateral questions others hadn’t considered.

Lateral thinking extends beyond boardrooms and innovation labs. It’s a powerful tool for addressing society’s most pressing challenges. When law enforcement and investigative journalists face seemingly impossible problems – catching criminals, exposing atrocities – lateral thinking offers unexpected solutions.

When armed men robbed Northern Bank in Belfast in December 2004, stealing around £25 million, the crime seemed unsolvable. The culprits were never caught. But bank officials thought laterally. Instead of pursuing the robbers, they recalled all banknotes in circulation – around £300 million – and replaced them entirely with new currency featuring different designs and serial numbers. Anyone holding stolen old notes couldn’t spend them without immediate detection. The authorities couldn’t catch the criminals, but they rendered most of the haul worthless.