There’s an old story that when the Native Americans needed to find new hunting grounds, the elder of the village would send out their young men with a map. These boys would return in wonder at how the elder had known exactly where the rich game was to be found, having never visited that territory.

What the young men didn’t know is that the elder had simply squashed and crushed the leather map, bending it up in such ways as to create new pathways in the material, then plotted these out for them. The leather did the leading - and invariably it led them to fresh new hunting ground because that’s what they were looking for. 

In one respect this story is a great example of confirmation bias. If you believe where you are going is rich in game, everywhere you encounter wildlife it ratifies your pre-existing belief, so as to make it even more convincingly true. 

But the story of leather map also tells us something more about human nature when it comes to problem solving, and it’s something that couldn’t be more pertinent in our pre-Brexit, post-industrial age of business challenges and global competition. It tells us that to find salvation and the answer to our new challenges we need to give ourselves the tools to think “off road”.
 

BUT IT'S NOT NATURAL!
“Our thinking is excellent, but it is not enough”
— Edward de Bono

In 1969, anticipating much of modern neuroscience, Edward de Bono wrote in Mechanism of Mind that the human mind does not receive information passively, accurately recording every moment or thought for posterity. 

Instead, says de Bono, the brain is more like jelly.

If I pour hot water over jelly it will dissolve it a little and over time channels will form so that eventually if I pour the water over the jelly it will immediately run down into the channels, bypassing the rest of the mass. Similarly, in the brain, information received previously strongly effects the way new information is received because the brain actively reorganises itself around new information all the time, creating patterns, biases and mental preferences which (like the jelly) over time form the channels for our thinking.

Why is this crucial to our work? Because, really, truly, deeply, we all think we know the answer to our problems. For a brand it usually involves more money, more staff or a new, futuristic technology. Whatever it is it’s a big, new, whizzy, expensive thing that has proven to work in the past. If only we could have X, we say to our colleagues.

When we think in this way we are flowing along the inner gullies of our minds – a process that is entirely useful and natural. The brain, as an electrochemical system is extremely good at energy saving and it does this through following those patterns, making judgements based on “what is has seen worked before”. 

But this form of logical or “vertical” thinking as de Bono defines it, is not always useful. In hard times when the answer we need is not obvious, where a new challenge presents itself, or simply where we need solutions that are faster, stronger, cheaper. In short, in our age, we desperately need creative thinking that goes beyond our experiences of the past and breaks out of the pattern. 

Conceptual creativity, as de Bono defines it, is “not natural” and hard to achieve. It requires cutting across the channels of the mind laterally. That is to move sideways, outside of the obvious pathways of thought, and to connect things within the brain that were previously unconnected.

THE RANDOM WORD TECHNIQUE
“The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot”
— André Breton

The “Random Word” technique is the simplest of all lateral thinking techniques. In fact, it’s so simple it just feels a bit bonkers and hard to believe that it reliably works. But lateral thinking, as we shall see, is all about suspending disbelief.

You have a need for a new idea relating to some situation. Simply introduce a random word. How? Take a page of the newspaper. 10th word in. Find the first noun. It must be random and unrelated to your subject for the process to “work”.

Then use this word to escape your patterned way of thinking. You need free association to generate an idea on the subject at hand and connect your word to an answer for your challenge. 

How does this manifest in practice?

Instead of imagining that the only way to solve the challenge of antibiotic resistance (A) is to create – at great expense - a new antibiotic (B) we may connect the problem with the previously unrelated thought of “a queue” (C). That connection creates an entirely new thought of waiting and perhaps giving patients delayed prescriptions – something which having now been implemented, NICE suggests can save up to 70% of antibiotics from being dispensed unnecessarily.

Lateral thinking can save lives, but invariably it also saves a lot of money in the process. Critically the Random Word technique (and many others) can be applied to any problem at all, whether at home, in the factory or boardroom. All they require is an understanding of the technique and - if generating ideas collectively - to ensure they are followed in a workshop format.

WHY YOU SHOULD WORKSHOP - AND NOT BRAINSTORM

“If we don’t get lost, we’ll never find a new route.”
— Theatre director Joan Littlewood

The power of lateral thinking techniques is not in their efficiency in problem solving, it is in the opposite - their prolific nature. They necessarily buildin for a high wastage of ideas.

In contrast to brainstorms, which encourage consensus thinking, lateral thinking exercises are exactly that – they exercise the minds of everyone in the room and force each individual to “have ideas”.  

We have all had the experience of hearing a great idea and mentally taking a back seat from the responsibility to then solve the problem. Well done Sharon, you’ve cracked it. But, as the manufacturer of post-it notes and masters of innovation, 3M suggest, we must have 400 ideas to have 40 that are averagely good, to have 4 that are excellent. The odds are stacked against excellence. In a competitive creative environment good is simply not enough. Excellent thinking is required and that requires many, many
new thoughts.

So it is no good simply to brainstorm, judging as you go along why someone else’s idea is wrong, or even right. No, you too must generate ideas of your own, within your own mind. In silence. The workshops we run contain many 3 minute pauses for thought in which the only sound is pen on paper. We generate hundreds of ideas in these sessions of an hour or less. Only when we have hundreds of ideas can we then truly judge and pull the excellent from the average.

Just as the Native American elder gave the braves the map to follow, if we are to find competitive, creative answers to our most entrenched challenges we need tools that we have confidence in. We’d encourage those in boardrooms across the country to start breaking more rules to chart new paths. It starts with breaking the mental patterns. It starts with workshops and words like donkey, spatula and pyramid. Unlikely, maybe but since when was the greatest creativity – the kind that we all need – ever predictable?

Written by Tara Austin

Chief Strategy Officer