2.4 Lateral Thinking (continued)

A baby crying is a generative situation. The baby just makes a noise and then things happen. From all the things that happen, the baby accepts the ones that are useful to it. Lateral thinking is a generative process. Instead of waiting for the environment to change established patterns, these are deliberately disrupted in various ways so that the information can come together in new ways. If any of these new ways are useful, then they can be selected out by any of the selecting processes.

In the early days of photography, the photographer used to go to a great deal of trouble to arrange the background, the lighting, the pose, the smile, and then when everything was just right he took the photograph. Nowadays the photographer just takes dozens of pictures from different angles with different expressions and different lightings. Then he develops all the pictures and picks out the ones that look best. In the first case the selection is done before the photograph is taken, in the second case it is done after the photographs have been taken. The first method will only produce what is known beforehand and planned. But the second method may produce something new that was totally unexpected and could never have been planned.

With the other types of thinking you know what you are looking for. With lateral thinking you may not know what you are looking for until after you have found it. Lateral thinking is like the second method of taking photographs, and the other sorts of thinking are like the first method. For convenience these other sorts can be included under the heading of vertical thinking which is the sequential development of a particular pattern ‑ like digging the same hole deeper. With vertical thinking one moves only if there is a direction in which to move. With lateral thinking, one moves in order to generate a direction.

The generative effect of lateral thinking is exerted in two ways. The first way is to counteract, restrain or delay the fierce selective processes of the memory‑surface itself. It is also necessary to counteract the selective processes that have been artificially developed, such as logical thinking with its heightened sensitivity to a mismatch. The second way is to bring about deliberate arrangements and juxtapositions of information that might never otherwise have occurred. The aim of both these processes is to allow information to arrange itself in new and better patterns, as happens in insight.

The nature of lateral thinking may be illustrated by outlining a few specific points of difference from vertical thinking.