Lateral thinking, anyone?

[Yorkie]

I guess I won’t be alone in that during my career I’ve attended various courses on ‘lateral thinking’ which outlined the two approaches to finding solutions to problems, particularly in terms of working as a team - either ‘convergent’ or ‘divergent’ thinking. (Converging on the problem taking a narrow view, or diverging and thinking of broader less obvious oslutions).

Because of the now well known ‘join the dots with one line’ example, we’ve been lumbered with that awful hackneyed term ‘thinking outside of the box’. We’re asked to join the dots in one go without lifting the pen from the paper, and we assume that we are constrained by the area defined by the dots, which form a rectangle (the ‘box’). No-on says we can’t stray beyond the boundaries of the dots, but instead of broadening our thinking, we try to converge on a solution 'withing the box' and fail. Remove that mental constraint, and it becomes an easy task.

Another example used is that your car gets a puncture at the side of the road, so your jack up the car, remove the wheel, intending to fit the spare, but all of the bolts roll down the hill and fall into a drain. What do you do next? Call the breakdown services, look for a car spares firm, call a taxi to take you to the nearest garage to get some new bolts? That’s the ‘convergent thinking’ approach to the problem.

It’s such an oft used example that I guess most will know the answer, arrived at by divergent (lateral) thinking: Take one bolt from each other the other three wheels, so that all four wheels have three bolts. Safe enough to get you home or to a garage.

We were advised that the reason that the Japanese, Chinese and other oriental nationalities are so inventive is that they don’t understand the concept of personal ownership of ideas or wanting to take personal credit for it – if a design team is working on a problem, whoever comes up with an idea, if it seems to be a good idea they all discuss and explore it and take joint ownership of the idea, whereas in western society, there is an inbuilt competitive desire and ambition to come out as ‘top dog’ - to be 'king of the hill' or 'roost ruler'. Hence, if someone comes up with an idea, other dominant team members will ‘rubbish it' and try to come up with a better idea or say that the idea has been tried before and it failed.

At the outset of a training course we were asked to find as many uses for a paper clip and a leather belt as possible. Though we weren’t told to work individually (and the course was entitled ‘Working as a Team’ so there was a clue in that, which we all ignored, so keen were we to try to draw up the longest and best list!), we all set about making our own list. We were than trained in lateral thinking – to list all of the possibilities, not evaluating each idea until we’d thought of every possibility. In a later session, we were asked to work as a team and draw up a list, (to use another hackneyed non-PC term by ‘brainstorming’) and it came as no surprise that the list was twice as long.

I think that as vintage radio enthusiasts, we often do think laterally – necessity being the mother of invention – and often come up with solutions when we need ‘unobtanium’ but can’t find a source!

Lots of info and examples on ‘tinternet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=lateral+thiniking+examples&qpvt=lateral+thiniking+examples&FORM=IGRE

'Thinking outside the box' diagram - see attachment.

Waffled and dribbled Yorkie.