Lateral Thinking for Every Day by Paul Sloane Extraordinary Solutions to Ordinary Problems
What's it about?
Lateral Thinking for Every Day (2023) teaches how to tackle everyday problems through imaginative approaches that rethink conventional problem-solving methods. Drawing on real-world examples and case studies, it presents practical frameworks and techniques to help you build stronger reasoning skills and enhance creative problem-solving abilities. Through these methods, you can develop fresh perspectives and discover original solutions to your most challenging situations.
King Solomon faced two mothers. Each claimed the same infant. His verdict shocked them: bring a sword and split the child in half. One woman accepted without protest.
The other cried out, begging him to spare the child and give it to her rival. Solomon awarded the baby to the second woman – only a true mother would sacrifice her claim to save her child's life. This ancient example illustrates lateral thinking: solving problems through unconventional, indirect approaches that view situations from unusual angles. Edward de Bono coined the term in 1967. When Ford struggled in a competitive car market, conventional wisdom suggested better engineering. Instead, de Bono proposed acquiring parking companies and reserving city-centre spaces for Ford vehicles – shifting perspective from manufacturer to driver.
This oblique approach unlocks innovation across every domain, from climate crises to criminal justice. In this lesson, you’ll discover how to think and act differently. You’ll explore the foundations of lateral thinking, examine why conformity blocks innovation, and discover proven techniques and real-world applications. While author Paul Sloane offers countless examples, we’ve curated a selection that reinforces core principles and equips you with immediately actionable advice. Let’s get started. Major airlines once operated on unshakeable assumptions.
Customers wanted premium service. Airlines issued tickets for every flight. Seats got assigned in advance. Travel agents handled sales.
And of course, you flew to major airports – that’s where business travelers were, right? These weren’t guesses; they were dominant ideas, hardened by decades of practice. Then low-cost carriers appeared and shattered nearly every rule. They ditched premium service, dropped pre-assigned seating, shifted away from traditional sales channels, and landed at regional airports.
The result was a massive market nobody had anticipated. This is a prime example of lateral thinking – addressing a problem by approaching it from a completely new angle. Edward de Bono introduced the term to describe thinking that moves sideways rather than forward through the predictable paths of vertical thought. It’s the ability to develop fresh approaches and original solutions to both large and small challenges. De Bono identified four main aspects: recognizing the dominant ideas that constrain thinking, exploring alternative perspectives, releasing the tight control of vertical thinking, and leveraging serendipity. The trouble is, most of us remain trapped within dominant ideas.
We see the world through the lens everyone else does. And once these ideas take hold, everything confirms them. We’re not alone in this trap. Evolution has wired us to crave groups. We want to belong. Henri Tajfel, a social psychologist, discovered something troubling: the mere act of dividing people into groups makes them favor their own and discriminate against others.
Solomon Asch ran experiments proving it. He placed one real participant with seven actors instructed to give wrong answers about line lengths. Seventy-five percent of participants ignored what they clearly saw and sided with the group. This conformity had two sources: the wish to fit in, and the assumption that others held better information. This desire for acceptance gets dangerous when groups make decisions together. Groupthink takes over – the push toward consensus silences dissent, suppresses controversy, and blocks alternative thinking.
President J. F. Kennedy’s team never seriously questioned the CIA’s plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and it failed catastrophically. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy learned his lesson. He brought in external specialists to share perspectives, encouraged members to voice concerns and ask probing questions, and deliberately absented himself from certain meetings so his views wouldn’t overwhelm the discussion. Without this kind of vigilance, groupthink has sparked disaster after disaster: the CIA’s blindness to 9/11, Enron’s accounting fraud, and Volkswagen’s emissions scandal to name but three.
Smart people in groups make poor decisions when they stop questioning and start seeking consensus. That’s why lateral thinking matters – and why mastering four key techniques can break you free from conventional constraints. They’re up next.
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. Similarly, while major software companies locked down their code, Linus Torvalds created Linux with open access – anyone could view and modify it. This opposite approach sparked the entire open-source movement. Uber owns no taxis. Airbnb owns no hotels.
Turo owns no cars. Each succeeded by doing the exact inverse of convention. A second approach is to break the rules. Sometimes progress demands breaking the rules entirely. On September 26, 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov received a warning that six missiles were heading toward the USSR. Protocol demanded he report it immediately.
Instead, he judged it a false alarm and stayed silent. His disobedience likely prevented nuclear war. And Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” violated every rule of commercial pop music – six sections, multiple genres, five and a half minutes long when radio played three-minute singles. Record labels rejected it. Queen bypassed them, gave it to a DJ, and created one of history’s greatest hits. A third technique is to think like an outsider.
The outsider brings fresh eyes. Immigrants founded or co-founded more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies and nearly 50 percent of American billion-dollar startups. They’ve experienced different cultures and aren’t trapped by local assumptions. When you’re immersed in a system, you can’t see its oddities. The outsider notices everything. The final technique is to ask dumb questions.
Never stop asking questions. Children ask roughly 73 questions daily; adults ask about 20. As we age, we assume we know enough and stop inquiring. Yet questioning deepens understanding. Roger Hargreaves drew Mr. Tickle because his six-year-old son asked an impossible question: “What does a tickle look like?
” That question sparked a 90-million-copy best-selling series. And when Eric Schmidt was Google’s CEO, he insisted the company ran on questions, not answers. Great breakthroughs come from asking the right ones – Newton wondered why apples fall; Darwin questioned why island species differed; Einstein imagined riding a beam of light. Ask “What if?
” relentlessly. Challenge everything. That’s how lateral thinking transforms problems into possibilities. 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. But history teaches another lesson.
Those who solve seemingly impossible problems often succeed not through expert credentials or meticulous planning, but through a willingness to fail repeatedly and learn. Aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready entered the Kremer Prize competition – a challenge to build a human-powered aircraft over a specific course that had defeated teams for 18 years. Rather than design the perfect plane, MacCready built the Gossamer Condor from lightweight materials chosen for easy repair after inevitable crashes. While competitors spent years perfecting designs, MacCready’s team won in months. The secret was simple: fly, crash, adapt. His team treated failure not as disaster but as data.
Each crash taught them something. When mastering any new skill, you expect some failure. Apply the same mindset to your experiments. Don’t plan for success – plan for safe failure. Design your attempts so you can fail without catastrophic loss, then adapt based on what you learn. This is how lateral thinkers bypass the resistance of experts and solve what the experts believe impossible.
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. When you need fresh ideas, you can use the Random Word method.
Pick a random noun fro a dictionary. List its attributes, and then force connections to your challenge. Say you need to attract job applicants and your random word is “eucalyptus. ” Attributes include: Australia, gum, branches, medicine. This triggers ideas: recruit from Australia, offer travel opportunities, show how careers branch out, provide health benefits. This random input jolts your mind sideways – exactly where lateral thinking happens.
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. Third, challenge your assumptions.
What if conventional wisdom is wrong? Could a simpler, free solution replace your complicated expensive one? Then consider the exact opposite of your current approach. Fifth, look beyond your own field for metaphors – who has solved something similar elsewhere? The sixth step is to assume superpowers: How would a great leader or hero tackle this? Then try shifting to a different medium entirely.
Could a mobile app work better than a website? Could a podcast replace a blog? Eighth, identify a critical tool or resource that would unlock momentum. Ninth, call for help. Asking for assistance isn’t a weakness – it’s often the smartest move. Finally, imagine starting fresh tomorrow.
What would you do differently with no prior investment constraining you? Cognitive biases are deeper persistent errors in thinking that can sabotage your judgment. Similarity bias makes you favor people like yourself and overvalue their opinions. Anchoring bias causes you to place too much weight on early information you encounter.
Confirmation bias leads you to search for information confirming your existing beliefs while ignoring contradictory evidence. Overconfidence bias makes you overestimate your own capability to decide well. By recognizing these thinking traps by name, you can prevent them from derailing your progress.
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. But there’s another principle that enables this kind of innovation: welcoming failure.
In most organizations, failure is punished and success celebrated. The lateral thinker inverts this. Failure is essential to exploration. Success can breed complacency. If everything you try succeeds, you’re not being bold enough. The tennis champion Rafael Nadal serves aggressive double faults at times – not to lose points, but because riskier serves are harder to return.
He accepts that some will fail as part of the trade-off. When you play entirely safely, you constrain your potential for breakthrough success. Take courageous initiatives. Some will fail.
Share those lessons. Recognize honorable failures. When leaders encourage this through words and actions, people become daring and entrepreneurial. As Tom Kelley of IDEO puts it: fail often to succeed sooner.
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. Law enforcement uses lateral thinking in other ways.
A fake encrypted chat platform called Anom, created by the FBI and Australian Federal Police in 2019, was promoted to criminals as a secure way to communicate. Instead, it allowed police to monitor messages from over 300 criminal syndicates in over 100 countries. One operation led to 800 arrests and seized eight tons of cocaine, 250 firearms, and $48 million in currency and cryptocurrency. In a different context, journalist Eliot Higgins applied lateral thinking to expose war crimes. In 2014 he founded Bellingcat, using publicly available information to investigate atrocities. Using satellite imagery and Google Earth, his team identified the Buk missile launcher responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing 298 people.
They also exposed the Russian agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal in the UK. Their open-source investigations have changed how intelligence agencies verify information. What began as crowdsourced research by amateurs has transformed the fight against those committing atrocities.
In this lesson to Lateral Thinking for Every Day by Paul Sloane, you’ve learned that lateral thinking solves problems by approaching them from completely new angles. Most of us remain trapped within dominant ideas, seeing the world through lenses everyone else does. Conformity and groupthink silence dissent and block alternative thinking, preventing breakthrough solutions. Yet this trap is escapable through deliberate practice.
Four key approaches can help you break free from conventional constraints. First, contemplate the opposite – flip your entire approach rather than tweaking what exists. Second, break the rules when progress demands it. Third, think like an outsider who notices oddities insiders miss. And finally, ask dumb questions relentlessly, the way children do before assumptions harden into certainty. By mastering these techniques, you can escape the dominant ideas that constrain your thinking and unlock solutions that conventional wisdom overlooks.
Lateral Thinking for Every Day (2023) teaches how to tackle everyday problems through imaginative approaches that rethink conventional problem-solving methods. Drawing on real-world examples and case studies, it presents practical frameworks and techniques to help you build stronger reasoning skills and enhance creative problem-solving abilities. Through these methods, you can develop fresh perspectives and discover original solutions to your most challenging situations.
King Solomon faced two mothers. Each claimed the same infant. His verdict shocked them: bring a sword and split the child in half. One woman accepted without protest.
The other cried out, begging him to spare the child and give it to her rival. Solomon awarded the baby to the second woman – only a true mother would sacrifice her claim to save her child's life. This ancient example illustrates lateral thinking: solving problems through unconventional, indirect approaches that view situations from unusual angles. Edward de Bono coined the term in 1967. When Ford struggled in a competitive car market, conventional wisdom suggested better engineering. Instead, de Bono proposed acquiring parking companies and reserving city-centre spaces for Ford vehicles – shifting perspective from manufacturer to driver.
This oblique approach unlocks innovation across every domain, from climate crises to criminal justice. In this lesson, you’ll discover how to think and act differently. You’ll explore the foundations of lateral thinking, examine why conformity blocks innovation, and discover proven techniques and real-world applications. While author Paul Sloane offers countless examples, we’ve curated a selection that reinforces core principles and equips you with immediately actionable advice. Let’s get started. Major airlines once operated on unshakeable assumptions.
Customers wanted premium service. Airlines issued tickets for every flight. Seats got assigned in advance. Travel agents handled sales.
And of course, you flew to major airports – that’s where business travelers were, right? These weren’t guesses; they were dominant ideas, hardened by decades of practice. Then low-cost carriers appeared and shattered nearly every rule. They ditched premium service, dropped pre-assigned seating, shifted away from traditional sales channels, and landed at regional airports.
The result was a massive market nobody had anticipated. This is a prime example of lateral thinking – addressing a problem by approaching it from a completely new angle. Edward de Bono introduced the term to describe thinking that moves sideways rather than forward through the predictable paths of vertical thought. It’s the ability to develop fresh approaches and original solutions to both large and small challenges. De Bono identified four main aspects: recognizing the dominant ideas that constrain thinking, exploring alternative perspectives, releasing the tight control of vertical thinking, and leveraging serendipity. The trouble is, most of us remain trapped within dominant ideas.
We see the world through the lens everyone else does. And once these ideas take hold, everything confirms them. We’re not alone in this trap. Evolution has wired us to crave groups. We want to belong. Henri Tajfel, a social psychologist, discovered something troubling: the mere act of dividing people into groups makes them favor their own and discriminate against others.
Solomon Asch ran experiments proving it. He placed one real participant with seven actors instructed to give wrong answers about line lengths. Seventy-five percent of participants ignored what they clearly saw and sided with the group. This conformity had two sources: the wish to fit in, and the assumption that others held better information. This desire for acceptance gets dangerous when groups make decisions together. Groupthink takes over – the push toward consensus silences dissent, suppresses controversy, and blocks alternative thinking.
President J. F. Kennedy’s team never seriously questioned the CIA’s plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and it failed catastrophically. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy learned his lesson. He brought in external specialists to share perspectives, encouraged members to voice concerns and ask probing questions, and deliberately absented himself from certain meetings so his views wouldn’t overwhelm the discussion. Without this kind of vigilance, groupthink has sparked disaster after disaster: the CIA’s blindness to 9/11, Enron’s accounting fraud, and Volkswagen’s emissions scandal to name but three.
Smart people in groups make poor decisions when they stop questioning and start seeking consensus. That’s why lateral thinking matters – and why mastering four key techniques can break you free from conventional constraints. They’re up next.
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. Similarly, while major software companies locked down their code, Linus Torvalds created Linux with open access – anyone could view and modify it. This opposite approach sparked the entire open-source movement. Uber owns no taxis. Airbnb owns no hotels.
Turo owns no cars. Each succeeded by doing the exact inverse of convention. A second approach is to break the rules. Sometimes progress demands breaking the rules entirely. On September 26, 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov received a warning that six missiles were heading toward the USSR. Protocol demanded he report it immediately.
Instead, he judged it a false alarm and stayed silent. His disobedience likely prevented nuclear war. And Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” violated every rule of commercial pop music – six sections, multiple genres, five and a half minutes long when radio played three-minute singles. Record labels rejected it. Queen bypassed them, gave it to a DJ, and created one of history’s greatest hits. A third technique is to think like an outsider.
The outsider brings fresh eyes. Immigrants founded or co-founded more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies and nearly 50 percent of American billion-dollar startups. They’ve experienced different cultures and aren’t trapped by local assumptions. When you’re immersed in a system, you can’t see its oddities. The outsider notices everything. The final technique is to ask dumb questions.
Never stop asking questions. Children ask roughly 73 questions daily; adults ask about 20. As we age, we assume we know enough and stop inquiring. Yet questioning deepens understanding. Roger Hargreaves drew Mr. Tickle because his six-year-old son asked an impossible question: “What does a tickle look like?
” That question sparked a 90-million-copy best-selling series. And when Eric Schmidt was Google’s CEO, he insisted the company ran on questions, not answers. Great breakthroughs come from asking the right ones – Newton wondered why apples fall; Darwin questioned why island species differed; Einstein imagined riding a beam of light. Ask “What if?
” relentlessly. Challenge everything. That’s how lateral thinking transforms problems into possibilities. 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. But history teaches another lesson.
Those who solve seemingly impossible problems often succeed not through expert credentials or meticulous planning, but through a willingness to fail repeatedly and learn. Aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready entered the Kremer Prize competition – a challenge to build a human-powered aircraft over a specific course that had defeated teams for 18 years. Rather than design the perfect plane, MacCready built the Gossamer Condor from lightweight materials chosen for easy repair after inevitable crashes. While competitors spent years perfecting designs, MacCready’s team won in months. The secret was simple: fly, crash, adapt. His team treated failure not as disaster but as data.
Each crash taught them something. When mastering any new skill, you expect some failure. Apply the same mindset to your experiments. Don’t plan for success – plan for safe failure. Design your attempts so you can fail without catastrophic loss, then adapt based on what you learn. This is how lateral thinkers bypass the resistance of experts and solve what the experts believe impossible.
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. When you need fresh ideas, you can use the Random Word method.
Pick a random noun fro a dictionary. List its attributes, and then force connections to your challenge. Say you need to attract job applicants and your random word is “eucalyptus. ” Attributes include: Australia, gum, branches, medicine. This triggers ideas: recruit from Australia, offer travel opportunities, show how careers branch out, provide health benefits. This random input jolts your mind sideways – exactly where lateral thinking happens.
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. Third, challenge your assumptions.
What if conventional wisdom is wrong? Could a simpler, free solution replace your complicated expensive one? Then consider the exact opposite of your current approach. Fifth, look beyond your own field for metaphors – who has solved something similar elsewhere? The sixth step is to assume superpowers: How would a great leader or hero tackle this? Then try shifting to a different medium entirely.
Could a mobile app work better than a website? Could a podcast replace a blog? Eighth, identify a critical tool or resource that would unlock momentum. Ninth, call for help. Asking for assistance isn’t a weakness – it’s often the smartest move. Finally, imagine starting fresh tomorrow.
What would you do differently with no prior investment constraining you? Cognitive biases are deeper persistent errors in thinking that can sabotage your judgment. Similarity bias makes you favor people like yourself and overvalue their opinions. Anchoring bias causes you to place too much weight on early information you encounter.
Confirmation bias leads you to search for information confirming your existing beliefs while ignoring contradictory evidence. Overconfidence bias makes you overestimate your own capability to decide well. By recognizing these thinking traps by name, you can prevent them from derailing your progress.
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. But there’s another principle that enables this kind of innovation: welcoming failure.
In most organizations, failure is punished and success celebrated. The lateral thinker inverts this. Failure is essential to exploration. Success can breed complacency. If everything you try succeeds, you’re not being bold enough. The tennis champion Rafael Nadal serves aggressive double faults at times – not to lose points, but because riskier serves are harder to return.
He accepts that some will fail as part of the trade-off. When you play entirely safely, you constrain your potential for breakthrough success. Take courageous initiatives. Some will fail.
Share those lessons. Recognize honorable failures. When leaders encourage this through words and actions, people become daring and entrepreneurial. As Tom Kelley of IDEO puts it: fail often to succeed sooner.
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. Law enforcement uses lateral thinking in other ways.
A fake encrypted chat platform called Anom, created by the FBI and Australian Federal Police in 2019, was promoted to criminals as a secure way to communicate. Instead, it allowed police to monitor messages from over 300 criminal syndicates in over 100 countries. One operation led to 800 arrests and seized eight tons of cocaine, 250 firearms, and $48 million in currency and cryptocurrency. In a different context, journalist Eliot Higgins applied lateral thinking to expose war crimes. In 2014 he founded Bellingcat, using publicly available information to investigate atrocities. Using satellite imagery and Google Earth, his team identified the Buk missile launcher responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing 298 people.
They also exposed the Russian agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal in the UK. Their open-source investigations have changed how intelligence agencies verify information. What began as crowdsourced research by amateurs has transformed the fight against those committing atrocities.
In this lesson to Lateral Thinking for Every Day by Paul Sloane, you’ve learned that lateral thinking solves problems by approaching them from completely new angles. Most of us remain trapped within dominant ideas, seeing the world through lenses everyone else does. Conformity and groupthink silence dissent and block alternative thinking, preventing breakthrough solutions. Yet this trap is escapable through deliberate practice.
Four key approaches can help you break free from conventional constraints. First, contemplate the opposite – flip your entire approach rather than tweaking what exists. Second, break the rules when progress demands it. Third, think like an outsider who notices oddities insiders miss. And finally, ask dumb questions relentlessly, the way children do before assumptions harden into certainty. By mastering these techniques, you can escape the dominant ideas that constrain your thinking and unlock solutions that conventional wisdom overlooks.
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