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Lateral thinking
Another useful thinking tool is the concept of 'Lateral Thinking'
developed by Edward de Bono.
- Lateral thinking means being able to look at issues from other angles and fresh perspectives beyond logical structured thinking. It can foster new ways of seeing something or linking ideas.
- Play with this style of thinking if you want to explore original angles to a topic or issue.
- Originality is often about the novel ways that ideas are linked or gathered together.
- To try out some lateral thinking, a fun way to do this is to take a few totally unrelated words or topics and try to find a trail of associations between them. It's a bit like doing a cryptic crossword, but even more creative!
For example, to develop your lateral creative thinking, you could take some randomly selected words:
- chocolate
- umbrella
- books.
and try to come up with creative links between the words.
Here's one possibility using chocolate and books
Chocolate is a good source of certain minerals and chemicals, which are good for students. So let's name assorted chocolates according to great authors, and include information about great books of the world on the inside cover of the boxes. Of course, the box itself would look like a book so it can be easily stored in the stack on a student's desk.
Here's another
Let's make plate-sized chocolate umbrellas, for students to nibble, like the mushrooms in the book 'Alice in Wonderland', when they want to expand ideas, or summarise ideas!
Now write your own. See if you can combine all three by thinking creatively.
- tourist
- chocolate
- mobile phones.
Enter your answer here:
Try it out with your friends. Find a set of words and see what creative connections you can find.
Download a printable version of this page. Problems? Questions? Comments? Please provide us feedback.
Two possibilities: which do you like better?
We could have edible chocolate phones for tourists!
Or mobile phones for hire from the chocolate shop at the airport - tourists could get their remaining phone credit back in chocolates on return, instead of money they couldn't take out of the country.