Thinking a bit about lateral thinking

After receiving an e-mail a while back from John Galt at Idonresources.com, I've started to gain an interest in thinking tools and lateral thinking. These tools can really change the way we look at reality.

There are many lateral-thinking puzzles out there and I'm sure many of them are familiar to people interested in innovation management. Here's one that I came across recently from the founder of the Destination-Innovation Web site:

A man has a business where he buys chairs for $5 and sells them for $4 and becomes a millionaire. How come? (If you want the answer, go to the bottom of this post.)

This type of question reminded me of a couple of sentences that I saw years ago to show how schema can affect our reading comprehension. Read these sentences and then read their endings, also at the bottom of the page:

A: "She was your typical blonde, she kept her nails . . . "

B: "Barrabus came by sea . . . "

So what's the point of using stuff like this? They can illustrate very clearly that our existing mental models/assumptions can be way off the mark -- miles off, and prevent us from solving very real problems.

Not only are there many tools available that can really stretch the way we think about problems, there also seem to be a few companies around that are offering "thinking environments," places where people can have a go at cracking some of their company's problems. Basically, anywhere other than the office.




Answer to millionaire question: The man had previously been a billionaire. [We automatically, and wrongly, assume that becoming a millionaire is a bottom-up process.]

A: ". . . all neatly lined up in jars in her basement."

B: "His feathers were so dirty and ruffled after the long trip." [The text was taken from a young girl's diary about her canary arriving at the new family home in another country.]

Here's an interesting video about "design thinking" from Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. Worth checking out!




innovation management