I have to admit I’m somewhat out of my depth on this one, although a kind of family and cultural osmosis has led to considerable familiarity with the movement in the past. In personal terms, I can relate to the topic in two ways. One is to think of myself as someone who is only able to think laterally. The other, which I haven’t been able to understood, was a comment by a client who said I never think laterally, but always vertically. I don’t know what to make of this apparent contradiction.
Edward de Bono died on 9th June 2021. That pattern recognition device went the way of all flesh, and flesh it was – he was often keen to emphasise that the mind was no computer, although I do wonder whether he included quantum computers in this. Or rather, did his concept of a computer as a vertical thinking machine, as it were, still apply to quantum computers?
This is not going to be a complete survey or review of De Bono’s work. He published seven dozen and one books and also had other rôles, so it’s unlikely I can do justice to him today, so I’ve decided to focus on two aspects of his earlier work on lateral thinking. Before I do that, I want to bring something to your attention about this. De Bono for me is not just someone who is “out there” because my father was very interested in him in the late ’60s and into the ’70s when I was born and through my childhood, and he does seem to have applied some of his principles and thought to my upbringing, so it’s quite likely that the way I approach things now is related to that way of thinking. I remember some exercises I’ve done at my father’s behest on the matter. In his case, he was attempting to apply it to his paid work in operational research and management, where it seems to have been quite popular, but as De Bono himself says, it shouldn’t be learned through its application because that places a restrictive filter on it, but should be considered a subject in its own right. If my thinking is linked to lateral thinking in this way, it’s also likely that I can’t perceive that it is.
Lateral thinking is contrasted with vertical thinking, and he is keen to emphasise that the former is not to be considered better than the latter. Both are appropriate but apply in different circumstances. Verical thinking is less creative and proceeds from given unquestioned premises step by step in a manner which is preferably not open to flexibility. This is often necessary, and is the kind of thinking we probably come across most of the time in technically-oriented walks of life such as mathematics, logic, computing and possibly science. I hesitate to commit myself entirely to this idea though, because whenever human beings are involved, creativity has a rôle, and this has always been so. De Bono would relate lateral thinking to insight, creativity and humour, and he almost has a theory of humour, but I’ll come to that. In vertical thinking, the only available method for changing ideas is conflict. Either a new idea is introduced and kind of enters into battle with the old idea in someone’s head, which it either wins or loses, or new information confronts one and conflicts with the old, leading to its hopefully dispassionate acceptance or rejection, which is said to be how science works. Thomas Kuhn would point out at this point that the war of ideas in science is heavily influenced by the career positions and choices of scientists and can’t be considered as occurring in an abstract realm where a new hypothesis or theory is mechanically accepted or rejected, but this is an idealised way of looking at science and I think we can probably agree that it’s how it should work.
An example of how it might work differently, and I don’t know if I can dignify this with the label of “lateral thinking” but here it is anyway, is my approach to the composition of Saturn’s rings. In the early 1970s, no space probe had been sent past the asteroid belt and there was conflict between astronomers who believed the particles making up the rings were icy and those who thought they were rocky. I chose to conclude that they were ice-covered rock. It turned out they were mainly made of frozen water, but this is probably an early example of lateral thinking and I know I applied it elsewhere. Bear in mind that this was a six year old, so it isn’t going to have the sophistication of an adult professional astronomer. Bear in mind also that I’m not commenting here on whether it’s right or wrong, which is another feature of lateral thinking.
Conflict between ideas only works where objective evaluation is possible. Very often, in vertical thinking new information is examined through the filter of preëxisting information and structures, which can cause the old idea to become more entrenched. I personally think the idea of non-baryonic dark matter is a good example of this. Another example might be found in religious fundamentalism, as with sexism and homophobia, where rather than attempting to moderate the prejudice in the light of new attitudes and even scientific research, people just dig in deeper, sometimes to the extent that it seems, at least to an outsider, that some churches are primarily concerned with hatred.
A good way of changing ideas is to rearrange the available information by use of insight. As recognised patterns are used, they become more firmly established. This reminds me of a friend who became delusional, or rather a friend whose delusions were unusual and began to affect her life adversely, and it seemed to me that one element in their reinforcement was that backtracking would involve acknowledging that she was wrong and that she’d used a lot of time and energy in maintaining them which had come to have major adverse consequences for her life. Nonetheless there’s a need to attempt to deal with the manifold, and the main way of doing it seems to be to convert established patterns into a kind of code for dealing with the world. The mitzvot of the Torah would seem to be one example, and vocabulary is another, and to me this raises the question of how much learning is really linguistic rather than some other kind. All of these are filters which leave out a lot of information, of necessity, but it’s possible that this information, were it acknowledged, would end up forming a new pattern not noticed before.
Crucially, De Bono tends to deprecate the notion of the mind as computer, or any kind of machine (although this becomes more contentious when one considers the possibility of what can be simulated). Rather, the mind is an environment rather like a landscape in certain ways. Now I’m conscious that I’ve already used the metaphor of a landscape to describe neurodiversity, and wish to dispel the notion that there’s a connection here. The mind for him is a specialised environment which allows information to organise itself into patterns. This reminded me rather of Gestalt psychology, which rejected empiricism and structuralism and is largely based on the idea that the mind tends to impose higher order phenomena such as movement and patterns on lower order sense impressions. I would call these higher order phenomena supervenient. Since Gestalt psychology now largely survives as therapy, this also suggests that if lateral thinking is helpful, it too could be used as a form of therapy, where people are trying to break out of maladaptive patterns in their emotional lives. In fact, right now I see lateral thinking as particularly useful in this area.
Restructuring is hard because existing structures grab the attention. Nonetheless there are times when restructuring occurs spontaneously in the human mind, and de Bono mentions three: insight, humour and lateral thinking. I would perhaps add revelation and epiphany to those. I once asked a non-religious psychologist friend of mine if he had had anything corresponding to religious experience and he mentioned insight as being somewhat akin. The experience of insight, in fact, was so difficult for thinkers to explain in the European Middle Ages that they posited the idea that God illuminated the contents of the mind. Humour constitutes a brief and reversible restructuring, which I found interesting, but couldn’t tell if he was proposing a complete theory of humour or not. Insight, on the other hand, is a long-term restructuring, or rather the beginning of one. De Bono appears to offer something like a definition of lateral thinking at this point, as “restructuring, escape and the provocation of new patterns”, and as such this reminded me rather of the somewhat later but also highly seminal ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid’ by Douglas Hofstadter.
Lateral thinking is in a way an attempt to generate creativity consciously. However, in the formal case the process itself may be hidden, often from the creator themselves. I’m reminded somewhat of Dalí and his paranoiac critical method and of the suggestion that one overcome writer’s block (not a problem for me so am I naturally a lateral thinker?) by cutting up and rearranging text, which is almost the same thing as one of the exercises he proposes. Lateral thinking generates its own direction by placing ideas next to each other as a form of progress, whereas vertical thinking is led by principles and is passive. Vertical thinking is also constrained by the choice of premises. It also tends to create sharp divisions and uses extreme polarisation, and this is particularly interesting since these may be the major problems with today’s society and were far less severe in the late ’60s. Is there a way of applying lateral thinking to this issue? One of its functions is to temper the arrogance of rigid conclusions. However, as he says, de Bono is not fundamentally opposed to vertical thinking, and believes that lateral thinking can support and help it in the long run. “You cannot dig a hole in the wrong place by digging deeper”, as he says, but digging a hole for the purposes of this metaphor is still a vertical process, so you think laterally to transport yourself to a better location and might then proceed to use vertical thought. This mode of thinking is not new either. There are also people who naturally gravitate towards it, and this is where it gets personal again. I would certainly say that many people on the Halfbakery are constitutionally lateral thinkers, and would include myself in that number, but as I’ve said, one of my clients has said that I always think vertically and am incapable of thinking laterally. I’m not sure what this means. It clearly is how he perceives me, but why is it so much at odds with my self-image, which is the opposite?
De Bono wrote another book called ‘The Mechanism Of Mind’ to which he makes extensive reference. I haven’t actually read it, but again uses the metaphor of a landscape to describe the mind. A flat limestone plain might gradually develop waterships and channels as it gets rained upon and these will eventually cut permanent ponds and lakes, and also streams and rivers. This is the memory of the land. It may also be influenced by differing composition of that land, such as granite as opposed to limestone. If there are instinctive schemata applied by the mind to the world, they might be seen as similar to the varying composition of the land, and the entrenchment of memory and learning is akin to the erosion and formation of bodies of water of particular forms. The land remembers where the rain and snow fall. Likewise, so does the mind remember things. I like this metaphor because it’s very un-computerised.
Even so, he sometimes seems to have a rather IT-oriented approach to thinking. For instance, in a later book he introduced a series of two number codes to sum up entire phrases. The predecessor of this idea is also present in his early work, where he proposes that communication can be abbreviated into trigger words. This is not “trigger” in today’s sense, where it refers to features which may cause anxiety to certain groups of people or people who have suffered particular traumatic experiences, but more like words which trigger a series of associations like a computer subroutine, and it seems ironic that this very un-computer-like device, the mind, according to de Bono, can also undergo something rather akin to programming in this way, although there’s no imperative element so maybe it’s object-oriented.
At the top of this post I described him as a “pattern recognition device”. This is more or less how he sees the mind, more precisely a pattern-recognition system. Most or all of the patterns the mind comes to recognise are not built in, although I’m not so sure about that. For instance, our sense of hearing is attuned in development to recognise voices and we tend to see faces everywhere even when they’re absent, such as the Badlands Guardian and the faces on Mars. The cognitive psychological view that the brain consists substantially of modules would also tend to contradict this, although it’s conceivable that modules could arise from a non-modular infant brain through learning. This is of course the nature-nurture debate, or in epistemological terms rationalism vs empiricism. In any case, this pattern-making tendency allows the mind to communicate, or perhaps a better word is “interact”, with its external environment. The patterns are always artificial, which seems to mean that de Bono doesn’t believe in natural kinds, i.e. types of things which exist objectively. He goes on to say that in a sense the mind is a mistake-making system, in that it mistakes one thing for another. Although an obvious example is our tendency to imagine faces in inanimate objects, it applies more broadly in that one must reject some of the features of an item one apprehends in order to conceive of it as like another. One has to generalise. Those patterns which promote survival are then selected. For example, one may have noticed a pattern that clear colourless liquid tends to quench thirst, but if one is surrounded by vessels containing water, acetone, turpentine and isopropanol one might wish to modify the pattern to include odourlessness, although I suspect that doesn’t eliminate everything. Hence one doesn’t end up poisoning oneself.
A further claim is that the mind doesn’t actively sort information but information sorts itself out. I’m not sure what he means by this, but I think the idea is that the mind constitutes a hospitable environment for the sorting of information and is a self-organising system. Such things can easily be seen in the living world, such as with shoals of fish all turning at once or ants’ nests working apparently purposefully when the individual worker ants each have only a very limited range of responses, and the brain is a similar system, with each neurone being little more than a logic gate with a modest ability to store information from previous inputs. He then made a claim about attention span, which didn’t seem to use the term in the way it’s generally understood now, and I was unfortunately lost, I hope temporarily, on this point.
A much clearer feature is that the order in which information is encountered changes the pattern perceived and can lead to it becoming harder to reorder the information. For instance, if one is playing a game of Hangman and chooses letters in one sequence, a word might quickly become obvious, but if one had started with a different set it might be considerably less so. “-A-A-A-A-A-A” probably suggests “taramasalata” to a lot of people, but “T——–T-” probably doesn’t. If the same information is deliberately presented in a different order, it may suggest a different solution, or a solution. Jokes often rely on such things, though there is always a switch back to a serious mode, or there ought to be. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. I once told someone the pyramids were supposed to have been built with the points at the bottom and the base at the top because the builders got the plans upside down, then discovered several years later that she had taken me seriously until she started an archæology degree. In another example, someone learnt the wrong physical examination technique due to a joke by their tutor, which could’ve had quite serious consequences. This also applies as poe’s law – one often can’t tell if people are joking or being satirical on the internet and shifts in pattern recognition can occur as a result, but not necessarily positive ones.
Pattern recognition speeds up identification and reaction, but also has a number of disadvantages. Patterns tend to fixate and cannot easily be altered, or new patterns can’t be as easily perceived. Change is difficult – to use a psychotherapy cliché, you “have to want to change”. Conversely there is also the paradox of change, where it takes place when one pays less attention to it. There are also butterfly effects, although these can be positive. Anything resembling a standard pattern will be perceived as such. For instance, it turns out to be notoriously easy to be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and psychological researchers have done this to get admitted to mental hospitals even though the symptoms they described didn’t fit the diagnosis. Established patterns grow. I would see mission creep as a manifestation of this. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Patterns also shift suddenly rather than smoothly: the rings of Saturn are either made of ice or rock but “can’t” be made of both.
Contrasts between vertical and lateral thinking are then outlined. Vertical thinking is selective, lateral generative. In vertical thinking, some of what one perceives or might perceive without preconceptions has to be rejected. Not so with lateral thinking. Vertical thinking is about being right or wrong, but lateral thinking is about richness of thought content. The imagination is more engaged. Vertical thinking proceeds along a path it has discovered or arrived at, whereas lateral thinking attempts to find many paths. Even when a solution has been found, lateral thinking can continue to look for more options, and once again I’m reminded of the Halfbakery. Vertical thinking is analytical, lateral provocative. Vertical thinking has to be right at every step to be valid, but lateral thinking recognises that being wrong may lead to a better solution in the end. Lateral thinking explores the less likely paths. It hears hooves and imagines zebras rather than horses.
Po
At this point it became clear that I wasn’t easily going to outline the entire corpus of the guy’s thought, so I’ve decided to focus on the Teletubby at the top of this post, so to speak: “po”. In logic, there is truth and falsehood, “yes” and “no”. There is negation. This involves rejection of the alternative deemed incorrect. De Bono introduces a third option: “po”. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Greek interjection “ποπο”, which is an expression of surprise or dismay, rather like “yikes”, and this may be where he got it. It also called to mind how the Samoan language negates statements: it turns them into yes/no questions, which seems to me to be a form of etiquette. The opposite of “Is it raining” (“ua timu”) seems to be “ua timu?” – “is it raining?” although I may have got that wrong. Whether or not that’s so, the approach taken by such an utterance is less arrogant and more polite than simply saying “no”, because the word “no” often has power, as was shown by Danny Wallace’s book ‘Yes Man’, and although it needn’t be, that power can be quite aggressive. After all, it involves rejection. “Po” is to lateral as “no” is to vertical thinking. He describes it as a “laxative” rather than a “negative”. It might seem at first that it allows for a third truth value, but I don’t think this is the intention, and it doesn’t fit neatly into multivalent logic simply because it doesn’t fit into logic. It’s a laxative in the sense that it can get thought moving rather than stop it. It withholds judgement. It can also be used as several parts of speech.
“Po” can be a conjunction. De Bono gives the example of “computers po omelettes”, which places two apparently unrelated things together to allow them or their associations to interact. That conjunction might bring to mind a recipe app which takes as its input the contents of your larder or fridge and gives possible meal ideas as output. It can also introduce a random word. Here the example is “po raisin”. The concept of a raisin is introduced to a discussion to stimulate ideas, perhaps of data compression by “dehydration”, e.g. reversibly removing a major but unimportant constituent of a picture which can be added back in later, or perhaps then becomes more concentrated information which can be used differently. For instance, an image of a mainly black night sky could have the completely black areas replaced by information telling a viewer or program that certain polygons in the image are devoid of content, and consequently asterisms, constellations or star clusters might become more evident. It can be used to signal that what follows doesn’t in fact “follow” and saves time and confusion by admission that a particular point is not arrived at by a conscious train of thought, thereby encouraging serendipity. “Po” lets someone be wrong without judgement because by being wrong one may find a better way of doing something than how it’s always been done. It can protect an idea from judgement: it’s short for “this is probably not true but let’s just pursue it and see where it goes.” It can also alter the problem to see if there’s a solution. Dividing eleven items fairly between three people can be achieved if you add an item of your own to share it out and then negotiate with the person who has that to have it back or share it on a regular basis with the others, or spacing four trees an equal distance apart could be managed by using a hillock or depression in the middle of the other three, thereby forming a tetrahedron.
“Po” has other functions. It can challenge the arrogance of established patterns. It is not po-faced. It might do the same with their validity. It can liberate information to allow it to come together and give new patterns. It can rescue information from pigeonholes. There’s a real life example of this for me because my surname is unusually short and begins with a rare letter, so I used to have my pigeonhole for internal mail filled up with rejected missives intended for other people because they assumed nobody’s name began with that letter, so I often had to rescue information from that pigeonhole due to the assumptions of others. Having experienced one possible alternative arrangement, it can encourage one to search for more. It is never judgmental. It can sometimes be translated as “that may be the best or only way but let’s look for others”. Hence it can have unintended consequences, and although those may be disruptive, sometimes they’re precisely what one needs.
All of this leads me to wonder what a “po man” would be like. Danny Wallace’s book ‘Yes Man’ tells of his experiment with his life when he became persuaded that he had got into the habit of saying “no” too often. He therefore committed himself to saying “yes” to everything and everyone for a period of time to see what might happen. This included questions like “are you looking at my girlfriend?”, which had interesting consequences. It was later adapted into the Jim Carrey film ‘Yes Man’, although there it was fictionalised – I don’t know how accurate the book is either of course. It is of course easier for a man to pursue this than a woman – I just want to drop that in. Stopping saying “no” is giving up power, and you might have to start fro a position of greater power to do that and have it not devastate your life. The question arises, therefore, of what the life of a “po person” would be like? What would it be like if every response you gave to a yes/no question aimed to juxtapose apparently unrelated things or opened up possibilities? I don’t know the answer to this, and I would also want any answer to explore other possible meanings of the word.
Po punctures pomposity. It reminds us that apparently inevitable information arrangements may in fact be arbitrary. It counteracts “no” and it heals divisions, and we really need that today. It diverts from the obvious, may provide a tension-relieving laugh or smile like the use of humour to defuse a tense situation, and it prevents overreaction and the swing towards polar opposites.
Although it occurs to me that “po” cannot work on a computer, whereas binary truth values can, I’m not sure that’s true of computers that are not digital or binary. I think this might indicate that the way we use our minds is almost a deliberate imitation of how we imagine computers work. Maybe we’re making ourselves in their image? What if we’re more like quantum computers or analogue ones?
Criticism
To an extent, it’s probably healthy to treat criticism of de Bono’s ideas with suspicion, as he seems to be something of an outsider and may not have too many people supporting his positions within academia. There is also a heady sense of power in judgement and rejection. Even so, it has been claimed that there’s little evidence to support Edward de Bono’s claims. Their style, if not their content, brings Neuro-Linguistic Programming to mind. There is said to be sparse evidence that it’s broadly successful. Early studies showed benefits to children with learning difficulties but it was also tried with Australian Aboriginal children and didn’t help them beyond the area of creative thinking. This seems like a strange criticism to me since that would seem to be his main focus, and it would be difficult to find an area which wouldn’t benefit from improved creativity sometimes. It’s also been suggested that suspending judgement would slow down or reverse progress.
De Bono didn’t use experiment to produce his body of thought, and he relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. However, sometimes it’s important to do exactly that. As well as pattern recognition devices, we are a species telling stories to ourselves and needing to hear them. Even if lateral thinking is propped up by myth, it still benefits people by enabling us to believe in ourselves more, and it seems worthwhile to protect people from acid rejection and criticism. We need permission to fail and be wrong without that ruining our reputation or lives.
He may also place too much emphasis on an individual’s “aha” experience rather than the communal testing of the idea that follows. That doesn’t always matter though, because sometimes the details of content are not of great import to their existence. Art is art. A particular mural may evoke one set of feelings but they’re no less or more valid or valuable than those another might have kindled, and a particular piece of music can still be “our tune” as much as another one can be, but any of these could become more memorable or thought-provoking because they were arrived at through lateral thinking. The problem may be when they come in contact with a particular kind of reality.
He’s also not so much a pioneer as he makes himself out to be, at least in terms of addressing the question of creative thinking. Another example would be William James, about whom I’m afraid I know practically nothing.
Last Words
In conclusion, I would say that I do actually currently find the idea of lateral thinking interesting and helpful, particularly as a way of inventing a new means of relating and approaching my thoughts and feelings, although it may also work in other areas. Even if it’s a myth, myths are important and we need them in our lives, and there are many areas where it doesn’t matter if a provocative idea is true or false, and such areas may have positive real world consequences. So I think Edward de Bono made a valuable contribution to the world and wonder if the nay-sayers would benefit from the po-sayers.
A Box Of Chocolates 