Just from the title alone before I even read the chapter, I was reminded of this very concept I learned as part of my Intro to Entrepreneurship class. During the ideation process, we were taught two very important lessons.
The first lesson was to suspend judgment when members of the group brought up ideas. Even if you didn’t agree with their idea or think it’s garbage, don’t verbalize your disagreement until everyone gets to discuss the ideas.
Another lesson we learned was to think with restrictions. Professor Scheck would give us stick notes with pretty random subjects on them. For example, my team was trying to start a student-run Thrift Pop-Up event. Professor Scheck gave us the theme of “moon”, which you might think had nothing to do with anything, but it actually let us come up with some really unique ideas like theming the pop-up around the moon stages and hosting it on lunar eclipses or full moons so students know when to expect a Thrift Pop-Up during the year.
Even if we didn’t follow through with those unique ideas, it was still a very effective ideation strategy I’ll remember. This is more or less what De Bono is discussing when he explains the difference between “being right” and “being effective.” Being effective just means being right at the end, so there’s no pressure to always be right because that’s not important. In a way I learned about lateral thinking through Professor Scheck echoing the same concepts in Intro to Entrepreneurship without me knowing it as lateral thinking.
One of my favorite takeaways was when De Bono points out the human tendency to borrow units of things from pre-existing concepts like building a mechanical hand with specifically five fingers to pick apples. I can’t remember where I read this but I remember learning that humans have a tendency to assume the human approach is the best approach. After all, we’re at the top of the food chain so surely we must understand everything better than any other animal, right?
Well, I think that’s where modern design leaves a lot of room for biomimicry. This was a really passionate topic for me back when I thought I wanted to be a biologist and engineer in high school, but it’s actually still relevant to me as a designer.
It’s not like animals designed their bodies the way they are of course, but they can serve as a reference for what might be the best solutions to a human problem, like using the shape of a Kingfisher beak and applying it to the nose of the Shinkansen bullet train.
Another takeaway was how to approach obviously wrong ideas. De Bono says the lateral thinking approach would be to shift one’s attention to why the idea is wrong and extract whatever usefulness it has before you move on. My reading of this paragraph is to essentially reverse what you think is obviously wrong and see the opposite idea, which may or may not be an idea to add to the solution.