What is Lateral Thinking?

Lateral Thinking is one of the many important skills that you should possess to be successful in your profession. Lateral thinking essentially means the ability to think outside the box. It is a way of solving problems in which individuals rather than adopting the step-by-step approach based on logic, take a rather creative approach. Lateral Thinking enables an individual to move from an already known idea to new ideas. Using lateral thinking, candidates find solutions to problems that are otherwise not apparent. It was first coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. Lateral Thinking as a skill not only helps individuals but also organizations as it makes the process of solving tasks and issues at hand easier and faster. 

You can improve your lateral thinking skill by engaging more with the problems that you come across. Although some people tend to possess this skill naturally, but you can practice certain exercises to enhance or to develop this skill. This skill is situational and requires a thorough thought process. Candidates can try these exercises to improve their lateral thinking skills:

Reverse Thinking can help individuals think in an unconventional way. It involves understand what you would normally do in such a situation and then doing something opposite. You think your way through the problem and whenever you are stuck, you begin to think backwards. Understand what you would ideally want the solution to be and then you can begin thinking backwards to find the starting point of you way to achieve that solution.

Mind Maps can be extremely useful in finding solutions to problems where logical thinking does not seem to help. They provide a visual aid to the problem and the brain adjusts its thinking process accordingly. Mind mapping helps you put down your thoughts and ideas on a paper so that you can understand each step, understand the process, take a step back and forth and find an efficient solution to the problem.

Sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste are the five senses that we possess. However, when it comes to solving problems, we only use visual sense. But we can make use of other senses as well to solve our problems. We can try to speak the problem again and again and hear ourselves. In that process, there are chances of our brain responding positively to solve a problem.

Lateral thinking is a very important skill through which you can transformational value to your organization where you are working. This skill is extremely in life and at work places. These days employers look for candidates who can think critically and out of the box to add to the functioning and efficiency of their institution. Candidates can follow the above tips to enhance their lateral thinking skills. It is the most valuable skill in difficult times. Its usual that in difficult times, we tend to think of the problems as tragedies, but if through lateral thinking we try to think of them as "voyage and return", our brain begins to look at the issue in a different manner which helps simplify the problem and reach the solution.