Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step

Never have I witnessed such a valuable concept being expounded upon in such an appallingly bad manner. It is truly astonishing. Each chapter contains approximately two paragraphs of truly essential content. The remainder of the chapter consists of the author repeating the same message as those two paragraphs or restating the purpose of lateral thinking from the introduction. And the rest of the chapter presents a completely unfeasible "practice method" that depends on the highly unlikely scenario of you traveling back in time and ensuring that this book reaches the hands of your teachers when you were studying in school. It beggars belief. What an astronomical waste of time it has been to read this book. It is truly a disappointment and a frustration. One cannot help but wonder how such a potentially useful concept could be so poorly presented and made so inaccessible. It is a great pity.

Lately, I've been looking at self-help books with increasing skepticism, especially when their titles make bold claims. 'Creativity Step by Step' is one such title. After having 'Lateral Thinking' on my TBR shelf for a long time, I finally decided to give it a try. Although I have some mixed feelings now, overall, I'm happy to say it was time well spent. I'm rounding off what felt like a 3.5-star read to 4.

The book is intended for educators, as the author clearly attempts to explain in the introductory chapter. I'm not one, but the first chapter was intriguing enough to keep me going. Until now, I only thought that one's way of thinking is a combination of logical, creative, and emotional aspects. I hadn't really thought about the specifics related to each component before. But this book introduces a very clear distinction between the 'creative' and 'logical' aspects of thinking, which are called 'lateral thinking' and 'vertical thinking'. And it's the 'lateral thinking' that is directly responsible for the generation of creative solutions.

The content is arranged like a teacher's guide book, with the first part of each section explaining the theory and then followed by practice methods. I did feel some of the content was a bit repetitive, but it seems the author expected the reader to use this as a frequent reference book when practicing or teaching lateral thinking. In that case, any teacher would find the book quite helpful.

So, will this book help you enhance creativity? Maybe a little, by helping you identify where vertical thinking becomes limiting and when to introduce lateral thinking. But the truth is, unless you're a teacher, you'll find the content too detailed (and a bit boring). I skipped through a lot of practice sections as they delved too deep into how to handle classroom situations. Still, this book did help me understand several ways to tackle seemingly impossible problems in the future. If I had been involved in the field of education, I probably would have found this to be a solid 4-star read.

At the beginning of the article, no examples are given for the arguments. Even in the part comparing vertical and multi-dimensional thinking, it just keeps talking. As I was reading, I was imagining the appropriate situations, but the lack of reference when rewriting makes it difficult for me to be sure about the degree of absorption of the presented content. This book is suitable as a material for building activities for life skills courses.

The technique of creating choices: This technique is presented more clearly in half of 13, which is 8. The general idea is that when thinking about finding solutions, instead of looking for the most reasonable solution, we should come up with as many solutions as possible that come to mind, and then choose the most reasonable solution from that list. This expands the scope of ideas.

For example, when faced with the problem of how to improve work efficiency, we can list various solutions such as optimizing the work process, learning new skills, improving time management, and collaborating with colleagues. By considering multiple options, we are more likely to find the most effective solution that suits our specific situation.