Thinking Laterally? - [website] Published: 14th of Nov 2011 by: Miss Knowitall
A man is driving his son to school. He is driving way too fast when they get into an accident and the man is fatally injured. Paramedics rush the son to the hospital but when he arrives for emergency surgery the doctor says...
... “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son!” How is this possible?
We’ll probably all come the conclusion that the doctor is the boy’s mother, but not before wondering if the man in the car was really the boy’s father, or perhaps that the man in the car and the doctor were partners – giving the boy two dads.
Traditionally we think of doctors as male and nurses as female, but times are changing, no longer are there gender-specific jobs as such and anything a man can do a woman can do as well (check out our Women@Work training course), but to break our old habits in thinking is not always an easy thing to do.
This is where lateral thinking comes in. Lateral thinking is defined as “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.”
Lateral thinking differs to critical thinking in that it is more concerned with the movement value of statements and ideas than judging the truth in statements and seeking errors.
This basically translates to “thinking outside the box,” as it were, and by tackling problems from a different perspective you often find wholly different, and more eye-opening, results.
Here are a few more examples that require lateral thinking to solve – how many can you get? Is lateral thinking something that comes naturally to you?
· How can you throw a ball as hard as you can so that it comes back to you? The ball can have nothing attached to it, cannot hit anything, and cannot be caught or thrown by anyone else.
· What does this mean:
HEAD
WATER
· How many hands does the clock of Big Ben have?
· You are running in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?
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