How To Spark Lateral Thinking

How To Spark
Lateral Thinking
And Train Yourself To Approach
Problems Differently
@ShaneSnow - www.shanesnow.com - #Smartcuts

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What is lateral thinking?
@ShaneSnow #Smartcuts

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Pretend you have a cake that you
want to cut into 8 pieces…
… but you can only make 3 cuts

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How most people cut the cake (using conventional thinking):
Cut 1

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Cut 2

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Cut 3
(only 6
pieces!)

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Cut 1
How to cut the cake using lateral thinking:

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Cut 2

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Cut 3
(8 pieces!)

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Lateral thinking is when you
turn problems around and
approach them from
unconventional angles.

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The easiest way to make
yourself use lateral thinking is
to ask yourself a question that
forces you to change the
angle at which you look at the
problem.

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Here are a few of my
favorites:

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QUESTION 1:
How would a type of
person of a different
background or
expertise look at this
problem?

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FOR EXAMPLE:
When James Patterson wrote his
first book, he had trouble getting
his publisher to promote it…

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So he did what a regular writer
would never do and made his own
TV commercial himself! (It worked.)
It was easy for Patterson to come up with this because his actual job was making TV
commercials.

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QUESTION 2:
How have people in
different industries
than yours already
solved similar
problems in the past?

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FOR EXAMPLE:
When a hospital in London needed
to fix problems with complicated
equipment changes while kids were
on life support…

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They solved the problem by
studying what race car pit crews do
to do the same thing in a very
different place.

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QUESTION 3:
What if you had to use
a different era of
technology, or a tool
from a different job for
this job?

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FOR EXAMPLE:
You know those terrible Blister-Pak
packages that you get electronics
in? (They’re impossible to open!)

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It turns out that a can-opener is the
easiest way to open them!
Repurposing tools from other times or jobs can be an
incredible way to find breakthrough solutions.

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QUESTION 4:
What if you had to do
this 10x better?
(So much better that you can’t just do more
of the same thing.)

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FOR EXAMPLE:
When Google’s R&D laboratory, Google[x],
decided to make a car that was 10x safer
than a typical car…

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Instead of designing better car
parts, stronger frames, or doing
lots of crash testing (like they
might have if the challenge was just
to make a car 2x as safe)…

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…they designed a car that used
computers and sensors to drive
itself and avoid accidents entirely.
(At the time of this writing, Google’s prototype self-driving cars have had significantly fewer accidents than
human drivers—almost all of them were the Google car being rear ended by other drivers, and none of
them severe enough to seriously injure.)

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QUESTION 5:
What if we had to do
this 100 times
cheaper?
(So cheap that you can’t just do the same
thing more efficiently.)

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FOR EXAMPLE:
When Stanford students wanted to make
an infant incubator for poor countries,
instead of trying to make a $20,000
incubator a little cheaper…

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…they were forced to redefine the challenge
of “make a cheaper incubator” to “keep a
baby warm for $200.”
Which helped them make this:

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They had to make it so cheap that the
problem of “make a cheaper incubator”
became “keep a baby warm for $200.”
Which helped them make this:
90,000 babies
lives saved,
and counting

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Shane Snow
shanesnow.com
@shanesnow
Get a copy of Smartcuts for more on lateral thinking in history
at http://www.shanesnow.com/smartcuts

How To Spark Lateral Thinking

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