Dallas McLaughlin

Since I was pretty young I’ve always trained my brain to think “outside the box”, also known as lateral thinking.  Lateral thinking is about reasoning that is not immediately obvious and about ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.  Lateral thinking can be used to help in solving problems but can also be used for much more.

I often use lateral thinking as a method of judging the “truth value” of statements and seeking errors in those statements.  I also use it to take one idea, and “improve” upon it, which may not necessarily be a solution, or a ‘good’ idea in itself, but moves thinking forward to a new place where new ideas may be produced.  But note that an idea doesn’t always need to be improved on, sometimes a different solution is required, which by some is not considered an improvement.

At some point in everyone’s lives they use lateral thinking, they just don’t know it.  Let me give you an example.

Example 1 of Lateral Thinking

“It took two hours for two men to dig a hole five feet deep. How deep would it have been if ten men had dug the hole for two hours?”

The answer appears to be 25 feet deep.  Two men digging for two hours makes a 5 foot hole, each man is digging 1.25′ per hour.  Ten men is 12.5′ per hour, times two hours, equals 25 feet.  That’s pretty basic.

But that’s not lateral thinking.

Lateral thinking is looking past the numbers, into real world scenarios.  Its figuring in all the variables, and finding the best solution (or working towards it) for the problem.  Here are some lateral thinking examples to the same question

A hole may need to be of a certain size or shape so digging might stop early at a required depth.

Since dirt needs to be lifted to the surface, there is a limit to how deep a hole can be dug by manpower without use of ladders or hoists for dirt removal – 25 feet is beyond this limit.

The men need to be able to get out of the hole later – depending on how steep the sides are. Normally, getting out of a 25 foot deep hole requires ladders, rope or other equipment.

Ten men would need more room to work side-by-side, and so may need to dig the hole wider rather than deeper. Each man digging needs space to use a shovel.

More men could work in shifts to dig faster for longer.

As you see, the question was very simple.  If this question was posed in a real world situation, without the use of lateral thinking, the workers would run into many technical problems hindering efficiency and work flow.

Let’s look at another example.

Example 2 of Lateral Thinking

“Cars should have square wheels.”

As ridiculous as that sounds, with the use of lateral thinking, you can defend this statement.  With this example you will see that lateral thinking does not always imply the “best” solution to a problem, it’s only used as a stepping stone to reach the jumping off point.

To defend this claim, you could say square wheels would produce very predictable bumps. If bumps can be predicted, then suspension can be designed to compensate.  This leads to the idea of active suspension, or suspension that looks ahead and prepares the square wheels for impact.  A sensor connected to suspension could examine the road ahead on cars with round wheels too.  A car could have a sensor for determining when it was going to hit a bump that feeds back to suspension that would know to compensate. The initial “ridiculous” statement has been left behind, but it has also been used to indirectly generate the new and potentially more useful idea.

Example 3 of Lateral Thinking

“A man and his son are in a car crash. The man is killed and the son is taken to hospital gravely injured. When he gets there, the surgeon says “I can’t operate on this boy- he is my son!” How is this possible?”

This is an example of an instant perception blocking the mind’s ability to explore alternatives. In this case the instant perception is that most people imagine a surgeon as a male, this leads to the conclusion that either the surgeon or the “father” in the car crash was not the boy’s real father.

If you switch your perception to allow for a female surgeon then the answer is suddenly obvious, the surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Most people imagine a surgeon as a male, but in this case it is the opposite! Lateral thinking is the method of switching perceptions to allow the alternate view point.

Another example for an instant perception blocking the mind’s ability to explore alternatives is that one assumes the surgeon is telling the truth. Maybe he was simply wrong (the son might have looked exactly like his own son) or maybe he was lying, because for some reason he didn’t want to operate on him (he could have felt bad or he was drunk).

Or the son could have two fathers – one of them could have been his adoptive father. Or if the boy was one of two separated twins, with the other growing up with the surgeon for whatever reason, then the surgeon would have recognized the boy as his own son.

Or the surgeon is actually talking about the man who died in the accident, making the surgeon the boy’s grandfather.

Conclusion

When using lateral thinking puzzles it is important to check your assumptions. You need to be open-minded, flexible and creative in your questioning and able to put a lot of different clues and pieces of information together. Once you reach a viable solution you keep going in order to refine it or replace it with a better solution.  I will leave you with a few lateral thinking puzzles, but I won’t supply the answers until I receive some legitimate effort.  Post your solutions in the comments, keep in mind there is often more than one correct answer!

Puzzles

There was a hotel where the visitors complained about the slow moving elevator and how long they had to wait for it to come. It became so severe that the manager was asked to do something about it. If you were the manager what would you suggest?

There is a man who lives on the top floor of a very tall building. Everyday he gets the elevator down to the ground floor to leave the building to go to work. Upon returning from work though, he can only travel half of the distance up riding in the elevator and has to walk the rest of the way up unless it’s raining! How can this be?

Mel Colly stared through the dirty soot-smeared window on the 26th floor of the office tower. Overcome with depression he slid the window open and jumped through it. After he landed he was completely unhurt. Since there was nothing to cushion his fall or slow his descent, how could he have survived?

A woman is found hanging by her neck from the high ceiling in an otherwise empty locked room with a puddle of water under her feet. How did she kill herself?

There are three switches outside a closed room. There are three lamps inside the room. You can flip the switches as much as you want while the door is closed, but then you must enter just once and determine which switch is connected to which lamp. How can you do it?

Tags: Ideas, Life, Solutions

11 Responses to “Explorations in Lateral Thinking”

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website