ABSTRACT
Edward de Bono coined the term ‘lateral thinking’ and has been actively promoting it for the past 30 years. Essentially lateral thinking is not just one technique but a number of different ways of making oneself open to creative thinking and problem solving. On closer examination it will be seen that lateral thinking has many overlaps with synectics (see Chapter 8) and several other well known methods as well. Edward de Bono has written extensively about the process of lateral thinking-the generation of novel solutions to problems. The point of lateral thinking is that many problems require a different perspective to be taken in order to solve them successfully.
