Week 7 @ Class of Lateral Thinking

Week 7 - emotions running wild. The huge side of my mind is on the NEP final exams, while the other side is basically contemplating that we are going to leave HCDC in another week.

So here we are, week 7 in Lateral Thinking class.

Prior to the class, I always believed that I am a creative person, given the right place and ambience coupled with sufficient sleep the night before. I electrify my creative neutrons by constantly asking myself, “What would a normal person do, given similar circumstances?” and I’ll just do the opposite. Similar to lateral thinking, I have a fixed point which is the ultimate objective of the thinking process to begin with. However, there wasn’t a specific subject matter to branch out from. I just let ideas run wild and make the best out of everything that comes out.

At the beginning of every thinking process, it is important for us to adopt the TOPI tool. We need to embrace the threats and look into the opportunities through the problems while identifying spaces for improvements. Through lateral thinking, the main point is to define a focus, brainstorming, harvesting and generate new ideas. We always need to challenge our ideas; we need to see what the restrictions are and how we can incorporate these bad points into the ideas to get the best out of it. This is when we can also apply the CBA tool, cut whatever that is necessary with specific reasoning and come out with the best alternative.

During the class, there was a great thinking method that I picked up. The method is having a random entry in your thinking process. This is extremely useful when your thinking process hits a dead end. For example, my department (Risk Management) always seeks new ideas in promoting a risk awareness culture in the bank. The norms of course would be mass emailing, stress balls, mugs, posters, etc. With the method of random entry, I can just put a random word such as ‘giraffe’ and come out with a variety of new ideas.

My personal opinion is that, while the lateral thinking process is intriguing, it must be used carefully. In life, there are many occasions where people overanalyze about things which are unnecessary. My advice is to put a question before the lateral thinking process. Whether or not, we need lateral thinking. And why? Secondly, if we adopt the lateral thinking process by de Bono, eventually it builds up a thinking pattern and wouldn’t that be not lateral thinking again? At that point of time, are we suppose to break the pattern of de Bono and form the Tutu thinking? I reckon we should.