Curiosity, Creativity and Thinking from the Side

An interview with Paul Sloane

“Everybody is capable of being more creative and introducing more variety and experimentation into their life — if they are prepared to take a little risk”

If you’re tired of being told to ‘think outside the box’, you might have more luck with lateral thinking. Not familiar with the term? Take the lead from an expert…

Paul Sloane is a speaker, author, course leader and facilitator who specialises in innovation and creative thinking. As well as lecturing at top universities and business schools, Paul hosts leadership masterclasses for companies around the world. His 2016 Tedx Talk, ‘Are You Open Minded? Three Ways to Break Thinking Patterns’, has over 139,000 views on YouTube.

Paul has published at least 20 books, selling over 2 million copies in total. His most recent title is Lateral Thinking for Every Day: Extraordinary Solutions to Ordinary Problems (2023).

A new year is the perfect time to start a new habit. In this interview, Paul explains how striving to be more creative and curious can help you become a lateral problem-solver.

Can you explain what lateral thinking is and how it benefits us?

Lateral thinking means approaching a problem from a fresh direction — the definition of ‘lateral’ is ‘from the side’. In most situations we face, whether at work or at home, we typically follow a routine. However, there’s often a smarter and better way to do things. This is what the lateral thinker is always looking for: a fresh approach to tackling a problem.

As an example, a student hall of residence in the UK had a broken landline — this was before the days of mobile phones. When the students reported the issue and requested an engineer to fix it, the telephone company said, ‘We’re very busy at the moment, so it will probably be a week or two before we can send someone.’ Then, one of the students had a lateral idea; they called the company again and said, ‘You know the phone that’s broken in our hall of residence? Well, people are making free calls to Australia on that phone.’ Unsurprisingly, the company sent an engineer straight away to fix the issue. So, that’s lateral thinking in action — a sneaky, more effective way to get things done.

Once we learn to think laterally, are our brains wired that way forever? Or is lateral thinking a skill that needs to be practised and trained?

I think it’s a skill that children naturally possess. They tend to approach problems from a curious point of view, questioning their parents about everything. This is their way of testing every hypothesis in order to understand the world better. As we get older, we stop asking questions, our curiosity dries up and we develop a set way of doing things. We think, ‘I’ve done this before and it worked, so why bother trying anything else?’ Children are the ones who ask basic, but important, questions.

We’re all natural lateral thinkers, but this tendency is ground out of us by following repetitive processes. A good way to redevelop this skill is by reading one of my books. Lateral Thinking for Every Day has a lot of examples, puzzles, challenges and techniques to help anyone become a lateral thinker.

It’s widely accepted that innovation and creativity produce more effective teams and organisations. How can leveraging these skills help people in their day-to-day lives, outside work?

Business leaders often talk about the need for innovation and creativity; lateral thinking is the key to unlocking innovation. This approach is also useful in other situations; it will help you become a more interesting and curious person, listen better and be more open to new opportunities. I’m trying to encourage people to break out of their routines, sidestep the obvious and embrace lateral thinking. It will make your life more fun!

Your book emphasises the importance of challenging assumptions and being open-minded. How does creativity help us overcome internal bias and preconceptions, as well as socially-conditioned habits?

We all have internal biases and preconceptions that frame our world, severely limiting our possibilities. Lateral thinking puzzles rely on people making the wrong assumption, which makes it harder for them to solve the problem.

We make assumptions all the time, especially if we meet someone new. This tendency goes back to the Stone Age; if you saw someone from another tribe who looked different, you would instinctively fear them as a potential threat.

Nowadays, this kind of assumption can make us prejudiced and biassed. It’s important to begin with a curious, open mind. A good thing to do in any situation is to ask yourself, ‘What assumptions am I making here? What if every assumption I make is wrong?’. This applies in both business and social relationships.

Is there any way to prevent these assumptions from happening?

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says that thinking fast immediately puts thoughts in our minds. We automatically assume that our current situation is similar to a past situation or experience. But it’s likely to be different because things have changed; what was true last year is no longer true, and vice versa. For instance, leaders should reconsider the assumptions they make about whether people will come into the office or work from home. They need to ask questions and consider the opposite position, which I advocate for in my book.

Your book features examples from inspirational lateral thinkers like Lady Gaga, Elon Musk and Tim Berners-Lee. I never thought of Lady Gaga as a lateral thinker, so please enlighten me!

Lady Gaga has done some remarkable things, such as turning up to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards in a dress made of meat. It shocked and offended a lot of people. She explained the reasoning behind this decision in a YouTube video for British Vogue; it was a statement about fighting for what you believe in. I think it was mainly a publicity stunt, but it worked.

Another clever illustration of lateral thinking is Adele’s decision to enter a singing contest for look-alikes, wearing a disguise. After the impersonators performed, she came on and absolutely nailed it. It was a marvellous piece of television, especially when the contestants realised they were in the presence of the real Adele.

Chapter 61 is all about experiments. What is the value in experimenting with ideas, even if they fail?

Well, you don’t know until you try! Lateral thinkers don’t trust experts. They don’t trust theory, but they do trust experiments. Guglielmo Marconi was a young Italian inventor and radio pioneer. He came to Britain in 1896 to test his theory about whether it was possible to send radio waves across long distances, like the Atlantic Ocean. The experts insisted it wouldn’t work: ‘Just look at the facts: radio waves travel in straight lines and the earth is a giant sphere. The radio waves will just go tangentially into space, never to be heard again’.

Marconi decided to try anyway. In 1901, he set up a transmitter in Cornwall and a receiver in Newfoundland. Amazingly, the signal was received. Unbeknownst to Marconi and the physicists of the time, there is a charged layer around the earth (the ionosphere) that reflects the signal.

Things that shouldn’t work often do work, whereas things that should work sometimes don’t work. The only way to find out is to test it in the real world. Empirical data is what lateral thinkers trust.

A lot of success happens by accident, then?

Things tend to find their own way. When I was Managing Director of Ashton-Tate, we had a fantastic product called Framework. We marketed it to first-time users in large corporations as the only piece of software they would need, because it did everything. It sold reasonably well, but we discovered from a survey that it was mostly used by experts in small organisations, alongside other software. So, all of the assumptions we’d made about the positioning of our product were wrong.

Sometimes you just need to throw a product at the market, aim it at your target audience and then study how people are actually using it. You learn from your customers by asking for feedback and experimenting. Really smart marketing companies listen to their customers and adapt their products and strategies in light of what they learn.

You did a degree in Engineering before working for various technology and software companies — in roles ranging from Marketing Director to CEO. What led you into the business world and why did you decide not to pursue engineering further?

I studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge before working for the Ministry of Defence, which I didn’t really enjoy. I then joined IBM (the International Business Machines Corporation) as an engineer and realised that it wasn’t about manufacturing — that was just a subset. IBM was all about sales and marketing. I wanted to find out how people used computers, rather than just how to build them. So, I transferred into sales and was very successful; I learnt a lot about the world by meeting different companies and trying to solve their problems.

That experience gave me a good foundation in business. When I became Marketing Director, I found that the challenge of marketing was much more fun than engineering. You can try all sorts of crazy things in software marketing; the same piece of software could be worth $10,000 for some people, but only $10 for others. There’s enormous flexibility in how you position and promote things, which I found really interesting.

I started collecting lateral thinking puzzles, which I had always loved doing. I published a book of them in 1991, called Lateral Thinking Puzzlers. It’s been a bestseller ever since and is still in print! I started to think about how the techniques used to solve puzzles could be applied to business problems. That’s how I ended up presenting and running workshops to facilitate the introduction of lateral thinking methods in businesses.

Do you think that your engineering background provided a foundation for learning to think laterally?

Engineers have to find clever ways to solve problems. Let me tell you my favourite engineering story… In a city, thieves were stealing the light bulbs from the subways, leaving them dark and dangerous at night. The city asked a municipal engineer to solve this problem, on a small budget and without changing the location of the bulbs. So, he came up with a lateral solution: he changed all the light bulbs from a clockwise thread to an anti-clockwise fitting. So, if a thief tried to unscrew a bulb, they would end up tightening it. This is pure lateral thinking, leveraging the assumption of how things usually work.

Today, universities are under pressure to produce more employable graduates. Do you think that critical and lateral thinking skills should be taught as part of all higher education courses?

Once upon a time, people would go to university to be challenged on their ideas. Nowadays, students are expected to learn by rote. Universities have almost turned into factories; they don’t encourage enough critical thinking, debate or creativity. If you churn out the right essay, you can get a 2:1 pretty easily in most places.

It’s not easy to formally introduce lateral thinking into a curriculum, but it’s something that a great teacher or lecturer can do successfully in a small classroom environment. Educators are in an ideal position to encourage people to challenge their own thinking, but I’m afraid that remote learning and AI chatbots will enable students to produce standard responses and still get reasonable marks. That’s no way to encourage the creative thinking that businesses and societies need.

A potential solution would be to reward creativity. For instance, if an essay wasn’t necessarily correct, it could still get marks for originality.

I wrote a blog post about Rob Law, the entrepreneur who appeared on the BBC show Dragons’ Den with his Trunki product idea. As part of his master’s degree in Design, Rob was challenged to come up with a new form of luggage. He went into a department store and wandered around the luggage displays, which weren’t very inspiring. He then went into the toy department for a different point of view. His lateral idea was to combine luggage with a toy, resulting in a ride-on/carry-on suitcase for children. This is a great example of the education system promoting a creative idea that turned into a successful business.

What are the key takeaways from Lateral Thinking for Every Day?

First, everybody is capable of being more creative and introducing more variety and experimentation into their life — if they are prepared to take a little risk. I would encourage people to try something different every day; eat a new breakfast, sit in a new spot, take a different route to work, visit a museum you’ve never been to before. Seeing something different will stimulate you and make your life more interesting.

Second, everyone should ask more questions — especially basic questions. When somebody comes to you with a fresh idea, don’t immediately shoot it down. If you’ve got a lot of experience or expertise, it’s easy to find fault with other people’s ideas. Instead, try opening a discussion, asking for more information and exploring new possibilities. All of this will lead to lateral thinking.

A range of online courses, lateral puzzles, tools and resources can be found on Paul’s website, Destination Innovation.

Discover some of his other books on Perlego:

• The Innovative Leader: How to Inspire your Team and Drive Creativity (2007)
• How to be a Brilliant Thinker: Exercise Your Mind and Find Creative Solutions (2010)
• A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing: Advice from Leading Experts in the Field (editor, 2011)
• The Leader’s Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills: Unlock the Creativity and Innovation in You and Your Team (2017)
• Lateral Thinking for Every Day: Extraordinary Solutions to Ordinary Problems (2023)