Posted by Luke in The other day I was involved in something that was quite useful. In short it was a bunch of people sitting around talking about stuff. It was fun LOL. We got to talking about problem solving and one of the people sitting their said to me that they thought lateral thinking was not moving to a new position because it actually stayed inside the box… it just moved sideways. I think previously (hat tip to Alan) I may have said it was more about moving out of the box entirely. I now think this latter interpretation is more than accurate!
How do you perspective shift?
Think back to something horrible that happened to you years ago. Say you were involved in a car accident and you hurt yourself pretty badly. Say you had a bad teacher and he said you were worthless. Those words or that incident changed your perspective. It made you realise a different world. One that you had no access to up to that point. Now you think different, you feel different, you talk different and so on. Your perspective has changed. So how do you change it back? You need to find a new perspective that dissolves the old. You need to find a new image of the situation in which you take back the power and confidence that was stolen from you. This is too much information for this short note but I will be covering this again on this blog at a later date.
What’s your perspective?
Your perspective is the view you hold on something… it produces thoughts. It’s the inner beliefs you have the shape the outgoing of your perceptions. How do you know what you believe? It’s the thing that ticks away inside of you… it’s the way you frame issues such as racism for example. How do you relate to the opposite sex? That’s a perspective.
Whatever your perspective is… you are tainted by it. Thanks for reading if you got this far.
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The more I think about this, the less I seem to understand it!
As far as lateral thinking is concerned, it’s not obvious that there is a “box”. And if there is, what might it be? In practice, the only relatively fixed aspect of lateral thinking is “the problem”. But the practical application of lateral thinking does not demand exclusive focus on this problem; in fact, it is traditional “vertical” thinking that judges the value of the approaches generated by lateral thinking (value in the context of the problem).
Having said that, lateral thinking is most definitely about “re-patterning” – breaking free from the existing concepts being used to address a problem. Perhaps this is what you mean by “perspective shifting”? What you seem to be saying, though, is that your “perspective” is the part of you that is input into the process of perception. So perhaps “perspective shifting” is about changing (or suspending?) more or less core beliefs. If you identify the core beliefs as (part of) the problem, then the combination of vertical and lateral thinking might be useful in addressing it. But they might not. It depends on the extent to which the beliefs are purely conceptual, as opposed, in particular, to physiological (e.g. “visceral”, “repugnant”, “phobic”).
I think if I had 45 minutes and a whiteboard I would do better. Sometimes I write stuff that makes sense to me but nobody else seems to understand. It’s not that I am some ‘super genius’. I think it’s because I don’t express myself properly.
I certainly recognise that feeling!
Sometimes I resort to the claim that what I say has zero or one interpretation: if I am not clear, at least I am unambiguous… It’s not true, though. There are at least as many interpretations as there are readers.
Here’s one interpretation I’d disagree with: lateral thinking changes the thinking but not the thinker. But certainly the focus is on changing the thinking. I suspect that improving lateral thinking skills, by practising lateral thinking, does lead to a tendency to “re-pattern negative beliefs” (whatever that may mean), but I know of no evidence for this.