From a business perspective, lateral thinking improves problem solving skills, and is a great way to kick-off a planning or problem-solving meeting. The general idea is that verbal and analytical processing tends to occur in your brain's left hemisphere; visual and graphic processing happens on the right. By translating pictures into words or words into pictures, you are brain-shifting (in layman's terms). Cultivating this ability enables you to view a problem or an opportunity in a wider variety of ways than without lateral thinking.
How do you cultivate this ability? One of my favorite ways is to play a form of Pictionary(r), a game that gives you a word or a phrase that you have to get others to guess by using only non-verbal images. So if you are the player who is drawing, you first read the card (left side), and then translate it into images (right side). The audience looks at your scribbles, and tries to verbalize what it is that you are drawing.
As a meeting ice-breaker, it not only gets the brain-shifting circuits working, it tends to energize and relax people at the same time. I will often use terms related to the purpose of the meeting to get people thinking along those lines. For example, if I were facilitating a project planning session, I might have terms such as: project, schedule, scope, and milestone. I start the meeting with the easy one, and draw something like you see in the diagram below.
If that didn't work I might try a chart with a forecasting arrow, to represent another way to "project." If that still did not work, I might try a "sounds like" and draw a dog protecting a house. How would you picture it? How about the others?
Another good exercise for lateral thinking is a rebus puzzle. Here, the idea is to look at the words in the puzzle as a graphical image, to understand the implied word or phrase. For example:
MOON
MIAMI
would elicit the song, "Moon over Miami." The Franklin Institute has a page of fun puzzlers.
No shift -- try it, it's fun.
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