Author Topic: A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering?  (Read 8220 times)

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Offline e100Topic starter

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(Apologies for a rambling post, flame away if need be, but I think it's an interesting topic.)

Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering, or to put it another way can you get through an engineering degree and whole career by memorizing everything you have been taught but have no ability to think outside the box?

I once saw someone describe engineering as "approximate applied math for profit" and when presented with a problem you draw upon your knowledge to figure out what math is needed to come up with a solution that is 'good enough' to make money. It doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough.

But what if the problem falls outside of the scope of everything you have been taught? You are now in a zone where books aren't going to help you. How are you going to come up with a solution?
 

Offline penfold

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Yes and no.

Engineering education does involve simply issuing a lot of facts and expecting the student to absorb them, and it is possible to go a long way in 'engineering' just applying them. If the choice of model was wrong, or it was incorrectly applied, or circuit topology wasn't good or if everything was fine - that'll get revealed during testing  - "if(problem found) address problem; else don't;" and so many little jobs can easily go like that. Cost can be an overwhelming factor and engineers' time is expensive. Obviously, there is a paradox there because a little more time thinking can save a huge cost in the future... but project managers don't often see that and engineers rarely explain it to them well, and it is often arguably better for a corporation to release a product sooner with faults than later with none.

Most companies I've worked for were in quite niche scientific applications, where precision 10ns wide 10kV pulse generator, low-noise DC-coupled 6GHz ADC front ends and positron detectors working inside MRI fields were reasonably common requirements - for those, you tend not to find many worked examples and then keeping the design all within silly safety standards certainly requires a bit of lateral thinking.

I like to consider myself good at lateral thinking and the value I've assigned to it certainly makes my clients' eyes water... I guess that makes it a valued trait.
 

Offline eti

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Of course it is!!
 

Online tggzzz

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Individuals aren't sufficient, except in movies. Teams are necessary ,but why?

Multiple things need to happen for a project to be successful, and they require radically different skills - and hence personality traits, and hence multiple people.

One way of dividing those up is via the Myers Brigg personality factors. Now while it would be unwise to I think of that as The One Truth, if used wisely there is so e validity to the concepts.

Myers Brigg invented eight team roles, each with requiredmstrengths and allowable weaknesses, with the concept that a team need them all to be successful. One person has a primary personality and roles, but can adopt a secondary role. I can never remember the official roles, but I find that alternative team roles are easier to understand and remember. They are:
  • chairman
  • ideas man
  • critic
  • worker
  • finisher
  • communicator
  • action man

One example of an unbalanced team is two ideas men: they would have great fun but nothing would be achieved. Another, of two critics, would result in nothing novel being achieved.

The OP's thinking outside the box is the ideas man role. Beneficial in some circumstances, but not sufficient.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
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Online Wallace Gasiewicz

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As a comment about "Good Enough"

Definition of "Quality"  in manufacturing is that the product meets the customers' "Specification" or expectation.
 

Offline eti

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Lateral thinking is a light-speed shortcut to "planet solution", instead of a 50 year interstellar journety, stopping off at every single planet along the route.
 

Offline e100Topic starter

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Individuals aren't sufficient, except in movies. Teams are necessary ,but why?
Multiple things need to happen for a project to be successful, and they require radically different skills - and hence personality traits, and hence multiple people.

Interesting, does that mean that majority of one person engineering companies are doomed to fail?
Perhaps the ones that thrive aren't necessarily run by great engineers - now there's a thought to ruffle a few feathers.
 
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Offline Circlotron

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I think one good example of lateral thinking in engineering was when Thiele and Small realised that existing equations modeling the behaviour of LCR circuits could also be used to describe the behaviour of a loudspeaker in a bass reflex box. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiele/Small_parameters
 

Offline Cerebus

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Individuals aren't sufficient, except in movies. Teams are necessary ,but why?

Multiple things need to happen for a project to be successful, and they require radically different skills - and hence personality traits, and hence multiple people.

One way of dividing those up is via the Myers Brigg personality factors. Now while it would be unwise to I think of that as The One Truth, if used wisely there is so e validity to the concepts.

Myers Brigg invented eight team roles, each with requiredmstrengths and allowable weaknesses, with the concept that a team need them all to be successful. One person has a primary personality and roles, but can adopt a secondary role. I can never remember the official roles, but I find that alternative team roles are easier to understand and remember. They are:
  • chairman
  • ideas man
  • critic
  • worker
  • finisher
  • communicator
  • action man

One example of an unbalanced team is two ideas men: they would have great fun but nothing would be achieved. Another, of two critics, would result in nothing novel being achieved.

The OP's thinking outside the box is the ideas man role. Beneficial in some circumstances, but not sufficient.

You missed out an important word in front of "Myers Brigg" there, "discredited": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28315137 and https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless for example.

But every team needs an action man , it's something for the chairman to play with while everybody else gets on with doing what they're told, and the chairman's going to need a bodyguard when the solitary worker realises that he's the only one doing any actual work.

Yes, I am taking the piss, which I will do whenever anybody trots out some packaged solution for "how to do X in business", especially when access to the secret sauce involves spending money with some guru/consultants. If there was a "one size fits all" methodology for making teams run well which actually worked we'd all be using it. It's amazing that people still teach and trot out Myers Briggs rubbish decades after it was thoroughly debunked. Even if the foundation wasn't rocky as a rocky thing, think for a minute about how useless all those team roles are for say a team of postmen, or plumbers, or any team of people that do a real jobTM.

At the best these methodologies sometimes work by mere coincidence because they make people think about and analyze what they are doing, at their worst they destroy any chance of success by being followed religiously, thereby excluding any exploration of solutions that might actual work but aren't part of "the process".

For a perfect example of this look at the 'agile' development methodology currently being used to destroy productivity and produce half-functioning products in companies around the world. If it makes you think about what you're doing, for whom, how, and why, it's probably good. If however you insist that every 'ceremony' (yes, that's really what they call them) takes place, every piece of work most produce something deliverable in every 'sprint' whoever inappropriate, that you produce a "working" 'MVP' no matter how broken or useless every sprint, etc. then you're on the highway to hell.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 
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Offline Brumby

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..... look at the 'agile' development methodology currently being used to destroy productivity and produce half-functioning products .....
I've seen some curious "development methodologies" in my time.

The one that made me cringe the most was one where a development was passed from one "silo" to the next.  Each silo consisted of one or more "specialist" teams that would do their bit and then hand the whole project over to the next silo.  I found that term rather appropriate ... it's like a project was lobbed into your arena, you did your bit then chucked it over the wall to the next guy.  This completely destroyed any end-to-end monitoring and relied solely on written communication for the job to be done properly.  I saw it as a corporate version of Chinese whispers.

Fortunately, I moved on not long after I was introduced to the concept.
 

Offline T3sl4co1l

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Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering, or to put it another way can you get through an engineering degree and whole career by memorizing everything you have been taught but have no ability to think outside the box?

Yes, and yes.

Define the problem a bit more clearly:
Does an increased application of "lateral thinking" (definition pending?) result in higher wages/salaries in engineering fields?

I would think so.  We can measure this quantitatively, at least in terms of outcome, and, given access to suitable data; filtering those data by the antecedent may be less straightforward, however.

But you also asked another question:
Can you complete an engineering degree, and whole career, using wrote information?

I also think so.  I have met plenty of engineers, who are by all practical and technical definitions "engineers", and who aren't especially keen on outside-the-box thinking; everything they do is either as prescribed by textbooks, appnotes, etc., or passed down as given from on high.

Regarding math, I think so as well, but not to the vaunted level we would like to think -- 99% of engineering consists of busywork/housekeeping (project management, office politics as applicable, part and supplier selection, etc.), basic arithmetic (evaluating equations as given in appnotes / etc.), and informal combinatorics (finding the right set / permutation / sequence to more-or-less satisfy some largely-incomplete constraints/specifications).  Even for the most erudite among the most common types of engineer, calculus and such makes up only a very small fraction of overall activity.  Less common types can use more -- for example, sooner or later, someone needs to write the simulation tools used by others, which will involve field equations, differential equations, and vector calculus, so, implicitly, calculus and linear algebra as well.  Though it's probably arguable that again, 95%+ is spent on combinatorics: writing code to implement those functions.

I can probably reduce that further and just say it's all combinatorics, as that's ultimately what squishy neural networks are good at; that, and detecting (pattern matching) environmental cues to, you know, learn all of language and society and how to actually do a job, as presented by other squishy-neural-networks.

Tim
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electronic design, from concept to prototype.
Bringing a project to life?  Send me a message!
 

Offline Berni

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So Wikipedia defines it as:
Code: [Select]
[b]Lateral thinkin[/b]g is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious. It involves ideas that may not be obtainable using only traditional step-by-step logic.

I would certainly say it is a useful thing.

You don't always find a ready to go solution for whatever you are trying to make. You can sometimes build the required solution out of a combination of existing solutions, but if you stick too much to that you risk the "When you know how to use a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" issue where you force a solution into something it really was not meant for.

Yes a lot of engineering work is reading datasheets, drawing diagrams, documenting things. But you have to also come up with design ideas at some point. Sure it might just take a minute of pondering to come up with the idea, but how good that idea is might have a big impact on how the rest of the project goes.

The LT appnotes from Jim Williams are a great example of this. He uses chips and discrete components in all sorts of crazy ways to the point where you look at his schematic for a while and then go "Wait.. you can do that?". Often accomplishing some pretty tough tasks with deceivingly simple yet genius circuits.
 

Offline SL4P

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YES to the holder, but most managers are unlikely to see or understand what it is.
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Offline Nominal Animal

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One can be productive in engineering by only knowing things by rote.

One can be an excellent engineer by applying logic and rational thinking effectively.

One can be a brilliant engineer by applying logic, and rational and lateral thinking.

One is an asshole (and not an "idea person"), if they only apply lateral thinking but not logic or more traditional methods of problem solving.



Thinking outside the box (as in re-evaluating the problem at hand, considering whether it even needs to be solved to perform the task at hand) is useful in all creative endeavours.  It isn't always necessary, because not all work (including engineering or even research) is necessarily creative.

Being incapable of rational thought or logic, and being incapable of applying traditional problem solving methods, does mean one is unsuitable for creative work.  Those who describe themselves as an "ideas person", who gets the brilliant idea, describes it in a single sentence "to a fleet of designer and engineer drones to implement it", are assholes.  I have had dozens of "ideas persons" approach me with a "brilliant idea", suggesting that if I implement their idea, I get 50% of the profits.  Or less.  This is unrealistic, because a single idea is just the starting point in the solution phase space.  Problem solving methods are like rolling a marble downhill, to find the lowest point reachable from a given starting point.  Creative thinking is finding reasons for picking specific starting points that should lead to better (lower) end points.  Lateral thinking and thinking outside the box is changing the entire phase space, by replacing dimensions with something else, with the change being such that it suggests promising starting points.  The starting point is worth nothing, unless it is followed by the hard work finding the end result.

You have to learn the rules first, before you can break them beneficially without any harm.  No shortcuts exist.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2022, 06:57:50 am by Nominal Animal »
 
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Offline tautech

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Consider what might initiate lateral thinking, new technologies of course and/or pressure from managers and bean counters.  ::)
Instrument/appliance PSU's are a fine example and SMPS has evolved in my lifetime to be the most common current source on the planet and allowed the miniaturization of all manner of things.
Reduced size, weight, increased efficiencies and lower copper content are all features that have reduced PSU cost keeping designers and bean counters happy.

We now consider the simple SMPS a basic design whereas just a few decades ago the even simpler linear PSU ruled the roost until someone thought laterally and used the new technologies available to them.

If you can't think outside the square you shouldn't be in this game.
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Offline Berni

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Yeah such "ideas people" are rarely any help at all.

It certainly is helpful to discuss a design with someone. I had plenty of good ideas come out of it, sometimes even as just a "rubber duck effect" where in trying to describe the issue you get extra ideas. But when you have someone from outside the field chiming in ideas, you do get outside the box ideas that are instead really difficult to actually implement or are things that you know would perform poorly before even doing any back of the napkin math. Then you typically have to spend a lot of time explaining to them why there brilliant idea is not quite so brilliant.

The one good use for "ideas people" is coming up with kickstarter projects to run a invest and disappear scam on.
 

Online tggzzz

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Individuals aren't sufficient, except in movies. Teams are necessary ,but why?

Multiple things need to happen for a project to be successful, and they require radically different skills - and hence personality traits, and hence multiple people.

One way of dividing those up is via the Myers Brigg personality factors. Now while it would be unwise to I think of that as The One Truth, if used wisely there is so e validity to the concepts.

Myers Brigg invented eight team roles, each with requiredmstrengths and allowable weaknesses, with the concept that a team need them all to be successful. One person has a primary personality and roles, but can adopt a secondary role. I can never remember the official roles, but I find that alternative team roles are easier to understand and remember. They are:
  • chairman
  • ideas man
  • critic
  • worker
  • finisher
  • communicator
  • action man

One example of an unbalanced team is two ideas men: they would have great fun but nothing would be achieved. Another, of two critics, would result in nothing novel being achieved.

The OP's thinking outside the box is the ideas man role. Beneficial in some circumstances, but not sufficient.

You missed out an important word in front of "Myers Brigg" there, "discredited": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28315137 and https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless for example.

Yes and no.

I've been through the 16PF test as part of being interviewed for a job and in interview panels.

After the interview the "interpreter" explained to the company what it was about, and three friends shared our results. They were all remarkably perceptive e.g. "I hate to sound sexist, but she seems loveable", even though the interpreter didn't meet us.

In the interview panels the interpreter gave pointlessly anodyne statements that could have been made by anybody that had met the interviewee for a few minutes - which he had done.

Conclusion 1: the results do depend on the interpreter, and aren't as rigorous as claimed.
Conclusion 2: the right interpreter can gain remarkable insights. In this case a chess grandmaster, who presumably is used to spotting spatial/numerical patterns.

Quote
But every team needs an action man , it's something for the chairman to play with while everybody else gets on with doing what they're told, and the chairman's going to need a bodyguard when the solitary worker realises that he's the only one doing any actual work.

The action man role was "don't know where else to fit them" :)

Quote
At the best these methodologies sometimes work by mere coincidence because they make people think about and analyze what they are doing, at their worst they destroy any chance of success by being followed religiously, thereby excluding any exploration of solutions that might actual work but aren't part of "the process".

The "sometimes" had a 100% hit rate, with the right interpreter and right division of roles. I could never understand the standard roles such as "plant".

The companies used the interview results sensibly: as a source of questions in the second interview. Otherwise they were ignored.

Overall it is very useful mechanism for realising that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and you need to cover one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.

Quote
For a perfect example of this look at the 'agile' development methodology currently being used to destroy productivity and produce half-functioning products in companies around the world. If it makes you think about what you're doing, for whom, how, and why, it's probably good. If however you insist that every 'ceremony' (yes, that's really what they call them) takes place, every piece of work most produce something deliverable in every 'sprint' whoever inappropriate, that you produce a "working" 'MVP' no matter how broken or useless every sprint, etc. then you're on the highway to hell.

Agreed.

I too intensely dislike the "magic" and "religion" of agile methods. When they fail and the excuse is that you only used 11 of the 12 principles, it is not a good advert for the methods! Nonetheless, they can have value if they jolt a company out of sclerotic waterfall practices.

But overall they are no subsititue for a team of people that know how to create something new.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
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Online tggzzz

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..... look at the 'agile' development methodology currently being used to destroy productivity and produce half-functioning products .....
I've seen some curious "development methodologies" in my time.

The one that made me cringe the most was one where a development was passed from one "silo" to the next.  Each silo consisted of one or more "specialist" teams that would do their bit and then hand the whole project over to the next silo.  I found that term rather appropriate ... it's like a project was lobbed into your arena, you did your bit then chucked it over the wall to the next guy.  This completely destroyed any end-to-end monitoring and relied solely on written communication for the job to be done properly.  I saw it as a corporate version of Chinese whispers.

Fortunately, I moved on not long after I was introduced to the concept.

I've seen exactly that too. Sclerotic and dysfunctional.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Offline DiTBho

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"rubber duck effect"

Pragmatic Programmer, I prefer the Rubber duck (debugging) effect, a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken natural language.

It actually works  :D
The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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It certainly is helpful to discuss a design with someone. I had plenty of good ideas come out of it, sometimes even as just a "rubber duck effect" where in trying to describe the issue you get extra ideas.
Yes; I personally have done my best work in a team with only slightly overlapping domains of knowledge and responsibility.  I claim it can be synergistic, if there is sufficient trust (so that egos do not become a hindrance) and honest, direct communication.

And the rubber duck effect is real: describing ideas in a structured linear fashion necessarily organizes that idea.  It is a process that works.

The point of my post was combining lateral thinking with logic and hard work can yield brilliant results; but lateral thinking alone, without the knowledge or the hard drudge work going through the steps, is really not useful at all.  That is, one cannot use lateral thinking as a shortcut to avoid learning, or to avoid the drudge work.  It just doesn't work that way.
 
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Online tggzzz

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It certainly is helpful to discuss a design with someone. I had plenty of good ideas come out of it, sometimes even as just a "rubber duck effect" where in trying to describe the issue you get extra ideas.
Yes; I personally have done my best work in a team with only slightly overlapping domains of knowledge and responsibility.  I claim it can be synergistic, if there is sufficient trust (so that egos do not become a hindrance) and honest, direct communication.

And the rubber duck effect is real: describing ideas in a structured linear fashion necessarily organizes that idea.  It is a process that works.

The point of my post was combining lateral thinking with logic and hard work can yield brilliant results; but lateral thinking alone, without the knowledge or the hard drudge work going through the steps, is really not useful at all.  That is, one cannot use lateral thinking as a shortcut to avoid learning, or to avoid the drudge work.  It just doesn't work that way.

Exactly.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Offline Cerebus

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Quote
At the best these methodologies sometimes work by mere coincidence because they make people think about and analyze what they are doing, at their worst they destroy any chance of success by being followed religiously, thereby excluding any exploration of solutions that might actual work but aren't part of "the process".

The "sometimes" had a 100% hit rate, with the right interpreter and right division of roles. I could never understand the standard roles such as "plant".

In your experience – probably just of one place that used it and had a culture that was the real cause for success. Need I remind your that "anecdote ≠ evidence". Like I say, if Myers Briggs actually works, and isn't merely a 100 year old management religion cobbled together out of fragments of Jungian psychology, if it actually works, all the time, everybody would use it. They do not. No doubt some of the places that use graphology in employee selection get good results albeit by happenstance, and I'm sure some ancient Roman businesses had immense success in employee selection using Augurs to read animal entrails.

Quote

Overall it is very useful mechanism for realising that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and you need to cover one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.

You don't need Myers Brigs to tell you that, and it doesn't purport to exist to remind you of "different strokes for different folks", it purports to provide an accurate personality analysis and any psychologist will tell you that it does not and if that is what you want that there are modern personality inventory tests that will (for some probabilistically quantifiable value of "will").

Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Regardless of whether Myers-Briggs is valid or not, I believe it to be the wrong tool for selecting workers or team members.  The reason is, the personality types I've worked best with have varied wildly, and have not correlated with the task at hand.

Furthermore, things like customer service does NOT require an extrovert personality type.  It is a simple skill that can be taught to almost all humans.  I do not know of any jobs where a specific personality type was a requirement, or more useful than say personal motivation and interest.

I suspect that the best interviewers and evaluators that use Myers-Briggs terminology, use the terminology to describe their observations on how the target person interacts with others, instead of using Myers-Briggs as a framework to estimate or predict how they might interact with others.
 

Offline Cerebus

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The point of my post was combining lateral thinking with logic and hard work can yield brilliant results; but lateral thinking alone, without the knowledge or the hard drudge work going through the steps, is really not useful at all.  That is, one cannot use lateral thinking as a shortcut to avoid learning, or to avoid the drudge work.  It just doesn't work that way.

My innate suspicion on encountering the sort of person who starts with telling you "I'm good at lateral thinking" is that they have left out the second half of the sentence "but I'm terrible at logical thinking or actually getting on and doing something".   >:D

Edward de Bono, the father of the term Lateral Thinking, might possibly have become a one trick pony in his latter career, but I blame that on the tendency of the great unwashed to religiously grasp some ideas and turn their originators into gurus whether they like it or not. Unfortunately it seems de Bono wasn't resistant to this pressure.  His original aim was to study creativity and how to teach people to be creative thinkers and what he identified as one route he dubbed Lateral Thinking.

But Lateral Thinking isn't the only route to creative thinking. Indeed we all know people who are highly creative who might nevertheless stumble over many of the "lateral thinking puzzles" that have become the trademark of this school of thinking. I find it ironic that most lateral thinking puzzles have a correct answer, which suggests that the exercise tends towards teaching a formulaic problem solving method rather than a creative one. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a lot of people who are fans of Lateral Thinking haven't even heard of Edward de Bono, let alone actually read any of this books,

As it is, I don't think we have yet found a method to teach creative thinking, not in "Lateral ThinkingTM" nor in other schools of thought. So perhaps the original question should not be about lateral thinking but about whether creativity ought to be a valued trait. If that was the question I would answer with an unqualified "yes".

Edit: Typo (literal)
« Last Edit: March 01, 2022, 03:13:27 pm by Cerebus »
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 
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Offline Cerebus

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I do not know of any jobs where a specific personality type was a requirement, or more useful than say personal motivation and interest.

I don't know, I think narcissistic megalomania and psychopathy are pretty much prerequisite personality traits for any actual or 'want to be' totalitarian dictator.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 


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