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A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering?
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 01, 2022, 08:54:03 am ---
--- Quote from: Berni on March 01, 2022, 07:52:19 am ---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.
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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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Exactly.
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on March 01, 2022, 08:40:59 am ---
--- 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".
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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").
Nominal Animal:
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.
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 01, 2022, 08:54:03 am ---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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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)
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 01, 2022, 02:54:52 pm ---I do not know of any jobs where a specific personality type was a requirement, or more useful than say personal motivation and interest.
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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.
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