Five More Brilliant Examples of Lateral Thinking
“Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces.”
Some time ago, we wrote a post on five brilliant examples of lateral thinking.
Since then, we’ve been looking for other interesting examples and decided to share our favourites.
In an increasingly complex world, lateral thinking skills offer an advantage.
Many tools are available to help you think this way, and our Creative Thinking course covers some of the best ones.
If you want to learn more about this fascinating topic, where better to start than the book ‘Lateral Thinking’ by Edward de Bono, who coined the term?
In the meantime, here are some great examples that might inspire you to find your own creative solutions.
1. The Bigger The Hole
Many of us have spice jars sitting in our kitchen cupboards that have been around for years.
This is not good news for spice companies who want to sell more of their product. To tackle the problem, one company challenged its workforce to come up with ideas.
All sorts of suggestions came back, including redesigning the packaging to make it more appealing and offering different sizes of containers.
The chosen solution?
Making bigger holes in the top of the jars!
2. Google Sheep-view
The Faroe Islands are a remote outcrop between Iceland and Norway to the far North of Scotland.
Around 50,000 people live there, and many parts of the islands are hard to access by car.
This posed a challenge for Google and its Street View mapping service. How could they grab images of the island without being able to drive their street-view cars around?
In a stroke of lateral thinking genius, someone suggested they use sheep. After all, the island is covered with them, so that’s what they did. They strapped their camera equipment onto the backs of the sheep and let them roam the island, taking photos.
Google then used these photos to model the island on Street View.
3. Nakedly Breaking The Law
In America, each state has their own set of laws.
What’s fair game in one can be prohibited in another. Take strip clubs, for example.
In Boise, Idaho, full nudity is banned in public places. This has obvious implications if you are the owner of a strip club.
But this didn’t stop one creative venue from sidestepping local laws by inviting customers to draw pictures of the dancers.
The proprietor of the Erotic City Strip Club, Chris Teague, charged $15 for a sketch pad, pencil, and dance as part of its “Art Club Night” and commented, "We have a lot of people drawing some very good pictures."
The law states that full nudity is only permitted if the display has “serious artistic merit”.
4. Caught In The Act
In 2015, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) set up the University of Farmington, a fictitious University, in an attempt to catch overseas students illegally extending their visas.
They charged the students thousands of dollars to apply.
They then deported them and kept the money. Ouch.
5. Vulfpeck’s ‘Silent’ Album
Vulfpeck is a Michigan-based funk band that employed a heavy dose of lateral thinking to raise money for its 2014 tour.
Instead of marketing their tour traditionally, the band released a five-minute album of silence on Spotify.
Then, they asked fans to stream that album overnight, again and again, to generate revenue for the band.
Surprisingly, this little trick worked, enabling the band to raise $20,000.
Vulfpeck’s silent album is a perfect example of using lateral thinking in marketing and exploiting a loophole in Spotify’s rules at the time.
We’ll sing to that.
