Lateral Thinking

A few weeks ago I mentioned the incident during the Great Train Robbery of 1963 when the need to alter a green signal to red was achieved by covering up the green signal and placing a red lamp nearby. In the darkness of a Buckinghamshire night the deception was undetectable. To my mind this is one of the great real life examples of lateral thinking.

First publicised in 1967, by Edward de Bono, lateral thinking implies solving a problem by not tackling it head on, or “vertically”, but coming at it sideways as it were, perhaps by adding in some new and unexpected feature, some kind of turbulence, going via an “impossible” middle situation, or applying an unusual thinking strategy. De Bono produced several books on the subject, with examples guaranteed to make one feel stupid. The examples that regularly get cited provide infuriating puzzles for parties or job interviews but, I suspect, are not of great practical significance. These days they get subsumed under the cliché of “thinking out of the box”. Some jokes work on the same principle. Rowan Atkinson, in some of his “Mr. Bean” films, applies inappropriate but workable solutions to domestic situations, releasing humour and using much the same kind of thinking.

Though, as we have seen, lateral thinking does turn up from time to time in real life, the popular examples can appear artificial and contrived. For instance, the question of whether a monk, struggling up a steep mountain slope to a sacred site at the top, is ever at exactly the same place as when he returns down the slope, albeit more easily and at a higher speed. This conundrum is solved by superimposing mental images of the monk, or indeed two monks, ascending and descending the mountain simultaneously. If you like, you can picture the situation as a kind of graph. However irregular the path, at some point it is clear that they must meet, and are thus at the same point at the same time. Another favourite is of the man who lives on the eleventh floor of a block of flats but when taking the lift always presses the button for the seventh floor, gets out there and continues via the stairs. There are two (at least) possible answers as to why he does this: (1) that he is trying to keep fit and (2), the “lateral thinking” answer, that he is of short stature and cannot reach beyond the seventh floor button. 

Back to real life. Well, kind of. In the last few weeks we have heard that Boris is supposed to send a particular letter to Brussels with respect to the Brexit negotiations. He doesn’t want to do this, and he’s said he isn’t going to, but the law demands it. If he fails to send it there will be consequences. I don’t know what the evidence is for this, but it has been suggested – in a true example of lateral thinking – that he will send the letter, and then send a second letter asking for the first letter to be ignored. Disingenuous or what? This is actually not quite as original a strategy as it might seem. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged several letters. One of them, with potentially fearful consequences, JFK ignored, and replied instead to the next letter from the Soviet leader. Disaster was averted and the world could breathe again. The principle is much the same as with Boris’s alleged proposed subterfuge.

As Sherlock Holmes said, fictionally, when you are having difficulty solving a problem, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Last night, getting out of bed in the wee wee hours to go to the bathroom, I was aware of treading on some strange, crinkly material on the bedroom floor. Nothing had fallen off the bed, there was nothing wrong with the carpet, and when I investigated further there was absolutely nothing there. It took me a little while to reach a conclusion, but eventually the answer was obvious and unavoidable, though admittedly unexpected. Part of my foot had fallen off.

Not quite as dramatic as it sounds. Some two months ago I had gone for a long walk in an unwise pair of shoes. There was some irregularity in the right shoe and after a couple of miles I developed a blood blister under my right heel. It hurt slightly for a few days but the whole of the base of the heel turned black and looked completely horrible. What happened last night was that, having forgotten all about it (for obvious reasons it was difficult to observe) the skin underneath my heel had died and dried up and was starting to crack and fall off, although for the time being was still attached to my foot. However improbable, that was the truth. That was the crinkly stuff I trod on. Thankfully, no illustrations this time.