The Little Blue Reasoning Book - Brandon Royal [6]
Creative or Lateral Thinking:
❧ Creative thinking is sideways thinking.
❧ Creative thinking is back-door thinking.
❧ Creative thinking is spontaneous thinking.
❧ Creative thinking is low-probability thinking.
❧ Creative thinking is primarily right-brain thinking.
❧ Creative thinking is “outside-the-box” thinking.
❧ Creative thinking is like a river which overflows and moves in new directions.
Traditional or Vertical Thinking:
❧ Vertical thinking is straightforward thinking.
❧ Vertical thinking is front-door thinking.
❧ Vertical thinking is logical thinking.
❧ Vertical thinking is high-probability thinking.
❧ Vertical thinking is primarily left-brain thinking.
❧ Vertical thinking is “inside-the-box” thinking.
❧ Vertical thinking is like a river which follows a set course.
The concept of creative thinking is somewhat more difficult to describe than to illustrate. The following story suffices as a noteworthy example.
Many years ago, a hapless merchant owed a substantial sum of money to a wealthy moneylender. Unable to pay back his debt, the merchant knew that the moneylender could see to it that he was put in jail.
The moneylender was old, ugly, and ill-tempered, but he couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the merchant’s teenage daughter was. He proposed a deal to relinquish the debt and ensure that the daughter would not starve as a result of her father’s going to jail.
The moneylender said he would place two small stones, one white and one black, into an empty money-bag and permit the splendid young lady to choose her fate. If she reached into the bag and chose the white stone, her father’s debt would be canceled and she would be free from any obligation to marry him. If the stone was black, the father’s debt would be canceled, but the young girl would have to marry the moneylender. If she refused to choose, the father would immediately go to jail.
Horrified by their present predicament, the father and daughter knew they could not refuse the moneylender’s proposal for debt relief.
What would you have done if you had been the unfortunate girl? If you had been asked to advise her, what would you have told her to do? You may believe that careful, logical analysis would solve the problem, if there were a solution. This type of traditional, straightforward thinking is not much help to the girl in this story. In this respect, there are but two possibilities:
1. The girl should take a black pebble and sacrifice herself in order to save her father from prison.
2. The girl should refuse to choose a pebble, show that there are two black pebbles in the bag, expose the moneylender as a cheat, and demand a fair retrial.
This story shows the difference between traditional thinking and creative thinking. Traditional thinkers are concerned with the fact that the girl has to take the pebble and on how the parameters of the “game” are fixed. Creative thinkers are concerned with changing the focus or parameters of the game. Traditional thinkers take the reasonable view of a situation and then proceed logically and carefully to work it out. Creative thinkers tend to explore all the different ways of looking at something, rather than accepting the most promising and proceeding from that.
Soon the moment of truth had arrived. The three of them met on the garden path of the moneylender’s large home. The moneylender bent over to pick up two small rocks. The girl grimaced with fright upon noticing that the moneylender had picked up two small rocks, both of them black, which he now placed in the money bag.
“Please choose, my fair maiden,” he said. The young woman reached into the money bag and pulled out a rock, which she purposefully let fall to the ground and