A father is busy putting decorations on to the Christmas tree but as quickly as he puts them on his two-year-old son pulls them off. He is about to put the child in a play pen when his wife suggests that it might make more sease to put the tree in the play pen and leave the child outside. Instead of keeping the child away from the tree one can keep the tree away from the child. (46) Lateral (侧面的） thinking involves moving sideways to look at things in a different way. Instead of fixing on one particular approach and then working forward from that the lateral thinker tries to find other approaches.

You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. (47) Acommittee that is convinced that parking meters are the only way to control city parking will spend its time deciding what meters to use, where to put them and how to patrol them. A lateral thinker would look at other approaches: letting people park anywhere they liked so long as they left their headlights on; giving people licenses which would allow them to park free in town only one day a week and so encouraging car sharing; visible licenses that the motorist would pay for if he wanted to park anywhere in town.

Our thinking traditions are very firmly based on logical thinking in which we start off with a certain way of looking at things and then see what we can deduce from that. (48) This can be called vertical thinking since it involves building on what is accepted as traditional,Vertical thinking is for using ideas and lateral thinking is for changing them.

(49) Most of our thinking does not take place at the logical stage but at the perceptual stage which precedes this. Lateral thinking is to do with changing perceptions and finding new ways of looking at things. Lateral thinking is the practical process of creativity. There are various deliberate techniques such as the use of stepping stones (produced, for instance, by reversing the usual situation). (50) Lateral thinking turns creativity into a tool. In a patterning system such as the mind provocation is as important as analysis— and more important for changing ideas.