Creativity and Lateral Thinking - Edward De Bono

From the beginning of our lives, we are constituted as subjects from others: first our parents and the rest of those who make up our family circle, later school, clubs or other spaces of socialization. We are born in a certain culture, with certain customs, rules and ways of thinking that are instilled in us since we were boys, and that after great exercises and transmits almost in a constant automatism.

We learn to see, think and understand the world that surrounds us in only one way: the one we were taught; because within that "understanding of the world", many times they make us believe that being outside the norm is bad, it is "abnormal", and consequently, reason for exclusion. And that always terrifies us, nobody wants to be left out. But the reality is that many of the great characters who made history are not only those who dared to think differently but those who also were encouraged to face the world with conviction.

Human thought is characterized above all by its logic, which translates into unidirectionality, uniformity, and mechanicity. We can also relate it to the innate, the unconscious and repetitive. This means that logical thinking is bad, quite the opposite. It is essentially human, and therefore necessary, since it is our means to develop ourselves and our ideas. But there is something more inherent to the human and necessary, is what Edward De Bono called as "lateral thinking".

Lateral thinking is the capacity that we all have, only that sometimes we forget to develop it. It implies leaving aside that unique way of seeing the world to begin to understand it in its diversity. it has to do with the ability to symbolize, with the creative, with the understanding that nothing is what it seems, that there are always different points of view, and that all can be valid. It has to do with construction, and with that capacity that our conscience has to analyze, question and rethink everything that surrounds us, and even to ourselves.