Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practis… - Edward de Bono

What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.

Creative thinking — in terms of idea creativity — is not a mystical talent. It is a skill that can be practised and nurtured. You can never tell how a policy has been reached just by looking at the end result. Some people who have achieved a huge amount do not come across as impressive when you speak to them.

With vertical thinking one may look for different approaches until one finds a promising one. With lateral thinking one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them.