You know the feeling. You’ve been staring at the same problem for an hour, and every idea you come up with is a slightly different version of the last one. The harder you push, the deeper the rut gets.
That rut has a name in psychology: fixation. Your brain grabs the most familiar route to a solution and keeps walking it, even when it plainly leads nowhere. Lateral thinking, a term coined by the writer Edward de Bono in the late 1960s, is the habit of stepping off that route on purpose. Instead of digging the same hole deeper, you dig somewhere else.
The good news is that this isn’t a gift some people are born with. It behaves much more like a skill, and the research of the last two years gives a fairly clear picture of what trains it. Some of it is surprisingly physical (walking, sleep). Some of it is about how you handle your first idea, your phone notifications and your AI tools. And a few of the tricks are almost embarrassingly simple.
Below are 15 ways to think more laterally, each with the evidence behind it and one small thing to try. If your days already feel crowded with habits that are bad for your brain, several of these will double as a reset.
1. Catch your first answer, then keep going
Your first idea is usually the one everybody else has too. That’s not an insult. It’s how memory works: the most common associations come up first because they’re the easiest to retrieve.
Creativity researchers call the pattern the serial order effect. When people list ideas, the later ones tend to be more original than the early ones. A June 2026 paper in the Journal of Intelligence by Baptiste Barbot, Wim Van den Noortgate and Sameh Said-Metwaly put that claim under a microscope, using data from 202 participants and three different scoring methods. The effect showed up every time. It was also small, explaining at most 3.5% of the variation in idea quality, and it wasn’t consistent from person to person. So the honest reading is this: on average, pushing past your first few ideas helps a little, but it won’t magically turn anyone into a genius.
A 2025 experiment in Creativity. Theories, Research, Applications by Rogelio Puente-Díaz and colleagues adds a practical twist. People asked to come up with three business ideas ended up with a better best idea than people asked for one, yet they still tended to feel most attached to their first. In other words, you produce better options than you’d pick by instinct.
Next time, do this: write your first answer down, label it “the obvious one”, and refuse to stop until you have at least five more.
2. Spell out the assumptions hiding in the problem
Most problems arrive with invisible rules attached. “We need a bigger office.” “I need to find a cheaper flat in this neighbourhood.” “The meeting has to be on Monday.” Each sentence quietly closes doors before you’ve even started.
The mechanism is simple. When you frame a problem, you also frame the search space. Your brain then looks for answers only inside that frame, which feels efficient but is exactly what keeps you stuck. Write the assumptions down and the frame becomes visible. Once it’s visible, you can ask which parts are real constraints and which are just habits.
Picture this: say your team “needs” more office space because people keep fighting over meeting rooms. Listed out, the hidden assumptions look like this: everyone needs to be in on the same days, meetings need closed rooms, and the problem is space rather than scheduling. Challenge any one of them and you get options that never come up when the question is “where do we find a bigger office?” This is a made-up scenario, but the pattern is everywhere, including in arguments with people who always think they are right, where the real disagreement is often an unspoken assumption.
A quick experiment: take one problem you’re stuck on, write “This assumes that…” five times, and finish each sentence.
3. Ask bigger questions before you look for answers
Where you look for an answer depends on the question you started with. Change the question and you’re searching a different part of the map.
Yoed Kenett, an associate professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology who studies creativity and memory search, describes questions as central to how people find problems and solve them creatively. His lab developed the Alternative Questions Task, which asks people to generate questions about everyday objects, and their work (Raz, Reiter-Palmon and Kenett, 2023) linked asking more complex questions with stronger creative thinking. Kenett’s 2026 lecture materials describe the lab’s newer push to study question-asking outside the lab, through interactive games. That’s an association, not proof that asking better questions causes creativity, but it fits what you’d expect.
The difference is in the kind of question. “What’s wrong with this?” keeps you narrow. “What would have to be true for this to be easy?” or “Who has solved something like this in a completely different field?” opens the search. Good questioning is also the backbone of a good conversation, and the same habits transfer.
Your move: before your next brainstorm, spend five minutes writing only questions about the problem. No answers allowed.
4. Aim for different kinds of ideas, not just more
Quantity is the classic brainstorming rule. Variety matters more, and it turns out to be the harder skill.
The OECD’s PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment, published in 2024 and still the latest edition of this test, measured how well 15-year-olds in 64 countries and economies could generate and improve ideas. Across OECD countries, 78% of students reached the baseline level of creative thinking. But when the OECD looked at which parts of the test students found hardest, accounting for task difficulty, generating diverse ideas stood out as the weak spot across participating countries.
| PISA 2022 Creative Thinking (OECD, 2024) | Result |
|---|---|
| Average score, OECD countries | 33 out of 60 points |
| Students at or above baseline (Level 3), OECD average | 78% |
| Countries/economies where more than half of students missed the baseline | 21 of 64 |
These are teenagers, not adults, so treat it as a signal rather than a verdict on you. Still, it lines up with what happens in most meetings. People produce ten ideas that are really one idea in ten outfits.
The fix is categories. If you’re planning a cheaper holiday, don’t list ten ways to find cheap flights. List one idea about transport, one about where you sleep, one about when you go, one about who you go with, one about not travelling far at all.
Start small: next time you list ideas, give each one a category label. If three share a label, you owe yourself a new category.
5. Borrow from something random and faraway
This is the technique de Bono called “random entry”, and for a long time it was more folklore than science. That’s starting to change.
In a preprint first posted in March 2026 (and revised in September 2026), Qiawen Ella Liu, Marina Dubova, Henry Conklin, Takumi Harada and Thomas Griffiths had people design product ideas either by addressing an unmet user need or by drawing inspiration from a randomly assigned source, such as an octopus or a cactus. Humans reliably came up with more original ideas when given the random source. Distance helped: the further the source sat from the product, the more original the ideas. Seven large language models were tested too, and, interestingly, they didn’t get the same boost from the random prompts. This hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, so hold it a little loosely.
Why would a random object help? Because it forces your brain to build a bridge between two things that have no obvious connection. Building that bridge pulls up associations you’d never reach by thinking about the problem directly.
Give it a go: open a dictionary or a random word generator, take the first noun, and ask, “What would my problem look like if it had to work like this?”
6. Add a constraint on purpose
It sounds backwards. If you want more creative ideas, give yourself fewer options.
Think of a sonnet. Fourteen lines, a fixed rhythm, a rhyme scheme. Poets have been squeezing surprising work out of that tiny box for centuries, partly because the box rules out the lazy, obvious moves. The analogy has limits, of course: a poem isn’t a business problem, and some constraints (no money, no time, no support) are simply crushing.
The research backs a version of this idea. A 2019 review by Oguz Acar, Murat Tarakci and Daan van Knippenberg looked at 145 empirical studies and found that individuals, teams and organisations tend to benefit from a moderate level of constraints, while very tight constraints do stifle creativity. That review is several years old, and no newer synthesis has replaced it, so take it as the best available picture rather than the final word. The mechanism seems to be focus: a constraint removes the default solution and forces you to look elsewhere. Self-imposed limits can also cut through the paralysis that drives so much procrastination.
Test it this week: solve your problem again with one rule added. “No budget.” “It has to be done in one hour.” “We can’t use email.”
7. Take your problem for a walk
Of all the lateral thinking tips with a decent evidence base, this might be the easiest.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of walking and creative thinking, published in PLOS ONE in May 2026 by Alex Thabane and colleagues (including the creativity researcher Roni Reiter-Palmon), pooled 23 studies with 1,036 participants. Walking had a large effect on divergent thinking, the ability to produce many varied ideas (Cohen’s d = 0.93, with moderate-certainty evidence). When the authors looked only at randomised trials, the effect was still large (d = 0.82). For convergent thinking, where you need to pick the single right answer, the evidence showed no clear effect.
There are caveats. Most participants were university students, and only about half the studies were randomised. But the pattern is consistent and the split is useful: walking is for opening a problem up, not for closing it down.
Here’s a simple way in: next time you need ideas, take a 10-minute walk with a question in your head and a notes app in your pocket. Save the decision-making for when you’re back at your desk.
8. Leave room for your mind to wander
Lateral thinking needs slack. The trouble is that modern workdays have almost none.
Microsoft’s June 2025 Work Trend Index special report, based on anonymised Microsoft 365 signals and a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers in 31 markets, found that the average person using its tools is interrupted roughly every two minutes during the workday by a meeting, email or notification. The same report counted an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day. That’s telemetry from one company’s products, not a measure of everyone’s life, but it’s a fair snapshot of office work.
Why does that matter here? Because breaks only help if your mind is allowed to drift. A preregistered study in Scientific Reports (July 2025) by Colin McDaniel, Assal Habibi and Jonas Kaplan had people write two short stories separated by a 10-minute break. The type of break (an easy task, a hard task, meditation or no break) didn’t make a significant difference on its own. What predicted improvement was how much people’s minds wandered during the break, and only when they came back to the same story. It’s one study and the link is correlational within the experiment, but the message is clear enough: a break filled with notifications isn’t really a break.
If constant pings are the problem, the techniques in this guide on focusing on one thing at a time pair well with this one.
Next time you hit a wall: close the laptop, put the phone in another room, and do something boring for ten minutes. Washing up counts.
9. Sleep on it, deliberately
“Sleep on it” is old advice. What’s new is that scientists have started to test it with real precision.
In a study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness in February 2026, Karen Konkoly, Ken Paller and colleagues at Northwestern University gave 20 people tricky puzzles before bed, each paired with its own soundtrack. During REM sleep, they quietly replayed the sounds for half of the unsolved puzzles. Fifteen of the 20 participants dreamed about at least one unsolved puzzle. The puzzles that showed up in dreams were solved 42% of the time the next morning, compared with 17% for those that didn’t.
Now the limits, and they’re real. The sample was tiny and mostly made up of experienced lucid dreamers. Across everyone, the sound cues didn’t significantly raise solving rates. And the authors themselves note that they couldn’t fully separate dreaming from simply caring more about certain puzzles. So this doesn’t prove dreams solve problems. It does suggest that what’s on your mind before sleep can carry into the night.
Your practical version doesn’t need a lab. A calm evening wind-down routine and a clear question will do.
Your move: before bed, write the problem you’re stuck on as a single question on paper. Then let it go. Check in with it at breakfast, not at 2 a.m.
10. Notice how your answers arrive
Some answers show up step by step. Others arrive all at once, out of nowhere: the “aha” moment. Lateral thinking leans on the second kind, and you can learn to notice when it’s working.
John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University who has spent years studying insight, was senior author on a study published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2026. His team asked 299 undergraduates to solve word puzzles and report whether each solution came by sudden insight or by deliberate analysis. People with the strongest ADHD symptoms solved about as many puzzles as those with the weakest, but they got there more often through insight. Christine Chesebrough, a co-author, summed up the finding by saying that being very high or very low in executive control can both help creative problem-solving, just in different ways. Kounios’s own takeaway was that understanding your natural style could help you “harness” it in daily life.
It’s a single study of students, so it says more about the existence of different solving styles than about any individual. But it’s a useful prompt. If your best ideas tend to pop up in the shower, you’re an insight solver at least some of the time, and you should protect the conditions that let that happen. The absorbed state researchers call flow can help with the deliberate part.
A quick experiment: for one week, every time you solve something, note whether it came “step by step” or “out of nowhere”, and what you were doing at the time.
11. Write ideas down alone before the group starts talking
Group brainstorming feels productive. Everyone’s energised, the whiteboard fills up. But it has a structural flaw.
Only one person can talk at a time. While you wait your turn, you either forget your idea or quietly drop it because someone louder has already set the direction. Researchers call this production blocking, and it adds up to fewer and more similar ideas. On top of that, people tend to drift towards whatever the first few speakers said, which is fixation on a group scale.
The classic test of this compares real groups with “nominal” groups: the same number of people working alone, with their ideas pooled afterwards. In a well-known 2006 study, Eric Rietzschel, Bernard Nijstad and Wolfgang Stroebe found that nominal groups produced more ideas, and more original ones, than groups brainstorming face to face (though those ideas were also somewhat less feasible). That study is two decades old, but it sits on a long line of similar findings, and newer methods like brainwriting are built on it. The lesson isn’t “never meet”. It’s “think alone first, then meet”. If your team meetings tend to turn tense, the approach in this guide on how to argue without fighting helps once ideas are on the table.
Start small: at your next team session, give everyone five silent minutes to write ideas on sticky notes before anyone says a word.
12. Treat AI as a sparring partner, not an answer machine
Generative AI can produce 50 ideas in a few seconds. That’s useful. It’s also exactly the problem.
Many people sense the risk. In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,023 US adults, run in June 2025 and published that September, 53% said AI will make people worse at thinking creatively, while only 16% said it will make people better. Among adults under 30, that worry rose to 61%. That’s a measure of opinion, of course, not of what AI actually does.
The research gives a more specific answer. A meta-analysis by Alwin de Rooij and Michael Mose Biskjaer, presented at the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics in September 2026, pooled 19 studies with 61 effect sizes. It found a small but statistically significant homogenising effect: when people create with generative AI, their outputs become more similar to everyone else’s (d = 0.33). The authors frame it as a reorganisation of creative diversity rather than a loss of creativity, but for lateral thinking, sameness is the enemy.
| Pew Research Center, June 2025 survey (US adults) | Share |
|---|---|
| AI will make people worse at thinking creatively | 53% |
| AI will make people better at thinking creatively | 16% |
| AI will make it neither better nor worse | 16% |
Here’s a simple way in: come up with your own ideas first, then ask the AI to attack them, combine them or argue the opposite. Use it to stretch your thinking, not to replace the first draft.
13. Separate generating ideas from judging them
Trying to come up with ideas and evaluate them at the same moment is like driving with the handbrake on. Each new idea gets shot down before it has a chance to grow into something better.
The UK Design Council turned this into one of the best-known frameworks in design, the Double Diamond. First introduced in 2005 and expanded in 2019 into its “Framework for Innovation”, it splits work into four phases: discover, define, develop and deliver. The key move is that each diamond opens out (diverge: gather, explore, generate) before it closes in (converge: choose, refine, decide). The Design Council developed it after studying how design teams at leading companies actually worked, and it’s now widely used in public services and business. It’s a practitioner framework rather than a controlled experiment, so its strength is in describing what successful teams already do.
The judging phase still matters. When it’s time to converge, the careful habits of attention to detail at work are exactly what you need. The point is to do it second.
Test it this week: split your next problem-solving session into two timed blocks. Block one, no criticism allowed. Block two, criticism only.
14. Keep an idea notebook and review it weekly
Lateral ideas are slippery. They arrive at odd moments and vanish just as fast.
The reason is fairly simple. Working memory can only hold a few things at once, so an idea that pops up while you’re doing something else is competing for space with whatever you were doing. Write it down and two things happen. You free up that space. And you create a record you can come back to later, when a stray thought from Tuesday might connect with a problem you hit on Friday. Lateral thinking often works exactly like that: two unrelated notes meet on the same page.
Picture this: a hypothetical teacher jots down “kids love sorting cards” one week and “parents never read the newsletter” the next. On review, the two notes collide, and she turns the newsletter into a short card-sorting game for families. Neither note was an idea on its own. The notebook made the connection possible. If you want to strengthen recall more generally, these methods to improve your memory are a good companion.
Give it a go: keep one running note on your phone called “odd ideas”. Every Sunday, read the whole thing and look for any two entries that could be combined.
15. Bring lateral thinking to work, visibly
If you’re wondering whether any of this matters for your career, the employers’ answer is fairly clear.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, published in January 2025 and based on a survey of more than 1,000 employers across 55 economies, ranked creative thinking as the fourth most important core skill for workers, named by 57% of employers. Analytical thinking came first (69%), followed by resilience, flexibility and agility (67%) and leadership and social influence (61%). Creative thinking was also listed among the skills expected to grow in importance by 2030. It’s the latest edition of the report, and it reflects employer expectations rather than proof of what they actually pay for.
| Core skills for workers, WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 | Share of employers |
|---|---|
| Analytical thinking | 69% |
| Resilience, flexibility and agility | 67% |
| Leadership and social influence | 61% |
| Creative thinking | 57% |
Notice that analytical and creative thinking sit side by side. Employers don’t want one instead of the other. They want people who can open a problem up and then close it down well, which is pretty much what this whole list adds up to. Building that skill is one of the better ways to invest in yourself, whatever your age.
Next time a problem comes up at work, don’t just bring a solution. Bring three different kinds of solutions and say which assumption each one challenges.
What to do when you slip
You’ll have weeks when every idea feels flat and you catch yourself reaching for the obvious answer again. That’s normal. Fixation is the brain’s default, not a personal failing.
How you react to that slump matters more than the slump itself. In a classic set of experiments from 2012, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at the University of California, Berkeley found that people encouraged to treat a failure with self-compassion spent more time studying for a second attempt at a hard test than people in the comparison groups. That work is older, but it’s foundational and still widely cited. A larger 2025 study in Personality and Individual Differences, covering 1,846 students across four studies, adds an honest nuance: students’ intentions to respond to setbacks with self-compassion were linked to better well-being, but not directly to better academic performance. So self-compassion won’t make you brilliant on its own. What it does is keep you in the game long enough for the other habits on this list to work.
So when you slip, skip the self-criticism. If that inner voice gets harsh, these steps on how to stop hating yourself can help, and so can a few tricks to turn a bad day around. Then pick the smallest technique on this list, maybe the walk or the five-ideas rule, and do just that one today.
Conclusion
Inspiration rarely shows up on request, so lateral thinking comes down to building conditions where unusual ideas have a fair chance: pushing past your first answer, questioning the frame, borrowing from odd places, moving your body, sleeping on it and keeping your tools (human and AI) from flattening everything into the same shape.
You don’t need all 15 at once. Pick two that feel easy, try them for a week and notice what changes. Then add another.
If you want more practical, research-based ways to grow, browse our self-improvement guides and pick your next small experiment.
