Among the many things that can be said to make the world progress, new and better ideas are always at the heart of them.

Our culture seems set up to make us uncreative. In school we are taught “things,” but not how to think. Yet thinking better is obviously the basis of professional advance and a means to happiness in our private lives.

Edward de Bono is famous for getting people to work on the effectiveness of their thought patterns and ideas. He coined the term “lateral thinking,” which is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

When de Bono started writing about lateral thinking in the 1960s, there were no practical standardized ways of achieving new insights. A few people were considered “creative” but the rest of us had to plod along within the established mental grooves.

The lateral thinking concept emerged from de Bono’s study of how the mind works.

The brain does not work like a computer. Rather, it continually looks for patterns, thinks in terms of patterns, and is self-organizing, incorporating new information in terms of what it already knows.

Because the mind is both pattern-making and conservative, a new idea normally has to do battle with old ones to get itself established.

Lateral thinking aims to help us avoid thinking in clichéd, set ways. It is essentially creativity, but without the mystique of creativity.

Lateral thinking needs to be contrasted with “vertical thinking.” Our culture emphasizes the use of logic: one correct statement proceeds onto the next one, and finally to the “right” solution.

This type of thinking is good most of the time, but it may not give us the leap forward we need.