Partial Pictures and Stories for Lateral Thinking
Partial pictures make it easier to practise alternative interpretations before tackling scenes with an obvious meaning. Written accounts offer a similar exercise: change the viewpoint or emphasis while keeping the facts.
THE IDEA
In de Bono’s picture exercise, the full scene would reveal a man putting up student posters. A partial picture makes alternative interpretations easier to find because the context is hidden. It offers practice for the harder task: reinterpreting a complete scene whose apparent meaning dominates our attention. It also encourages us to ask what relevant information might lie outside the scene.
Written material — Stories
Stories may be obtained from newspapers or magazines or even from books that are being used elsewhere in the curriculum. By story is not meant a tale but any written account.
Stories may be treated in the following ways:
- Generate the different points of view of the people involved.
- Change what is a favourable description to an unfavourable one not by changing the material but by changing the emphasis and looking at it in a different way.
- Extract a different significance from the information given than that extracted by the writer.
When to use it
Brainstorming sessions where teams deliberately use partial information to generate novel solutions.
Creative writing exercises where students rewrite a story from a different character’s perspective or with a reversed tone.
Conflict resolution training to practice seeing issues from multiple stakeholders' viewpoints.
Product design: using incomplete prototypes or vague user stories to spark innovative features.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Partial Picture of a Man Sticking Up Posters
As an exercise, crop a photograph to show only a hand holding a poster. Ask what might be happening: putting it up, taking it down, or adjusting it. Then reveal the full scene and examine which assumptions the crop encouraged.
Story About a Political Protest
Take a newspaper article about a protest. First, list the differing viewpoints: the protesters, the police, local business owners, and the government. Then rewrite the article using the same facts but with an unfavorable emphasis on one group — e.g., by describing the protesters as 'disruptive' rather than 'passionate'. Finally, extract a significance different from the writer's, such as focusing on the economic impact or the underlying social grievances.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a current problem where one interpretation seems obvious. What are at least three other ways to see the situation, even if they seem unlikely?
Recall a recent news story. How might the same facts be presented from a completely opposite emotional angle?
When you encounter a partial picture or incomplete information, what assumptions do you automatically fill in? How could you deliberately resist that?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Lateral Thinking A Textbook of Creativity (Edward de Bono)