Suspended Judgement

The purpose of thinking is not to be right but to be effective. Being effective does eventually involve being right but there is a very important difference between the two. Being right means being right all the time. Being effective means being right only at the end.

Vertical thinking involves being right all along. Judgement is exercised at every stage. One is not allowed to take a step that is not right. One is not allowed to accept an arrangement of information that is not right. Vertical thinking is selection by exclusion. Judgement is the method of exclusion and the negative (‘no’, ‘not’) is the tool of exclusion.

With lateral thinking one is allowed to be wrong on the way even though one must be right in the end. With lateral thinking one is allowed to use arrangements of information which are invalid in themselves in order to bring about a restructuring that is valid. One may have to move to an untenable position in order to be able to find a tenable position.

In lateral thinking one is not so concerned with the nature of an arrangement of information but with where it can lead one. So instead of judging each arrangement and allowing only those that are valid one suspends judgement until later on. It is not a matter of doing without judgement but of deferring it until later.

As a process lateral thinking is concerned with change not with proof. The emphasis is shifted from the validity of a particular pattern to the usefulness of that pattern in generating new patterns.

There is nothing ‘unreasonable’ about the other lateral thinking processes described so far but the need to suspend judgement is so fundamentally different from vertical thinking that it is much harder to understand.

Education is soundly based on the need to be right all the time. Throughout education one is taught the correct facts, the correct deductions to be made from them and the correct way of making these deductions. One learns to be correct by being made very sensitive to what is incorrect. One learns to apply judgement at every stage and to follow up this judgement with the ‘no’ label. One learns how to say, ‘no’, ‘this is not so’, ‘this cannot be so’, ‘this does not lead to that’, ‘you are wrong here’, ‘this would never work’, ‘there is no reason for that’ and so on. This sort of thing is the very essence of vertical thinking and accounts for its great usefulness. The danger lies in the arrogance of the attitude that assumes that vertical thinking is sufficient. It is not. Exclusive emphasis on the need to be right all the time completely shuts out creativity and progress.

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

The need to make use of provocative arrangements of information in order to bring about insight repatterning is dictated by the behaviour of mind as a self-maximizing memory system. In practice this need is met by delaying judgement. Judgement is suspended during the generative stage of thinking in order to be applied during the selective stage. The nature of the system is such that a wrong idea at some stage can lead to a right one later on. Lee de Forest discovered the immensely useful thermionic valve through following up the erroneous idea that an electric spark altered the behaviour of a gas jet. Marconi succeeded in transmitting wireless waves across the Atlantic ocean through following up the erroneous idea that the waves would follow the curvature of the earth.

The major dangers of the need to be right all the time are as follows:

Arrogant certainty attends a line of thought which though correct in itself may have started from wrong premises.

An incorrect idea which would have led on to a correct idea (or useful experimentation) is choked off at too early a stage if it cannot itself be justified.

It is assumed that being right is enough — an adequate arrangement blocks the possibility of a better arrangement.

The importance attached to being right all the time breeds the inhibiting fear of making mistakes.