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 curiosity of generating them.

Lateral thinking is the art of looking at things sideways, and not choosing the obvious answer. When we think laterally, we look a little bit deeper into things.

It can be quite challenging to think laterally, as we have always been taught to think vertically; this is expected of us, the norm, and often thought as the right way to think. We believe that both lateral and vertical thinking help in varied situations. Vertical thinking is our day-to-day logic. When considering vertical thinking,believing ‘what we believe is right’, it made me wonder that how we are supposed to evolve without lateral thinking?

Lateral thinking makes new ideas possible. Sometimes, one way of doing this is to take two random, unrelated ideas, and put them together to create something new. Lateral thinking leads us away from the rules and structure, we normally encounter; this can be a mental block to our creativity. “Breaking the rules won’t necessarily lead to creative ideas, but it’s one of the avenues. And staying on the same road may eventually lead to a dead end”. If we always think vertically, and are not prepared to explore a new thinking process, our thoughts will never be generative.