Edward DeBono is a man who travels all over the world, giving seminars on how to think. He teaches what he calls "lateral thinking," and he illustrates what he means by that from an experience early in his life.

Some thirty years ago he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. One night he attended a party in London. The party lasted late, and he got back to Oxford after the gates were closed. Traditionally in that college the gates were locked at twenty minutes past midnight. So, in order to get to his room, he had to scale the college walls.

There were two walls, and he said, "I got over the first one without too much difficulty and came to the second wall. It was about the same height as the first one. I climbed that, and jumped to the other side only to find myself outside again."

He had climbed in and out across a corner of the wall. He tried again, this time with more careful attention to where that second wall was. He noticed that there was a gate in the wall, and as the gate was lower than the rest of the wall, and provided footholds, he decided to climb over the gate. He did, and as he was sitting astride the top of the gate, it slowly opened. It had never been locked.

He said he learned a lesson from that. No matter how good you are in climbing a wall, you should always pick the right one. And when he applied that to problem-solving, he called it "lateral thinking." Instead of facing problems head-on, instead of trying to climb over them just because they are there, try lateral thinking. And by that he means try solutions that are not obvious. Don't attack the problem head-on. Take detours, moving latterly, or even sometimes moving backwards, until you find the gate that no one knew was open.