One of my favourite stories is about slow elevators. As it is told, there was a co-op building in New York where tenants were complaining about slow elevators. Management considered all sorts of solutions including installing additional elevators or speeding up the existing ones until one day someone came up with the idea of putting mirrors beside the elevators so people would have something to do when waiting and then wouldn’t notice the slow service. Great lateral thinking.
Lateral thinking as defined by Wikipedia is “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was coined in 1967 by Edward de Bono.”
One of the best ways to innovate is using lateral thinking, so in order to get your innovative juices flowing I want you to solve the following puzzle. I’ll post the answer tomorrow in a reply to the blog in case you don’t get it.
A woman had two sons who were born on the same hour of the same day of the same year. But they were not twins. How could this be so?