I went thru a course on lateral thinking (and other things) at my work, years ago based on the books by de Bono. My natural mindset apriori is this kind of stuf

I went thru a course on lateral thinking (and other things) at my work, years ago based on the books by de Bono. My natural mindset apriori is this kind of stuff is bunk, but i must say, i found the process to be pretty useful. The main premise is that to find breakthrough aha ideas, you associate two things that are not at all related to one another, and see what the natural questions and consequences of such a pairing produces. You get all kinds of wild ideas, most are just silly, but occasionally you get really good ideas that perhaps you would never have thought of. An example might be, if you want to improve cars, work through what it would mean if dogs were the primary drivers of cars. What would you change about cars to make this easier? Then once found, are there any of these that would make sense for human drivers?