In reality each game produces on winner and one loser. There can only be one winner in the tournament so there must be 96 losers and therefore 96 matches. Unless we take deliberate steps to derail them our thoughts progress along in-built tram lines so, in making our business decisions, our answers will depend, unless we make a deliberate effort to avoid a tramline outcome, on where we start. So if we are thinking about a business startup and we have a series of questions to answer:
1. What am I selling?
2. To whom am I selling?
3. What sort of company will I start: Will it be a company, a partnership, etc?
4. Will it have a ‘storefront’ as well as a web-site?
5. Where will it be based?
6. Who will be involved?
7. How will the world know about my business – what is my marketing Plan – SEO, advertising, word of mouth?
8. How will I deliver my goods/services?
9. What will my organisation look like?
10. What finances will I want/need (especially start-up expenses capitalisation)?
11. How and when will my revenues come in
12. What is my Financial Plan?
and De Bono suggests that the answers you get will depend on the order in which you ask these questions, as each answer dictates the starting point from which you ask the next. But engineers seem to have beaten de Bono to his conclusions about ‘lateral thinking’ by several hundred years, after all the Romans built their aqueducts and the Chinese their great wall long before de Bono built his theory.
Whether deliberately or intuitively they saw this ‘linear’ approach as having limited value and saw the key questions as lying along the rim of a wheel so that number 12 lies next to number 1 and having answered all twelve to the best of your ability and knowledge once, you go round the loop again knowing the preliminary answers to the other eleven.