Lateral Thinking: How to See Business Opportunities Everyone Else Misses

In 1988, Simon Berry was working for the British aid program in northeast Zambia when he noticed something that didn't add up. One in five children under the age of five was dying from preventable causes, with dehydration from diarrhea among the leading killers, a condition treatable with oral rehydration salts that cost pennies. The salts existed. The children existed. The problem was the distance between them. Rural clinics were sparse, roads were unreliable, and the medicine never reached the people who needed it most.

But Coca-Cola did. Somehow, in villages with no paved roads and no functioning health system, you could always buy a Coke. Berry stood there looking at a crate of Coca-Cola bottles in a place where children were dying from a lack of medicine that weighed less than a sugar packet, and asked a question that nobody in international development had thought to ask: what if we used the Coca-Cola supply chain to deliver the medicine?

The idea took twenty years to become reality. In 2009, Berry and his wife Jane co-founded ColaLife. They designed a wedge-shaped container called the AidPod that fit perfectly in the unused space between the necks of Coca-Cola bottles in a standard crate. Every crate of Coke shipped to a rural area could carry medicine with it, at virtually zero additional distribution cost.

The trial in Zambia produced results that conventional aid programs had never achieved. Treatment rates for diarrhea with oral rehydration salts jumped from less than 1 percent to 46 percent. The distance caregivers had to travel to access medicine dropped by two-thirds. The solution wasn't better medicine. It was better thinking about distribution.

This is lateral thinking: the practice of approaching a problem from an entirely different angle than the one everyone else is using. Edward de Bono coined the term in 1967, but he never explained what the brain is actually doing when it thinks laterally. The neuroscience now can, and it reveals why some entrepreneurs consistently see opportunities that are invisible to everyone around them.

What Happens in the Brain When You Think Laterally

Lateral thinking feels different from normal problem-solving because it is different, at the neural level. Standard analytical thinking follows well-worn pathways. You define a problem, break it into components, and work through them sequentially. The executive control network handles this efficiently. It's convergent: many inputs, one output, the "right" answer.

Lateral thinking requires the brain to abandon those pathways and form connections between concepts that have no obvious relationship. Medicine and Coca-Cola. A kingfisher's beak and a bullet train. An industrial sawmill and a vacuum cleaner. These connections don't emerge from the executive control network. They emerge from the default mode network, the brain's system for spontaneous association, daydreaming, and mental simulation.

A 2024 study published in Brain used stereo-EEG recordings to measure neural activity directly from within the default mode network during creative tasks. The results showed that the default mode network's creative contribution isn't random. It's directed exploration shaped by the constraints of the problem. Give the brain a narrow, specific question ("how do we get medicine to remote villages?") and the default mode network searches across domains for analogous patterns. Berry's brain connected "Coca-Cola distribution" to "medicine delivery" because both involve moving small physical products to remote locations. The connection was always available. Focused, analytical thinking would never have found it because it was looking in the wrong domain.

A 2025 study in Communications Biology confirmed this at scale. Analyzing brain scans from 2,433 people across five countries, researchers found that creative ability depends on dynamic switching between the default mode network and the executive control network. The people who see connections others miss aren't smarter. Their brains toggle more effectively between generating unexpected associations and evaluating which ones are worth pursuing.

The Kingfisher and the Bullet Train

In the 1990s, Japanese engineer Eiji Nakatsu faced a problem that conventional engineering couldn't solve. The Shinkansen bullet trains were producing thunderous sonic booms every time they emerged from tunnels at high speed. The compressed air in front of the train built up as it entered the tunnel and exploded outward when the train exited. Residents near tunnel exits were complaining. Regulators imposed strict noise limits. The engineering team tried modifying the train's speed, the tunnel's shape, and the aerodynamics of the existing nose design. Nothing worked within the noise targets.

Nakatsu was an avid birdwatcher and a member of Japan's Wild Bird Society. He began thinking about a completely different domain: birds that move between air and water without creating a disturbance. The kingfisher dives from air into water at high speed to catch fish, and it enters the water with almost no splash. The transition from one medium to another, which is essentially what the train was doing when it moved from open air into the compressed air of a tunnel, is nearly silent.

Nakatsu's team redesigned the front car of the Shinkansen to mimic the kingfisher's beak: a long, tapered, streamlined nose that split the air gradually rather than pushing it. They shot bullets of various shapes into pipes to measure pressure waves and ran separate tunnel simulations on a space research supercomputer. The data confirmed what the bird already knew. The kingfisher-shaped nose reduced the sonic boom to acceptable levels.

But the results went further than noise reduction. The new design made the train 10 percent faster. It consumed 15 percent less electricity. The solution to a noise problem accidentally solved an efficiency problem, because the same physics that creates sonic booms also creates drag. Nakatsu wasn't looking for a faster, more efficient train. He was looking at birds. The lateral connection delivered benefits that no amount of direct engineering optimization had produced.

Why Entrepreneurs Miss What's Right in Front of Them

The biggest obstacle to lateral thinking isn't a lack of intelligence. It's expertise. The deeper your knowledge of a domain, the more your brain defaults to the established patterns within it. Engineers think like engineers. Marketers think like marketers. Aid workers think like aid workers. The executive control network, trained on years of domain-specific experience, efficiently routes every new problem through the same familiar pathways.

This is why outsiders so often disrupt industries. They don't carry the domain's assumptions. When Dyson looked at why vacuum cleaners lost suction, he didn't think about better bags (the vacuum industry's assumption). He thought about industrial cyclonic separators he'd seen in sawmills that used centrifugal force to separate particles from air. No one in the vacuum industry was looking at sawmills. Constraints played a role here too: the limitation of existing bag technology forced Dyson to search in an entirely different domain.

When a nonprofit called Design that Matters studied infant mortality in Nepal, they found that 96 percent of hospital incubators were broken because nobody could repair them. The parts were proprietary and the local technicians had no training. But the team noticed something: Toyota 4Runners were everywhere, and local mechanics could fix anything on them. Their prototype, the NeoNurture, was an incubator built from Toyota auto parts: headlight filters, dashboard fans, motorcycle batteries. The concept won Time magazine's #1 Invention of 2010, though it never reached mass production. The lateral insight was the same as Berry's: don't build new infrastructure. Attach to infrastructure that already works.

De Bono's insight was that you can deliberately trigger this kind of cross-domain thinking. You don't have to wait for it to happen accidentally during a shower or a walk. You can structure your problem-solving to force the brain out of its default pathways.

How to Think Laterally on Demand

Borrow from adjacent domains. When you're stuck on a problem, stop looking within your industry for answers. Deliberately study how a completely different industry solves an analogous challenge. Berry looked at consumer goods distribution. Nakatsu looked at ornithology. Dyson looked at industrial manufacturing. The practice isn't random. You're searching for a structural analog: a different domain where someone has already solved the physics, logistics, or psychology of your specific problem. This is the essence of combinatorial creativity, where the most original ideas turn out to be novel combinations of existing components from unrelated fields.

Reframe the problem. Most problems come pre-framed by the industry they belong to. "How do we reduce tunnel noise?" frames the problem as an acoustics challenge. "How does something move between two mediums without creating a disturbance?" reframes it as a physics challenge that exists everywhere in nature. The reframe opens the search to domains the original framing excluded. Ask yourself: what is this problem really about, stripped of its industry context?

Use the "wrong expert" method. Describe your problem to someone who knows nothing about your field. A musician, a chef, a nurse, a mechanic. Their associations will be different from yours because their default mode networks contain different raw material. Berry's insight required someone who knew about both international aid and consumer product distribution. Nakatsu's required someone who knew about both engineering and birds. The connections live at the intersection, which is exactly how cheap experiments in creative problem solving work: test ideas from unexpected sources before committing resources.