Ask most AI tools for a plan, a campaign idea or a solution to a problem, and you’ll get something usable within seconds. It reads well, sounds confident and it may even look finished. And for a lot of teams, that’s where the thinking stops.
The ‘finished-looking’ answer is the trap. AI’s first response often draws on patterns in the material it has learned from. That makes it remarkably good at producing something plausible and useful quickly – but not necessarily something distinctive, original or right for your specific problem.
Treating that first response as the finished idea skips the steps that makes it better: developing it, challenging it, and adapting it to what your business, customers, or situation actually need. That’s where Lateral Thinking comes in.
AI makes generating ideas easier. It doesn’t make creative and critical thinking less important. It makes them more important.
Why AI’s first answer isn’t necessarily the best one
AI is genuinely good at producing a plausible first draft: a structure, a set of options, a starting list of ideas.
What it doesn’t automatically know is which of those ideas is actually right for your business, your market or your customers. It can also converge on the obvious. Ask for marketing campaign ideas, ways to improve a process or solutions to a business problem, and you may get variations on familiar suggestions – competent, safe and not necessarily very different from what another organisation could generate with the same tool.
That’s not a reason to stop using AI. It’s a reason not to stop thinking when AI gives you an answer. When anyone can generate ten campaign ideas, draft a strategy or suggest solutions in seconds, the advantage shifts to the people who can generate alternatives, challenge assumptions, spot what has been missed and decide which ideas are actually worth developing.
Lateral Thinking: taking a starting point somewhere better
This is exactly where Lateral Thinking can add value.
Lateral Thinking gives teams specific, repeatable techniques for deliberately generating alternatives beyond the first, most obvious answer – whether that answer came from a colleague, a brainstorm or an AI tool. An AI-generated idea might be perfectly reasonable.
Lateral Thinking encourages the team to ask:
- What else could this be?
- What if we challenged the assumption behind it?
- What happens if we approach the problem from a completely different direction?
Provocation techniques can help teams deliberately move away from an existing idea and explore what else is possible. Having the techniques to be able to challenge the assumptions built into an AI-generated answer can uncover a different direction entirely. And developing an idea rather than simply accepting or rejecting it can turn a reasonable first draft into something much more useful.
Used this way, AI becomes a faster starting point, not a shortcut past the thinking. The team still has to do the part that matters: deciding what’s actually worth pursuing.
Six Thinking Hats®: making sure the idea stands up
Generating more ideas is only part of the challenge.
Once a team has developed different options, it needs to examine them properly before deciding what to do. Six Thinking Hats® provides the structured approach for this.
The method enables teams to deliberately look at an idea from different perspectives: facts, feelings, risks, benefits and possibilities – within an overall thinking process. This matters more, not less, when AI is involved. An AI-generated option can sound authoritative even when it is wrong, incomplete or simply unsuitable for a specific situation. More AI-generated options don’t automatically lead to better decisions either. Teams still need to to have the practical tools to confidently ask:
- What do we know?
- What are we missing?
- What are the risks?
- What could work?
- What concerns do we have?
- What else should we consider?
A structured approach helps make that thinking deliberate rather than leaving the discussion to whoever speaks most confidently or agrees most readily with the AI-generated suggestion.
Creative thinking and critical thinking in an AI workplace
AI has changed the cost of generating ideas. It can produce possibilities quickly and give teams something to react to instead of starting with a blank page.
But that changes the value of human thinking rather than removing it.
- Creative thinking helps teams move beyond the obvious.
- Critical thinking helps teams challenge, examine and evaluate what they have produced.
Both matter when AI is part of the workflow. A team that simply accepts the first AI-generated answer may be moving quickly, but it isn’t necessarily thinking differently. The team that deliberately develops alternatives, challenges assumptions and examines its options is doing something much more valuable.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies creative thinking among the core skills expected to remain important as the world of work changes. As AI makes generating plausible answers increasingly easy, knowing what to do with those answers becomes increasingly important too.
What this looks like in practice
A team using AI well doesn’t treat its first output as the answer. They treat it as raw material – a quick way to get past the blank page, not a replacement for the thinking that follows. Lateral Thinking can push the ideas further. Six Thinking Hats® can provide a structured way to examine the options from different perspectives.
AI makes the starting point faster to reach. The human thinking determines where you take it. That is the opportunity.
The next step
Your team is probably already using AI to generate ideas, draft content, explore options or solve problems. The real question is what happens next:
- Does someone challenge the first answer?
- Does the team explore alternatives?
- Does anyone question the assumptions behind it?
- Do people develop the idea further?
- And, when there are several possibilities, do they have a structured way to examine them before deciding?
These are not skills AI makes irrelevant, they are the skills that become more valuable when AI makes the first answer easy.
Lateral Thinking and Six Thinking Hats® give teams practical techniques to develop ideas, challenge assumptions and examine possibilities deliberately – rather than relying on whoever happens to be the most senior person in the room or push back the loudest.
AI can give your team a start. The thinking determines what happens next.
Get in touch today to talk about bringing Lateral Thinking or Six Thinking Hats® to your team, or book your place on an upcoming workshop.
Frequently asked questions
Doesn’t Lateral Thinking training compete with using AI tools?
No, it is designed to work alongside them. AI is fast at producing a starting point. Lateral Thinking gives people repeatable ways to challenge that starting point, generate alternatives and develop ideas that are better suited to the actual problem.
Why can’t AI just do this part too?
AI can certainly generate more variations and challenge ideas when prompted to do so. The issue is that generating more output isn’t the same as deliberately exploring a problem from different perspectives. Teams still need to decide what matters, which assumptions should be challenged, which alternatives are genuinely different and which ideas are worth developing.
Lateral Thinking provides a structured way to do that deliberately.
How is this different from just prompting AI more carefully?
Better prompting can improve the raw material AI produces, but it doesn’t replace the team’s own thinking about which ideas to pursue and why. Lateral Thinking and Six Thinking Hats® give people repeatable methods for developing, challenging and examining ideas, not simply a better first draft.
Who should learn Lateral Thinking?
Anyone who regularly needs to generate ideas, solve problems or explore alternatives – not just people in traditionally “creative” roles.
Lateral Thinking is a technique, not a personality trait, which is exactly why it can be learned and applied in different roles and situations.
Sources
- Future of Jobs Report 2025 – World Economic Forum – source for the claim that creative thinking is identified among the core skills expected to remain important as the world of work changes.
