Find The Side Door

Ads are a lot like the art you see in galleries. The vast majority are pretty crap, relatively forgettable, and more often than not downright annoying. But every once in a while you see one that stops you in your tracks and gives your brain a nice little piece of candy to munch on.

Like these ads by TD Bank. Or this ad that wasn’t an ad.

Or more recently, like this billboard.

It’s illegal in the US to advertise that your tequila contains no additives. Apparently the lobby group backing the law argued it would “confuse” the consumer. OK, if you say so. Welcome to Washington.

To get around it, they ran the message anyway, purposely misspelling the words they weren’t allowed to use, making the ad technically letter-of-the-law legal. Despite the muddled spelling, the message lands clear as day. Cheeky indeed. 

As fun as it is to watch ad folk being clever, we saw this more as a perfect example of what is called lateral thinking.

Lateral thinking is what you do when the problem you’re facing won’t be solved by walking through the front door, so you have to find a side entrance instead. 

Every other rock band is doing bland, formulaic, radio-friendly stuff? Start a punk band. Every other car brand is making big, hand-built, chauffeur-driven, expensive cars only kings can afford? Invent the Model T. Every other fast food joint is forcing customers to fight for a parking spot before ordering? Invent the drive-through.

If you read military history, you see nothing but lateral thinking. The most recent example is what Ukrainians are currently doing with drones against Russia. Funny how quickly lateral thinking kicks in when it’s life or death. 

Which begs the question, if it’s such a competitive advantage, why is it so rare? 

As Daniel Kahneman said, “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it, but they’d prefer not to.” Lateral thinking not only asks people to do the one thing they’d rather not, it also forces them to sit in the discomfort of not knowing if it will work out. Twice the discomfort.  

Not to mention that most of us have been burned before. The boss promotes “out of the box” thinking in a brainstorm, but the moment someone mentions something truly outlandish, the eye rolls come out. 

We can learn from the exceptions. Ukraine didn’t get creative because someone came in and ran a lateral thinking workshop. Their leadership created the environment and the flexibility for them to diverge from the norm. 

And that’s the true task of leadership. To create the conditions for your people to do their best work. Your people already can think laterally, they just need your signal that it’s OK. 

The best way to do this? Make it the expectation to say things out loud that sound stupid. Really stupid.

The idea most likely to get them fired. What they think competitors are too scared to try. What they would do if they had zillionaire money. And see what happens.

Some of the ideas will be genuinely stupid, and that’s okay. If logic could solve your problem, somebody logical would have solved it by now. The reasonable paths are all crowded with reasonable competitors, all walking up to the same front door. All waiting politely in the same line. 

All the ideas leftover are the ones that play three chords very fast. Strap a grenade to a hobby drone. Misspell the billboard.

The side door is always there. It just looks stupid until someone walks through it.