Lateral Thinking - An Advantage For Businesses
Lateral thinking is a valuable skill for candidates to possess in today’s world.
Lateral thinking a highly effective skill
Lateral thinking is a valuable skill for candidates to possess in today’s world. Many organisations have had to look for creative ways to meet customers demands, communicate and ultimately operate.
Being able to look at a situation creatively and provide an original answer or idea can be critical. As Phil Lewis highlighted the important role of lateral thinking is using it to reframe a situation to a ‘voyage and return’ - where businesses provide a space for employees to think, ‘outside the box' about an organisational issue.
So what do lateral thinkers offer?
Lateral Thinking Skills in Practice
The ability to see patterns and relationships where others might not see them, is the core of lateral thinking as a concept. It is a highly effective skill that many strategic thinkers possess. Strategy is the ability to see the bigger picture of where a business needs, or wants to be, versus where they currently are.
Lateral thinking doesn’t concentrate on the how, but the why and what we need to achieve in a business sense. In doing this, those who are strategic will look at the final goal, the objective and why the business needs to achieve this. Whereas those who are more logical thinkers will look at the specific tactics of ‘how’ a goal can be achieved. For businesses looking to innovate, develop new products or stay ahead of their competitors recruiting candidates or graduates with strong lateral thinking skills will help.
An example of this might be a marketing proposition or campaign to communicate a new proposition a company is. The lateral thinking part of the proposition is the strategic idea to offer a new proposition or reposition the brand based on market and consumer analysis. The lateral or abstract reasoning behind this looks to research the data, identify the insight (whether business or consumer-related) and leverage this to push the company’s efforts towards a new strategic direction. This is how Pearson TalentLens’ Raven’s Advanced Matrices test in particular helps — to identify the intrinsic abstract reasoning skills or the requirement for developing those skills within your talent pool.
Raven’s - A World-Renowned Cognitive Ability Test
While there is no one clear test to measure a candidate's ability to think laterally, the RAVEN’s matrices test is the gold-standard test used globally for measuring cognitive ability. The abstract reasoning test measures a candidate's measures abstract reasoning and lateral thinking by looking at a candidate's speed and accuracy in interpreting information and identify relationships between shapes and patterns. For businesses and managers unfamiliar with the RAVENs Advanced Matrices test, this non-verbal intelligence test is a test widely used by businesses across the globe. It provides a non-bias way of assessing candidates and enables recruiters to better understand how prospective candidates can identify patterns and solve problems relative to their business industry.
The RAVEN’s Advanced Matrices test looks to measure an applicant's ability to:
- Lateral thinking
- Learning new concepts quickly
- Solving new and complex problems without drawing on prior knowledge.
This is important in modern business due to the need for innovation and strategic thinking to tackle new and different business problems.
While businesses remain comfortable in knowing the immediate commercial, customer and market issues, advances in technology, consumer behaviour and competitive product developments means that to stay competitive and operating efficiently, businesses need to incorporate new strategies to tackle new problems. This is ultimately where the need for lateral thinking and abstract reasoning come into play.
How Does the RAVEN’S Advanced Matrices Differ to the Progressive Matrices?
There are two types of RAVEN’s matrices tests. These are the RAVEN’s Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven’s SPM) and the RAVEN’s Advanced Progressive matrices (Raven’s APM).
In essence, these tests are extremely similar, however there are some small nuanced differences between the two. Firstly, the progressive matrices is aimed more toward entry-level roles within an organisation, whereas the advanced matrices is aimed at managerial talent, looking to identify those who may need support in thinking more strategically from positions of management and above.
Secondly, the progressive matrices is a test used with the general population, whereas the Advanced RAVEN’s matrices is a test typically associated with the top 20% of the population. Tailored towards middle-to-senior management roles, the level of difficulty in the patterns is higher in the APM.
Raven’s is also an abstract reasoning test that is frequently researched, for example a research paper into the relationships through verbal ability tests (RAVEN’s APM II Test). Research has also transferred into the education sector, with papers researching how the APM II can be used in educational analysis through RASCH Analysis; along with the following paper published earlier in 2021, ‘A shortened version of Raven’s standard progressive matrices for children and adolescents.’
Further research into cognitive processing suggests that the progressive matrices whereby patterns are easier to identify, showed suddenness and certainty in pattern identification was much higher than the advanced matrices, which shows a higher level of analytical thought and contemplation, while also showing more uncertainty in decision making.
This is important because it shows the breadth of influence in which the RAVEN’s matrices, both progressive and advanced, have across multiple industries and the global interest across business, education and relationships this abstract reasoning test garners.
Practice your lateral thinking skills
Whether you’re interviewing or the interviewee, practicing your lateral thinking skills can put you at an advantage. Think of a situation when you last had to think laterally about a situation. What happened, what was the benefit of thinking differently about a situation? There are some great examples of real life situations here. You might be surprised just how creative you’ve been when required to use your lateral thinking skills!
Further information
Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us or visit our pages on the RAVEN’s Standard Progressive Matrices or the RAVEN’s Advanced Progressive Matrices to learn more about how your business could benefit by measuring and developing abstract reasoning and lateral thinking skills.