Edward de Bono, father of lateral thinking and author of such indispensable books as 'The Six thinking Hats', made a rare appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival yesterday. Speaking for just over an hour, he gave an excellent summary of the finer points of lateral thinking and touched on his new book, 'Six Frames: For Thinking About Information.' In it he sets forth ways of focusing our attention in this information-saturated world. Very useful.

Here at Libertine we like lateral thinking alot. It involves moving sideways to look at something in a different way. De bono argues that our thinking traditions are firmly rooted in logical thinking, which works essentially by saying yes or no, this is right or wrong. And there's nothing wrong with this, in much the same way as the rear left wheel of a car cannot be said to be wrong. But our thinking traditions have neglected the other three wheels: perception, design and emotion.

De bono has devised a number of ingenious, yet simple techniques which anyone in advertising would do well to study: Po, random input, reversal, fractioniation.

Po-Provocative operation is a technique whereby you deliberately say something illogical and use that as a stimulus or random input, where you pick a word or stimulus. '

For example, let's say we were given the brief of coming up with a way of launching a new holographic television from Japan.

Po: Vulture. Perhaps the TV's picture could be so realistic that vultures would gather overhead over an image of carrion.

Po: Plant. A Venus fly trap snaps at a holographic fly.

The point is this: to the mind, any two inputs cannot remain separate no matter how unconnected they are. With vertical thinking, you would say the above is absurd, and that you could have arrived at those ideas by logic. This is mistaken. Lateral thinking should seem logical in hindsight, but not in foresight. It is asymmetrical. With lateral thinking, you don't have to think in sequential steps, you can jump ahead and fill in the gaps later.

All of which has lessons for us all in the creative industries. With that in mind, here's an experiment. We at Libertine would like some ideas to promote our new identity. Your random input is figtree. All suggestions gratefully received.