CONCEPT
The Lateral Builder
The figure at the center of de Bono's synthesis — the practitioner who brings systematic lateral tools to the AI collaboration and produces output that neither human creativity alone nor machine computation alone could reach.
The lateral builder is the operational synthesis of everything de Bono's framework implies for the AI age. Not a creative genius — de Bono was adamant about this distinction across his entire career. A lateral builder is a practitioner who has developed, through daily structured practice, the capacity to make the specific cognitive moves that disrupt self-organizing patterns: provocation, random entry, reversal, perspective shifts, framework recognition. The lateral builder brings these tools to the AI collaboration systematically, transforming the partnership from a convergence machine into a divergence engine — from a tool that produces polished conventionality to a tool that maps genuinely novel territory.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The lateral builder's practice is concrete. Twenty to thirty minutes daily, applied to a specific problem, cycling through PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting), provocation (with principle extraction), random entry, and sequenced Six Hats. The practice is not a performance of creativity. It is exercise — the deliberate repetition