I inspire myself the most, says Edward de Bono

Towards the end of the interview on Wednesday, I ask him, Who inspires you the most?

“Myself.”

Meet Edward de Bono, regarded by many as the leading authority in the field of creative thinking, innovation and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. De Bono was born in Malta into a family that was filled with doctors for seven generations. So, following the tradition, he alsocompleted his medical degree from the Royal University of Malta. After this, De Bono landed up at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. A few more degrees later, he realised that his studies could be applied to the mind. He published his first book, The Mechanism of Mind, in 1969. Four decades on, De Bono has authored around 70 more, that have been translated into 40 languages. He is the originator of the term ‘lateral thinking’ and the widely used ‘six thinking hats’ concept. Excerpts from an interview:

You are a qualified doctor. How did you move from being a doctor to being what you are now?
I started out in medicine. I worked for many years in medicine. Then I also worked in medical research. In medical research, I was working on the complicated systems of the body, glands, kidneys, respiration, and circulation, and I developed theories on self-organising systems and then applied those to neural networks of the brain and said, if this is how the brain works, this is what it should be good at and this is what it should not be good at. And that is the basis for my work in thinking.

How does you being a doctor help in what you do?
Being a doctor helps in looking at how the brain works and for the first time in human history, someone has developed thinking that is based on how the brain works and not just on philosophy and playing with words. That is the big difference.

Which concept do you think is your most popular concept?
Well, it depends. The key book was The Mechanism of Mind on how the brain works. That was read by Prof Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the quark. He was very supportive, and said, what you say makes perfect sense. In terms of use of techniques. the ‘six hats parallel thinking’ is the most used. Last year, I was told by a top Nobel Prize winning economist that the previous week he was in Washington and in a top economics meeting they were using the six hats concept.

Why do you think the six hats concepts has achieved so much popularity?
Because it is incredible that for 2,400 years we have been content with argument which is extremely primitive and inefficient. To be fair, I am talking about thinking in Europe. This was the Greek gang of three — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. They developed the habits of thinking based on analysis, judgment and knowledge.

That came into Europe at the time of Renaissance. At that time schools and universities were in the hands of the church. The church did not need design thinking or creative thinking or perceptual thinking. What they needed was truth, logic and argument to prove heretics wrong. That became the core of the western education culture. Now that has been very good in science and technology, but we have never developed thinking for creating value. So the same thinking has been disastrous in human affairs, conflicts, persecutions and wars. So that’s what happened to our thinking.

Do you have any evidence of the six thinking hats concept improving corporate decision making?
I have got feedback from corporations saying that it reduces meeting times to one-tenth. In the US, Ericsson had a big $4 billion project and they had been thinking about it for two weeks and hadn’t got anywhere. They asked one of my people to teach them the six hats concept and then one afternoon they reached a decision.

How did you come up with the idea of lateral thinking? 
Through my work in medical research on self-organising systems and how the brain works. And the brain works to form patterns and so we need ways in cutting across patterns and that’s lateral thinking.

Do you feel lateral thinking is  neglected?
Absolutely. Totally. First of all, thinking has been neglected for 2,400 years, we still use thinking developed by the ancient Greeks, and it is very, very limited. We have done nothing about thinking and we have done absolutely nothing about creative thinking. We have just said that it’s a talent, or you just sit and brainstorm. So we have done virtually nothing about thinking for 2,400 years. That’s incredible.

How can something like lateral thinking be used to ease of tensions between two nations?
Let me give you an example. Some months ago, Israel attacked Gaza. The solution to that would be that all the nations that set up Israel should jointly give the Palestinians a grant of $3 billion a year because after all, they took their territory. And every time the Palestinians fire a rocket at Israel, they lose $50 million. And that changes the scene completely.

I remember reading somewhere where you said that “the continuation of the Olympic Games is due to me”. Why did you say that?
What happened was that in 1976 the Olympic Games were held in Montreal and lost a great deal of money. After that in 1980, the games were held in Moscow and they also lost a great deal
of money. The games nearly came to an end because no one wanted the Olympic Games. In 1984, the games in Los Angeles were a big success. And since then, everyone wants the Olympic Games and there have been allegations that they bribe the committee to get them. When Peter Ueberroth, the  organiser of the Los Angles Olympic Games was interviewed by The Washington Post, he was asked “How did you do it?” He said using lateral thinking. And he told me that he learnt it when I talked to the Young Presidents Organisation in Boca Raton, Florida, nine years before. He remembered it and used it. So he changed the Olympic Games due to my thinking and that’s why the Olympic Games continue.

You have done so much thinking on thinking, have you seen your thoughts being used in any public programme?
There are countries like Venezuela where every school has to teach my thinking. The Chinese government is trying it out in five provinces and if they like the result, they are going to put it in 680,000 schools. It is widely used in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Singapore and so on. And research in the UK shows that teaching my thinking as a separate subject in schools, increases performance in every subject by between 30% to 100%. 

There is this story about you having taken a seminar for the Australian cricket team and after that they won some 20-odd one day internationals in a row. What did you talk to them about? 
That’s right. John Buchanan, their then coach, invited me to teach them thinking, which I did. And they were very successful after that. I think they beat England which was the biggest defeat in the history of test cricket. An Australian football team called the West Coast Eagles invited me to train them and then they won the championship for the first time in 13 years.

What do you talk to sportspersons about?
Thinking. It is the same as I talk to business. Change in patterns. Change in thinking.

You have said in the past that ‘The West is complacent and offensive. The East has more energy for change, and so I think they will rise above the West.’ Can you elaborate on that?
Possibly. The West is ruled by very rigid judgements, East is less judgemental in that sense. One of things I want to do in India is to create a new caste — PCCT —  which stands for Positive, Constructive and Creative Thinkers. So people develop a pride in themselves as being positive, creative thinkers and then they build up their confidence, and then can do things more positively, constructively and creatively.

You have said schools waste two-thirds of the talent in society. The universities sterilise the rest. Can you explain..
The main thing at schools is seeing how can we keep these children occupied until they grow up. But some things are useful, reading, writing, basic mathematics  are useful. Obviously I can’t judge Indian education, but in England, the students might leave school learning what happened 300 years ago, and they don’t know how the world works today.

What about the theory that humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain...
Yes. This is because humour imitates an asymmetric patterned system. You are going along one direction and you switch to another direction and in hindsight it makes perfect sense. The example I use in my seminars is about an old man of 90 years, who goes to hell. And as he is wandering around, he sees a friend also aged 90, sitting there with a beautiful young woman on his knee. So he says to his friend, are you sure this is hell, because you seem to be having a rather good time. And his friend looks up and says, it is hell all right, I am the punishment for her.

Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception, you have said in the past. Can you elaborate... 
Research at Harvard showed that. It is the way you look at the subject that will determine your thinking about the subject. And there is a mathematical theorem, the Godel’s theorem, which says that from within any situation, you can never logically prove the starting points. And if you can’t prove the starting points what are they? They are perceptions. So it does not matter how good your logic is if your perception is inadequate or wrong, the answer is going to be wrong, no matter how logical you are.

Can you give an example?
Any situation, if you look at it in a particular way and logically you work it out, if you say that this person is an enemy, then you behave like he is an enemy. If you perceive that he is not an enemy, but perhaps insecure then you help him to be more secure. So it depends on how you perceive the situation.

What are your priorities today? Where are you currently focusing your energy?
I am continuing to encourage people to think. My last book was Think Before It’s Too Late. There what I am saying is that our thinking is based too much on judgement, conflict, world affairs, not enough design, design in the way forward. So there is much more to do. I have to write several more books on the limits of existing thinking and how we need and have an opportunity to change.

Who inspires you the most?
Myself

You have written so many books, if you were to pick up three books of yours, you feel are a must read…
It really depends. If you are really interested in fundamentals then The Mechanism of Mind is the book to read. If you are interested in how to, then I would say Six Thinking Hats or Lateral Thinking or How to Have Creative Ads, are the ones.

What do you read?
A lot of the books on psychology and philosophy are not inspiring at all. They are extremely boring. I am interested in things that are happening, maybe organisations, maybe economics, watching systems working. Whats happening, how people are behaving and so on.