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 isneglected?
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, theorganiser 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.
Comments