20 - 26 July 2000

Changing the way we think, create

Prof. EDWARD DE BONO , regarded by many as the leading international authority on creative thinking and the teaching of thinking skills,

is in Malta for the Edward de Bono 2000 Seminar, being held over the next three days. David Kelleher spoke to Prof. de Bono on the

concept of creative thinking and its benefits.

Creative thinking, lateral thinking. Is this the sign of a new trend in how people think?

In June, I was in France and invited as one of the keynote speakers to the European Venture Capital Association. This is a group of 700 people who have invested 25 billion euros in Europe. They wanted me to talk to them because they realised that creativity is the key. What is interesting is that in all their investment, there is very little focus on value. They tend to simply ask whether the person running the show has a good track record and not about the business value of the idea.

A lot of the investment in dot.coms goes bad because they are not really high tech investments at all but weak ideas that happen to be delivered by technology. This does not make them good ideas delivered by technology.

Earlier this year, I spoke at a large meeting for lawyers in California. The idea was to see how lawyers could become more creative in their work. The meeting was organised by the American Bar Association and brought together 90 deans of law schools around the US, and officials from the Justice Department.

These are two example why creative thinking is important. What is happening worldwide is a growing sense that creativity is the key to success. The reason being that in many countries three things are becoming commodities: information, technology and competence.

So, if that is the case, what is left to be done is to see how to create value from these commodities. How you can turn ideas into superior values is the key success factor in business. How you keep creating value... using creative thinking.

How would you define creative and lateral thinking?

Most of your thinking is what I call recognition thinking. That is identifying a standard situation and providing a standard answer. This is how a doctor works. He diagnoses a particular situation and provides a particular answer based on what he knows.

Ninety per cent of education is based on this model. Standard situations, standard answers. There is nothing wrong with that but by itself it is not enough. We need to add more. What is thinking? How can we think better? This is creative thinking. Something I have been talking about for years is now making sense.

Creative thinking is used very broadly, such as artists who produce something new, something that has value, but very little change. I describe these artists as productive stylists... the same style but no change. We need something that is more specific, about changing concepts, changing perceptions, changing ideas. This is where the need for lateral thinking comes into play.

Lateral thinking is specific to how the brain functions as a self-organising information system, which makes asymmetric patterns.

Lateral thinking requires crossing over sideways, moving across patterns, not just up and down the patterns. It is much more specific in its meaning and more defined in terms of the system base.

What is the most important starting point for anyone wanting to start using creative thinking?

I think the most important factor is to realise that it is needed, that it is a skill, and like other skills, it has to be developed.

In developing ideas, traditional brainstorming has some value but it is pretty weak. We need to develop some of these specific techniques. Brainstorming on its own is not enough.

From your experience, can everyone use your teachings and techniques?

The answer is yes. Some people would be better than others, like any other skill, but yes, anyone can learn and reach a reasonable competence.

Some time ago you held a seminar for school children, who seemed to accept and understand these concepts better than adults. Is this the case? And why?

There are three points to make about children. First, their motivation is very high. Children love thinking, so much so that in one school, the main punishment was not being allowed to attend thinking lessons. This goes to show how much children love it.

Secondly, because children don't know the traditional approach to thinking, they are free to come up with different approaches; creativity of innocence, if you like.

Thirdly, and contrary to what some educationalists say, children have to use a lot of concepts because they don't have enough experience to link up things at detail level. So they have to use concepts, and if you use concepts you can be very creative.

Lateral thinking was introduced some years back as a subject in the Systems of Knowledge curriculum. Should learning thinking skills become a main subject in our national curriculum?

It should be the main subject. There is no more important human skill than thinking. There isn't. In the European Union, schools spend 25 per cent of their time on mathematics. Most people only use three per cent of the maths they learn at school. Thinking is the most important skill and yet it is very rare in schools for it to be exclusively in the curriculum. If you go around the world, I would be very surprised if there is one university that has a faculty of thinking. This is incredible... the most important thinking skill.

It should be the key subject and there is another reason for this as well. A lot of young people are not good at the academic game. However, they are good thinkers. Education, in my view, wastes about two-thirds of talent in society because education is all for training the top one-third, those that go to university. The rest are relative failures. But this is not the case. They are not failures but good thinkers. If they are given the chance to think, it makes a huge difference.

In research carried out in the UK among unemployed young people, we found that giving them five hours of training on thinking skills, increased their employment rate by 500 per cent. This is a huge figure. If five hours of thinking can do more than 10 years of education, then there is something wrong with education.

Have universities been receptive to your thinking skills?

In Argentina, in every faculty at university, my books are required reading. Some places have realised the importance, others have not. So, it's patchy.

You created the most simplest game ever, the L-Game. What other games have you created?

I designed another game, even simpler and one I call the social justice game. This game is won by not winning. If you tried too hard to win, you lose and only if your opponent did really well, will you win. Recently, I also invented a card game with no element of chance or luck whatsoever.

As an authority on creative thinking, and author of numerous books on the subject, do you think that people are finding it difficult to find solutions to everyday problems simply because they are unable to understand the problem and using simple techniques to arrive at an answer?

Very often the problem is with perception. Ninety per cent of errors, are errors of perception, not errors of logic. The reason is that no one looks at the whole picture, the alternatives. These errors of perception are due to the absence of logic, but logic can only get started when you have chosen your perceptions.

So the reason why people find it difficult to solve problems is that they are stuck in some inadequate perception... so if they get some more perception skills things will get easier.

How can creative and lateral thinking be used by businessmen and top executives to good effect in the running of their companies?

There are three uses of creativity in business. The first is to deliver what you are doing better, faster and at a lower cost. A company in Canada that recently started using my thinking skills said they had reduced product development time from 210 days to 40 days, saved $20m and had a return of $28 on every dollar spent on training.

The second use is to do things differently, provide new services and to create value. The third is to use these skills and techniques to solve disputes and help negotiations. A strike at a plant in Canada was averted because someone introduced the Six Hats technique. A second strike was also averted. Third time round, the union told the management they would only talk if they started using these methods.

On a lighter note, Parliament. Should politicians start using your creative thinking skills?

Certainly. I would like to see Parliament have sessions using the Six Hats methods. Seeing the Speaker tell the politicians to wear the Yellow Hat and just discuss the positive points. Arguing is incredibly inefficient.

Any plans for the future?

I work at several levels. One is at school level. In the UAE, as from September, my thinking skills will be taught at all levels. There are other countries which are doing the same.

The other side is working with businesses and other organisations. We need improved thinking skills. We have done nothing about thinking software, nothing since Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, 2,400 years ago. It is incredible that universities doe not have a faculty of thinking, incredible that the most important human skill is not in every school, incredible that we have remained complacent with a good but limited type of thinking. There is a lot more to be done.

In my latest book, The de Bono Code Book, I state that language is the biggest barrier to human progress, because language is very poor at complex situations. With language you can describe things, but it is not the same as perceiving them. What I've put forward in this code book is a whole range of ways to deal with complex situations instantly. Progress is being able to perceive complex situations.