Tools

What is the biggest problem facing humanity and the world today? Many people might choose ‘climate change’ but, in my view, the biggest problem is the inadequacy of our thinking. And we are not even aware of it.

Two people are standing one on either side of a canal in Venice. One calls across to the other, “How do I get to the other side?” The second person replies, “But you’re already on the other side!” We use our existing thinking to promote our complacency and thus create a vicious circle of bad thinking. As an Ambassador for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009, and as a native of the oldest civilisation in the world – Malta – I feel I have a duty to point these things out.

There are probably more than 50,000 people worldwide writing computer software. Yet, outside of mathematics, we have done nothing about software for the human brain for 2,400 years. That is when the Greek Gang of Three (GG3) – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – designed the thinking software we have used ever since.

When Greek thinking entered Europe at the time of the Renaissance, schools, universities and thinking in general were in the hands of the Church. People did not need perceptual thinking because all perceptions were set as matters of faith. They did not need creative thinking or design thinking. What they did need were truth, logic and argument with which to prove heretics wrong. So that became and has remained the core of our thinking today.

We have excellent thinking for ‘finding the truth’ and this has served us well in science. But we have never developed the thinking for ‘creating value’. We have a thinking system based on judgement rather than on design. In my new book, Think! Before It’s Too Late, I put forward 23 reasons why world thinking is currently so poor and outline the thinking methods I have developed to combat this.

Argument

Argument is a crude and inefficient system for exploring a subject. Yet we have used it for two-and-a-half millennia in government, in courts of law and in negotiations. It is largely negative and there is no design element. There is too much ego involved in proving others wrong. Argument was never designed to explore a subject – you can argue about which road to take on a road map, but argument can’t create a road map.

What could we use instead of argument? There is the parallel thinking of the Six Thinking Hats. As I outline in Think!, this is a method I developed where all participants think in parallel using six constructive frameworks that allow productive outcomes to be reached. When used in meetings, decisions are reached faster and more positively and creative solutions are yielded. As argument and ego are taken out of the equation, all participants generate more conducive ideas. The Six Thinking Hats is used to great success by many groups, governing bodies, leading and progressive companies and in education.

At any moment, all participants are looking and thinking in the same direction – as indicated by the colour of the hat in use. One of the attractions of argument is that you can show your superiority by proving someone else wrong. You cannot do that with Six Hats. If you want to show off, you can only do it by performing better under each hat.

In 2008, I was told by a Nobel prize-winning economist that he had attended a top economics meeting in Washington and they were using the Hats. Later in the year, a woman in New Zealand told me she had been teaching the Hats in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (generally regarded as the most primitive place on Earth). She went back a month later and they told her it had changed their lives.

Global technology company ABB of Finland reported that multinational project meetings that had previously taken 30 days now took only two days. Canada’s biggest marketing group, MDC, reckoned that it had saved $20m in the first year of using the Hats. Statoil had a problem with an oilrig that was costing $100,000 a day. It had been thinking about it for some time. Then Jens Arup introduced the Hats and in 12 minutes it had solved the problem. Ericsson recently had discussions on a $4bn project. It did not seem to be getting anywhere so it invited Pat Carlisle (one of my trainers in the USA) to teach its people the Hats method. They quickly had an outcome.

Grant Todd in the USA taught the Hats to juries in court and as a result they reached unanimous verdicts very quickly. The judges were so impressed that in three states the judge can now recommend that the jury use this method. This may be the first change in the jury system for 1,000 years.

Creativity

Idea creativity is not some mysterious talent that some people are born with and others can only envy. It is a skill that can be learned, practiced and applied.
Creative thinking is logical thinking in a patterning universe. One day a man gets up in the morning and programs his computer to go through all the different ways of getting dressed with 11 pieces of clothing. The computer works for 40 hours because there are 39,916,800 permutations. If you were to try one way every minute of your waking life you would need to live to be 76 years old to cover every one. This would be rather inconvenient. We do not need to do this because the brain is designed to allow incoming information to organise itself into patterns. Once the patterns are formed, all we need to do is to recognise them and use them.

All patterning systems are asymmetric. This means that we go from A to B. We can also go from C to A but not from A to C. This asymmetry is precisely the basis for humour and for creativity. In both cases, the new idea or perception is totally logical in hindsight – but not accessible by logic in the first place.

I explained all this in my 1969 book The Mechanism of Mind and illustrate it in my new book Think! The leading physicist in the world, Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who won a Nobel prize for discovering the quark, commissioned a team of computer experts to simulate the patterning of nerve networks in the brain that I described in the book. They confirmed that the system would behave exactly as indicated.

Lateral Thinking

From this understanding of the patterning nature of the brain we can design the formal tools of lateral thinking (moving across patterns). One such tool used by a workshop in South Africa generated 21,000 new ideas in a single afternoon. As outlined in Think!, there are tools in different areas.

There are tools of challenge. In 1970, in a workshop for Shell Oil in London, I suggested that oil wells should move horizontally at the depth of the oil stratum. Such wells produce between three and six times as much oil as the conventional well. Yet for 80 years everyone had been happy with the traditional well.

There are tools to do with concept extraction. An Australian town mayor told me he had a problem with commuters who left their cars parked in the street all day and made it impossible for shoppers to park. He wondered whether to put in parking meters – with all the associated costs. I suggested that if the concept was to ‘self-limit’ parking time we could have areas where you could park as long as you liked provided you left your headlights full on.

Then there are tools of provocation. Provocations allow us to say things that are totally wrong or impossible and then to use these for their ‘movement’ value to move on to new ideas. This seems utter nonsense to logicians but makes perfect sense to mathematicians who know that self-organising systems reach a local equilibrium and have to be provoked to reach a more global equilibrium.

During a talk to an ecology department in California, I used a provocative technique to suggest that a factory should be downstream of itself on a river. This seems absurd but from it comes the logical suggestion that we legislate that any factory built on a river must have its inlet (taking in water) downstream of its own outlet (putting out effluent). This has now become legislation in many countries.

Then there are the random entry methods. These again seem nonsense to logicians but are perfectly logical in a patterning universe.

Education

My Blue Sky Skills organisation has shown that teaching my thinking (the CoRT – Cognitive Research Trust – method of perception) as a separate subject raises performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 per cent. David Lane at the Hungerford Guidance Centre for very violent youngsters showed that training these youngsters in creative thinking reduced actual criminal conviction (in a 20-year follow up) to one tenth compared to those not taught thinking. Teaching thinking to unemployed youngsters for just five hours increased their employment rate by 500 per cent.

These methods are now in use in thousands of schools around the world and are mandatory in some countries, such as Venezuela. The Chinese government is carrying out a pilot project in five provinces and if it likes the results may introduce it to 680,000 schools.
The UK is a little behind in these matters, although there are some excellent schools doing it, because this country gives much more recognition to rugby, football, cricket and rock music than to intellectual matters.

The Future

There is a great deal more to be done. I have written to the prime minister to suggest the need for a ‘Minister of Thinking’. On the website debonopost.com there is a suggestion to deal with the economic crisis. There is a mathematical need for new thinking. Where is it to come from? Many years ago I tried to set up a creative thinking group in the UN but was told that the representatives were there to represent their countries – not to generate new ideas. So I am planning to set up a ‘Palace of Thinking’ to provide a platform and source for new ideas.

Edward de Bono's Think! Before It’s Too Late is published by Vermillion, £16.99