Think!
Page 1
Table of Contents
About the Author
PRAISE FOR HOW TO HAVE A BEAUTIFUL MIND
PRAISE FOR HOW TO HAVE CREATIVE IDEAS
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Author's Note
Introduction
Chapter 1 Creativity
Chapter 2 The Formal Tools of Lateral Thinking
Chapter 3 Judgement Not Design
Chapter 4 Knowledge and Information
Chapter 5 Language
Chapter 6 Democracy
Chapter 7 Universities
Chapter 8 Schools
Chapter 9 The Media
Chapter 10 Perception
Chapter 11 Critical Thinking and Criticism
Chapter 12 Art and Thinking
Chapter 13 Leadership and Thinking
Chapter 14 Conflicts and Disagreements
Chapter 15 Twenty-three Reasons Why Thinking Is So Poor
Chapter 16 What Can I Do?
Chapter 17 What Can You Do?
Chapter 18 What Can Society Do?
Chapter 19 Values
Chapter 20 The Right to Think
Epilogue
De Bono Thinking Systems
The Edward de Bono Foundation
Index
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM VERMILION BY EDWARD DE BONO How to Have a Beautiful Mind
The Six Value Medals
How to Have Creative Ideas
Six Frames for Thinking about Information
H+ (Plus) A New Religion?
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IN PRAISE OF EDWARD DE BONO
'Edward doesn't just think. He is a one-man global industry, whose work is gospel in government, universities, schools, corporates and even prisons all over the world' Times 2
'Edward de Bono is a toolmaker, his tools have been fashioned for thinking, to make more of the mind' Peter Gabriel
'De Bono's work may be the best thing going in the world today' George Gallup, originator of the Gallup Poll
'The guru of clear thinking' Marketing Week
PRAISE FOR HOW TO HAVE A BEAUTIFUL MIND
'Mercifully free of the trite techniques offered by many publications promising to save us from social awkwardness, the book succeeds in doing just that' Independent on Sunday
'a clever, instructive guide . . . Highly recommended' The Good Book Guide
PRAISE FOR HOW TO HAVE CREATIVE IDEAS
'Good fun, stimulating good thinking' Times Educational Supplement
'A thought-provoking – and thought-improving – book . . . Simple, practical and great fun' Management Today
'It is simple, practical and fun and a necessary read for anyone who wants to have great ideas' Business Executive
Also by Edward de Bono from Vermilion:
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
The Six Value Medals
H+ (Plus) A New Religion?
How to Have Creative Ideas
Six Frames for Thinking about Information
Think!
Before It's Too Late
Edward de Bono
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Author's Note
Apologies
There are a number of people whose names should be in this book. They have told me certain things, or done certain things, and I would like to acknowledge their contribution. Unfortunately I do not keep detailed records of all meetings and conversations. So I apologise to anyone who feels they should have been mentioned. Please write to me and indicate where and why your name should be included, and in the next edition of the book I shall see that your name is there.
In addition, if you have practical experience with my thinking in your own life or business, or in teaching the methods, and it is not included here, let me have details and, if appropriate, I will include them in the next edition.
Any omission of a name is unintentional and I apologise for it. I do want to give full credit to those who have helped me in my work.
Introduction
WHY DO WE NEED THIS BOOK?
This is not a nice book. It is not intended to be a nice book. You cannot shift complacency with niceness. We are completely complacent about the quality of our human thinking. We believe it to be wonderful for various reasons that I shall discuss later. We have done nothing about human thinking, outside of mathematics, for roughly 2,400 years, since the great Greek philosophers. I do not believe we should be so complacent. This book is about why human thinking is so poor. It also suggests what we can do about it. So it is a positive book even if the need for such a book is negative.
I come from the island of Malta, which is officially the oldest civilisation in the world. The earliest man-made structure on earth is a substantial Stone Age temple in Gozo (the sister island of Malta). So perhaps I have a mission to save the world from its complacency.
Think grey not green
It has become very fashionable to 'think green', and I am fully in favour of this. Climate change is a legitimate political theme, and any politician can express his or her concern with this matter and get votes as a result. This is excellent.
But there is a bigger and more urgent danger than climate change. That danger is the poor quality of human thinking. This requires even more urgent attention. Perhaps there should be an even more important slogan 'think grey'. The grey refers to our grey matter, or brains. Most of the problems, conflicts and fights in the world are caused by poor thinking. An improvement in human thinking would help solve such issues. If we get our thinking right then it becomes easier to solve not only environmental problems, but other problems too.
Consider the Israel / Palestine problem. Here we have some of the most intelligent people on the surface of the earth. For over 60 years they have been unable to solve their problem, and yet they know full well that it has to be solved some time. That is poor thinking.
Nothing is more fundamental or more important than human thinking. What about values? The purpose of thinkin
g is to enable us to deliver and enjoy our values. Values without thinking are highly dangerous and have been responsible for the wars, pogroms, persecutions and appalling behaviour of the past. Thinking without values is pointless – for thinking then has no purpose.
Yet, amazingly, we have paid no attention to thinking for 2,400 years.
Emotion vs. thought
What about emotions? What about human behaviour? What about human nature?
There is a belief that thinking is academic and abstract and that what really drives action is human emotions and human behaviour. This is unfortunate nonsense that arises directly – and correctly – from our traditional methods of thinking, which have very little practical impact in conflict situations.
In the Karee platinum mine in South Africa there were seven tribes represented among the workers: Xhosa, Zulu, Sutu, and so on. As a consequence of the traditional hostilities between these tribes, developed over centuries, there were 210 fights every month between members of the various tribes. Susan Mackie and Donalda Dawson taught my perceptual thinking to these totally illiterate miners who had never been to school for even one day in their lives. They encouraged them to consider other people's points of view. The result was that the fights dropped from 210 a month to just four! Why had better thinking made this huge difference? Because this new thinking was concerned with perception – not logic.
Logic will never change emotions and behaviour. Trying to persuade people logically to change emotions is useless in practice, and most people have experienced this. It is perceptions that control emotions and emotions control behaviour. Changes in perception will change emotions and therefore behaviour. If your perception changes, you have no choice: your emotions and behaviour change too.
THINKING SOFTWARE
Worldwide there are probably about 50,000 people writing software for computers. It is obvious that a computer cannot work without software. It is also obvious that new and more powerful software will allow the same computer to behave far more effectively.
How many people are writing software for the human brain?
The basic and traditional thinking software that we use was developed 2,400 years ago by the GG3. Who were the GG3? This was the Greek Gang of Three. They were Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Socrates was interested in asking questions (usually leading questions). He was also most interested in dialectic or argument.
Plato was interested in the ultimate 'truth' (he also considered democracy to be a silly system).
Aristotle created 'box logic'. Something was in this box or not and could never be half in and half out. Although he was married twice, he never asked either of his wives to open their mouths so he might count their teeth. He knew that men had more teeth in their mouths than women because with horses this was so. Creatures in the category of males (like horses) have more teeth than those in the category female – this was Aristotle-type logic.
The Renaissance and the Church
At the Renaissance, this wonderful Greek thinking spread across Europe. At that time schools, universities and thinking in general were in the hands of the Church.
The Church did not need creative thinking, or design thinking, or perceptual thinking, all of which I will discuss later. What the Church did need was argument, truth and logic with which to prove heretics wrong.
So argument, truth and logic became the core of our thinking in culture, in education and in the operations of society (such as law).
Creativity and inventiveness were left to individuals but never became part of education.
Argument, truth and logic proved so excellent in science and technology that we came to consider this thinking as perfect, complete and beyond any need for change.
Why have we not done more about software for human thinking?
Bookshops have a hard time deciding where to place my books. They get placed under Philosophy, Psychology, Business, Education and even Humour. There is no category for 'Thinking'.
There is no category called 'Thinking' in bookshops because we have always believed that thinking was well looked after by philosophy and psychology.
Imagine someone sitting at a table with a large sheet of white cardboard in front of him and a pair of scissors. With the scissors he cuts the cardboard into intricate shapes. Then he carefully puts all the pieces together again and smiles in triumph.
Philosophers do this. They describe the world in concepts, perceptions and values and then put these pieces together again.
Psychology arose from folk tales, myths, magic and astrology as a way of understanding people and predicting behaviour. But psychology understood that in order to become a real science there was a need for measurement. Measurement was the opposite of myth. So psychology became obsessed with measurement. Today, psychology is much concerned with putting people into boxes on the basis of some measurement.
Both philosophy and psychology are descriptive and analytical in nature. They are not operational. They do not provide practical tools for thinking.
So there should be a category called 'Thinking' because this is separate from philosophy, psychology and even mathematics.
I find it rather sad that when students who are interested in human thinking enter university, they choose to study philosophy. This is not about human thinking at all, and effectively sterilises their minds. I studied psychology at Oxford, but it was not an operational subject – it was just the history of psychology.
I am currently Da Vinci Professor of Thinking at the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona. I am also professor of thinking at four other universities. Very few universities have a Faculty of Thinking.
My interest in thinking has resulted in me designing practical operational tools and frameworks for thinking. These are now used by four-year-olds in school and by top executives at the world's largest corporations. Tools have to be simple, practical and effective. I am providing what philosophy and psychology have never provided. I am providing new software for human thinking.
The mechanism of mind
For the first time in human history we can base the design for human thinking on an understanding of how the human mind actually works.
I graduated as a medical doctor and worked in the field of medicine for 48 years. I was doing research in addition to clinical duties. I had teaching positions at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge and Harvard. I had also graduated separately in Psychology.
In medicine I was doing research into the interaction of various systems: respiratory, kidney, heart, glands, etc. If you can understand what is going on, you can design treatments.
I once had a patient with Idiopathic Postural Hypotension. This is a rare condition but, for those with it, these unfortunate people spent their whole lives lying flat in bed because, if they stood up, they fainted. Various approaches, including Air Force G-suits, had been tried without much success. I figured out that the arteriolar tone going to the kidneys was poor, so, when they lay down, the kidneys acted as if there was too much blood volume and got rid of the salt and water. So they never had enough blood – and collapsed.
The cure was very simple. No medication and no operations were needed. All that was required were two six-inch blocks of wood under the head of the bed – one on each side. The kidneys now acted as if there was not enough blood so they held on to the salt and water. The patients were now able to live a 100 per cent normal life.
If you understand the system you can design appropriate action. That is what I did.
From my work in medicine I derived certain principles of 'self-organising systems'. I applied these principles to the neural network in the brain in order to understand how the mind worked.
In 1969 I wrote a book with the title The Mechanism of Mind. This book was read by the leading physicist in the world, Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who won his Nobel prize for discovering the quark. He also founded the Santa Fe Institute, which deals specifically with complex systems. He liked my book so
much that he commissioned a team of computer experts to simulate what I had written in the book. They confirmed that the system I suggested for the brain behaved exactly as I had predicted. Two other computer teams, elsewhere in the world, have also confirmed this.
Professor Murray Gell-Mann has remained to this day a valued supporter of my ideas. It is interesting that when I am addressing groups of mathematicians or physicists, they fully understand and agree with what I am saying. They can understand the behaviour of self-organising systems like the human mind. All this is very far from the word games of traditional philosophy.
From this basis of understanding how the brain works I designed the formal and deliberate tools of Lateral Thinking. Later in this book I shall elaborate further on how the brain works.
I shall also show how the asymmetric patterning behaviour of the human brain gives rise to both creativity and humour.
For the first time in the history of the human race, we can relate ways of thinking, or software for the human brain, to how the information system of the brain actually works. This is very, very different from philosophers playing around with words and concepts but with no understanding of how the brain actually works. That is the difference.
WE HAVE SUCH EXCELLENT THINKING!
Is our thinking all bad? No! We have such excellent thinking, how can there be any suggestion that our thinking is inadequate?
Look at some successes:
We can land men on the moon and watch them walk around in real time (Buzz Aldrin is actually a friend of mine).
We can fly faster than the speed of sound (Concorde).
We can pick up a mobile phone in Australia and get to talk to a particular person in the USA.
We have computers, from the simplest to the most complex.
We have devised the Internet, which connects up millions of people around the world.
We have nuclear energy.
Global television can send pictures and live stories around the world.