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==Ideas==
==Ideas==
{{essay-like|section|date=September 2012}}
{{essay-like|section|date=September 2012}}

===Thinking===
Edward De Bono argues that the new thinking of the "New Renaissance" should be based on the most fundamental of all bases, more fundamental than philosophical word-play or belief system. They are to be based directly on how the human brain works and in particular the way the human way creates perception” Edward De Bono writes in the book I Am Right You Are Wrong. He continues that the last renaissance received and polished the methods of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the golden age of Greek philosophy. It is possible that the argument method was in use before and De Bono continue that Socrates developed it in a formidable procedure. Then there is a remarkable paradox of how history made the revival of Greek argument thinking in the last renaissance while he proposes a new renaissance that of design that is an evolution of such thinking. But on the last renaissance it served a dual purpose. On the one hand used by humanistic thinkers that used the system of logic and reason to attack the dogma that suffocated society. On the other hand, church thinker led by the genius of Thomas Aquinas of Naples developed the same argument of logic into a powerful way of defeating the numerous heresies that were forever surfacing. Perhaps this is not so surprising, since the new method was such an obvious advance on existing thinking method. He continues that truth is a destination is a very powerful motivator.

In his book ''Teach Yourself To Think'' Edward De Bono writes “From Plato came an obsession with truth and the belief that we could establish this logically. This belief has been a powerful motivator to all subsequent thinkers and he adds that Plato was a fascist. From Socrates in this book he writes that we took argumentation Dialectics criticism that it is more important to construct what is wrong than what is useful and ultimately from Aristotle we inherited that which is based on “is” and “is not” and avoidance of contradiction. He says that the past used logic is called Rock Logic that is permanent and unchanging absolute and we need to use water logic instead which is a flexible logic and which rock logic can also be in as rocks are in the sea, in water. This is based on “to”. The concept of fit and flow.

He therefore also proposes the [[Six Thinking Hats]] rather than argument as it is more productive as he states.


In 2000, de Bono advised a U.K [[Foreign Office]] committee that the [[Arab-Israeli conflict]] might be due, in part, to low levels of [[zinc]] found in people who eat [[unleavened bread]] (e.g. [[pita]] [[flatbread]]), a known side-effect of which is [[aggression]]. He suggested shipping out jars of [[Marmite]] to compensate.<ref>[[John Lloyd (producer)|Lloyd, J]] & [[John Mitchinson|Mitchinson, J]]: "[[The Book of General Ignorance]]". Faber & Faber, 2006.</ref><ref name="independent-marmite">Louise Jury [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/de-bonos-marmite-plan-for-peace-in-middle-yeast-1133338.html De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast], The Independent, 19 December 1999, retrieved 11 February 2009.</ref>
In 2000, de Bono advised a U.K [[Foreign Office]] committee that the [[Arab-Israeli conflict]] might be due, in part, to low levels of [[zinc]] found in people who eat [[unleavened bread]] (e.g. [[pita]] [[flatbread]]), a known side-effect of which is [[aggression]]. He suggested shipping out jars of [[Marmite]] to compensate.<ref>[[John Lloyd (producer)|Lloyd, J]] & [[John Mitchinson|Mitchinson, J]]: "[[The Book of General Ignorance]]". Faber & Faber, 2006.</ref><ref name="independent-marmite">Louise Jury [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/de-bonos-marmite-plan-for-peace-in-middle-yeast-1133338.html De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast], The Independent, 19 December 1999, retrieved 11 February 2009.</ref>

He has suggested an alternative to the [[Penalty shootout (association football)|penalty shootout]] when a [[soccer]] match ends in a draw. If the number of times each goalkeeper touches the ball is recorded throughout the game the results can be compared in the event of a draw. The team whose goalkeeper has touched the ball more often is the loser. The winner will then be the team that has had more attempts at scoring goals and is more aggressive (and therefore exciting) in their style of play. This mechanism would avoid the tension of the penalty shoot out. However, some people argue that this method of deciding a drawn match completely ignores the goalkeeper's skill which can win a game for a team. If the game goes to a penalty shootout, even though one team may have completely dominated the other, the goalkeeper has kept the scores level. Furthermore the goalkeeper can make highly skilled saves in a penalty shootout and defeat the better team.


===Games===
===Games===

Revision as of 07:19, 18 February 2013

Edward de Bono
De Bono in 2010.
Born (1933-05-19) May 19, 1933 (age 91)
Malta

Edward de Bono (born 19 May 1933) is a Maltese physician, author, inventor and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking,[citation needed] wrote the book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.

Biography

Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born in Malta on 19 May 1933. De Bono then gained a medical degree from the University of Malta. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, in England where he gained an M.A. degree in psychology and physiology. He also has a Ph.D. degree and a D.Phil. degree in Medicine from Trinity College, Cambridge, a D.Des. degree (Doctor of Design) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and an LL.D. degree from the University of Dundee.

He has held faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard.[1] He is a professor at Malta, Pretoria, Central England and Dublin City University. de Bono holds the Da Vinci Professor of Thinking chair at University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix, USA.[2] He was one of the 27 Ambassadors for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009.[3]

De Bono was formerly married to Josephine Hall-White, with whom he has two sons. He continues to travel giving seminars on his work and to write. He lives in Malta and owns an apartment in Piccadilly, London (previous residents of which include the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone and the poet Lord Byron).

In 1969 de Bono founded the Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT). In 1979 he co-founded the Edward de Bono School of Thinking.

He has written 57 bookswith translations into 34 languages.[1] He has taught his thinking methods to government agencies, corporate clients, organizations and individuals, privately or publicly in group sessions. He has started to set up the World Center for New Thinking, based in Malta, which he describes as a "kind of intellectual Red Cross".

In 1995, he created the futuristic documentary film, 2040: Possibilities by Edward de Bono, a lecture designed to prepare an audience of viewers released from a cryogenic freeze for contemporary (2040) society.[1]

Schools from over twenty countries have included de Bono's thinking tools into their curriculum.[2]

Convinced that a key way forward for humanity is better language, he published "The Edward de Bono Code Book" in 2000. In this book, he proposed a suite of new words based on numbers, where each number combination represents a useful idea or situation that currently does not have a single-word representation. For example, de Bono code 6/2 means "Give me my point of view and I will give you your point of view." dBc 6/2 might be used in situations where one or both of two parties in a dispute are making insufficient effort to understand the other's perspective.[4]

Ideas

In 2000, de Bono advised a U.K Foreign Office committee that the Arab-Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread (e.g. pita flatbread), a known side-effect of which is aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.[5][6]

Games

De Bono invented a simple strategy game, the L Game, and Concept Snap, which requires participants to think of ways in which different objects can be used to perform similar functions. He notes that what is learned from games tends not to be transferred to thinking in real life.

Art

In I Am Right You Are Wrong, de Bono writes that art is directly concerned with redirecting existing perceptions and changing them, but does not encourage perceptual skills, and that in the end art is a form of communication. In his book Water Logic he writes that art needs to highlight, to deepen perception and to open up insights. This is done by disrupting the patterns, by juxtaposing patterns and by providing new pattern framework and he gives us the example that when anything new arise such as Impressionism it was first judged as ugly, even hideous by most art critics. This was because it was “ugly” when viewed through the frames of expectation of existing and traditional painting. He continues that people had to be trained to look at the paintings in a different way to appreciate their beauty. Carrying this to the extreme is Andy Warhol with his Brillo Boxes, or putting a pile of scattered bricks in an art gallery and asking the people there about them as if they were a work of art, whereby they really do become a work of art. Our normal perception patterns treat bricks and treated the Brillo Boxes as mundane material but if we break the loop of our perception pattern we see them differently, while still keeping a faint echo of their constructive value. This is because when we explore a ruse clearly we set a perception, but then we pass that perception as we just see it and put it somewhere generally, at which point we don't break any pattern anymore.

Edward De Bono also wrote that Water Logic is present in such art as poetry. This is because, as he writes in I Am Right You Are Wrong, in poetry we add layer after layer of words, images, metaphors and other vehicles for perception. It all builds up in one holistic perception. Poetry is an area of lateral thinking. He originated a form of poetry, similar to a limerick, that he termed a "Bonto." In 2007, his Septoe idea was given life through a new website. Septoes allow people to distill their wisdom into phrases of exactly seven words.[7]

Critiques

The following two critiques on research methodology assume the Philosophy of Positivism. The critiques on Positivism usually comes from the Philosophy of Antipositivism.

  1. In the Handbook of Creativity, Robert J. Sternberg writes, "Equally damaging to the scientific study of creativity, in our view, has been the takeover of the field, in the popular mind, by those who follow what might be referred to as a pragmatic approach. Those taking this approach have been concerned primarily with developing creativity, secondarily with understanding it, but almost not at all with testing the validity of their ideas about it." Sternberg continues, "Perhaps the foremost proponent of this approach is Edward De Bono, whose work on lateral thinking and other aspects of creativity has had what appears to be considerable commercial success."[8]
  2. Frameworks For Thinking is an evaluation of 42 popular thinking frameworks conducted by a team of researchers. Regarding Edward De Bono they write, "[he] is more interested in the usefulness of developing ideas than proving the reliability or efficacy of his approach. There is sparse research evidence to show that generalised improvements in thinking performance can be attributed to training in the use of CoRT or Thinking Hats tools. An early evaluation of CoRT reported significant benefits for Special Educational Needs (SEN) pupils.... However, in a more recent study with Australian aboriginal children (Ritchie and Edwards, 1996), little evidence of generalisation was found other than in the area of creative thinking."[9]

The views of De Bono on language have been challenged by some philologists (Marco Ferri, 1994) who contend that his view of language as the biggest barrier to human progress is superficial. Ferri argues that a lack of human critical judgement should be held responsible for the transmission of out-of-date ideas. [citation needed]

De Bono has also been criticized for his suggestion of exporting Marmite to the Middle East in order to ease conflict in the area, as the area is associated with low zinc levels, which De Bono argued leads to heightened aggression. This idea achieved certain prominence.

Published works

Partial list of books by de Bono include:

  • The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967) ISBN 0-14-013788-2, introduced the term "lateral thinking"
  • New Think (1967, 1968) ISBN 0-380-01426-2
  • The Five-Day Course in Thinking (1968), introduced the L game
  • The Mechanism of the Mind (1969), Intl Center for Creative Thinking 1992 reprint: ISBN 0-14-013787-4
  • Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, (1970), Harper & Row 1973 paperback: ISBN 0-06-090325-2
  • The Dog-Exercising Machine (1970)
  • Technology Today (1971)
  • Practical Thinking (1971)
  • Lateral Thinking for Management (1971)
  • Po: A Device for Successful Thinking (1972), ISBN 0-671-21338-5, introduced the term Po
  • Children Solve Problems (1972) ISBN 0-14-080323-8, ISBN 0-06-011024-4 (1974 reprint)
  • Po: Beyond Yes and No (1973), ISBN 0-14-021715-0
  • Eureka!: An Illustrated History of Inventions from the Wheel to the Computer (1974)
  • Teaching Thinking (1976)
  • The Greatest Thinkers: The Thirty Minds That Shaped Our Civilization (1976), ISBN 0-399-11762-8
  • Wordpower: An Illustrated Dictionary of Vital Words (1977)
  • The Happiness Purpose (1977)
  • Opportunities : A handbook for business opportunity search (1978)
  • Future Positive (1979)
  • Atlas of Management Thinking (1981)
  • De Bono's Course in Thinking (1982)
  • Learn-To-Think: Coursebook and Instructors Manual with Michael Hewitt-Gleeson de Saint-Arnaud (1982), ISBN 0-88496-199-0
  • Tactics: The Art and Science of Success (1985)
  • Conflicts: A Better Way to Resolve them (1985)
  • Masterthinker's Handbook (1985)
  • Six Thinking Hats (1985) ISBN 0-316-17831-4
  • I Am Right, You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic (1991) ISBN 0-670-84231-1
  • Six Action Shoes (1991)
  • Handbook for the Positive Revolution (1991) ISBN 0-14-012679-1
  • Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas (1992) ISBN 0-00-255143-8 – a summation of many of De Bono's ideas on creativity
  • Sur/Petition (1992) ISBN 0-88730-543-1
  • Parallel thinking: from Socratic thinking to de Bono thinking (1994) ISBN 0-670-85126-4
  • Teach Yourself How to Think (1995)
  • Textbook of Wisdom (1996) ISBN 0-670-87011-0
  • How to Be More Interesting (1998)
  • Simplicity (1999)
  • New Thinking for the New Millennium (1999)
  • Why I Want To Be King of Australia (1999)
  • How to Have A Beautiful Mind (2004)
  • Six Value Medals (2005)
  • H+ (Plus): A New Religion (2006)
  • How to Have Creative Ideas (2007)
  • Free or Unfree? : Are Americans Really Free? (2007) ISBN 1-59777-544-4
  • Six Frames For Thinking About Information (2008)
  • Think! Before It's Too Late (2009) ISBN 978-0-09-192409-6

De Bono has also written numerous articles published in refereed and other journals, including The Lancet and Clinical Science.

See also

References

The Edward de Bono Society is an information based and social networking site for all de Bono followers.

  1. ^ a b c Bio at Penguin books
  2. ^ a b "About Edward de Bono". Edward de Bono's Personal Web Site. 5 May 2008. Retrieved 5 May 2008.
  3. ^ European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - Europa, Europa.eu. Accessed 2009-05-14.
  4. ^ de Bono, Edward (2000). The de Bono Code Book. p. 52.
  5. ^ Lloyd, J & Mitchinson, J: "The Book of General Ignorance". Faber & Faber, 2006.
  6. ^ Louise Jury De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast, The Independent, 19 December 1999, retrieved 11 February 2009.
  7. ^ "Septoe Web Site". Innovation Delivery. 5 May 2008. Retrieved 5 May 2008.
  8. ^ Sternberg, R. J. & Lubart, T. L. (1999). "The Concept of Creativity", in ed. Sternberg, R. J.: Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.
  9. ^ Moseley, D., Baumfield, V., Elliott, J., Gregson, M., Higgins, S., Miller, J., Newton, D. (2005). "De Bono's lateral and parallel thinking tools", in ed. Moseley, David: Frameworks for Thinking. Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

  • Piers Dudgeon: Breaking Out of the Box: The Biography of Edward de Bono. London: Headline, 2001. ISBN 0-7472-7142-9
Wikiquote has quotations related to Edward de Bono.

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