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Edward de Bono

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Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono (born 19 May 1933, in Malta) is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He is known as the originator of the term lateral thinking, wrote a best selling book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.

Biography

Edward de Bono studied at St Edward's College in Malta and gained a medical degree from the University of Malta. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford where he gained an M.A. degree in psychology and physiology whilst being a keen sportsman; rowing and playing polo for Oxford. He also has a Ph.D. degree and a D.Phil. degree in Medicine from Cambridge University, 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. 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.[1] He is one of the 27 for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009.[2] He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2005.

He was formerly married, has three children and resides in London.

In 1969 de Bono founded the Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT) which continues to produce and promote material based on his ideas.

He has written 82 books with translations into 41 languages. He has taught his thinking methods to government agencies, corporate clients, organisations 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.

De Bono has developed a range of 'deliberate thinking techniques' - which emphasise thinking as a deliberate act.

De Bono's techniques are used in companies like IBM, DuPont. Agencies offer corporate training courses based on his techniques think outside the box.

Work

Lateral Thinking

Edward de Bono's key concept is that logical, linear and critical thinking has limitations because it is based on argumentation. The traditional critical thinking processes of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates are reductive, designed to eliminate all but the truth. In many of de Bono's books, he calls for the more important need for creative thinking as a constructive way though that is deliberately designed. In de Bono's first book, Mechanism of Mind, he wrote of the importance to disrupt the dominant patterns preferred by human brain design to facilitate potential creative abilities. Many of de Bono's speculative models from that era about how the brain worked were vindicated by later brain research.

Lateral thinking, (literally, sideways thinking,) uses various acts of provocation to incite ideas that are free from previously locked assumptions. The most well-known lateral thinking technique is the "random word." Invention of the word "PO" by de Bono, (meaning Provocative Operation, also related to POetry and hyPOthesis) gives notice that what will follow isn't meant as nonsense, but intended to relate to the subject at hand. Various provocative lateral thinking actions, (such as escape, new stimuli, reversal, etc.) were designed to deliberately shift perceptional assumptions for the purpose of generating observations and insights about the subject.

Direct Teaching of Thinking

De Bono proposes that most of the problems in thinking are perceptual. Many more mistakes are made by jumping to the wrong conclusion too soon than by thinking irrationally once factors are known.

Edward de Bono held that "Operacy" is key, (another new word he has coined, related to literacy and numeracy.) Creativity should be producible on demand. Formation and design from new ideas cannot merely be left to chance. Because of these opinions, de Bono continues to invent ways to teach creative thinking as a separate skill. Former teaching strategies include complete courses that were adopted as curriculum for children, with later versions adapted for adults. This included many attention directing tools under the names of CoRT, later as DATT, Masterthinker series, and the most widely used Six Thinking Hats. He continues to experiment with new systems such as The de Bono Code.

All his thinking tools operate by directing attention to various aspects and factors of the topic at hand for a short time period of a few minutes. The various tools (with their corresponding acronyms) are often combined together in series to arrive at practical solutions.

For example, after making a list Considering All Factors, (CAF) the thinker selects a priority after doing a FIP (First Important Priorities.) Then, an OPV (Other Peoples' View) is used to help implementation of the idea. This tool prompts the thinker to list the people (or types of people) who would be affected by a proposed idea. The thinker is then required to imagine what effects that idea would have on each of these different people so their concerns may be anticipated and answered.

While this may sound like an exercise in altruism, it need not be. Say you've got a selfish desire (e.g. you're a kid wanting ice cream), then doing an OPV will help you anticipate and plan for other peoples' responses (e.g. "Mummy, me and Jimmy were thinking that cleaning our rooms to your complete satisfaction might earn us both an ice cream. But we would have to eat these ice-creams immediately to avoid spoiling our dinner, so we'd have to start cleaning right away.")

Schools from over twenty countries have included de Bono's thinking tools into their curriculum.[3]

Language

De Bono has stated that he regards language as having been both the biggest help and the biggest barrier to human progress.

His contention is that just as language has allowed one generation to pass useful knowledge onto the next, it has also allowed dangerous myths and out-of-date ideas to become enshrined.

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 (i.e. pita flatbread), a known side-effect of which is aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.[5][6]

He has suggested an alternative to the 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.

Since 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]

Games

Edward de Bono invented a simple game as a challenge, called the L Game, that requires strategy to win, and 'Concept Snap', which requires participants to think of ways in which different objects can be used to perform similar functions. He does contend that what is learned from games tends not to be transferred to thinking in real life.

Critiques

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]

Frameworks For Thinking is a comprehensive 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]

Published works

Partial list of books by de Bono include:

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

See also

References

  1. ^ "About Edward de Bono". Edward de Bono's Personal Web Site. 2008-05-05. Retrieved 2008-05-05.
  2. ^ European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - Europa, Europa.eu. Accessed 2009-05-14.
  3. ^ "About Edward de Bono". Edward de Bono's Personal Web Site. 2008-05-05. Retrieved 2008-05-05.
  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. 2008-05-05. Retrieved 2008-05-05.
  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 074726542X.
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