Change
Originator of the concept of sideways thinking, Edward de Bono talks about more productive ways of thinking - both in business and in the academic world.
Interview by Peter Chiaramonte
His vision was of nothing less global revolution. Born on a small island in the Mediterranean, his visions and ambitions have led to dynamic far-reaching changes. And he married a beautiful woman named Josephine.
Napoleon Bonaparte? Well, him too. I was thinking of Edward de Bono, a map-changer of another kind.
Dr. Edward de Bono is the leading international authority in the teaching of thinking and creativity. Born on Malta, he received his M.D. from the Royal University of Malta when he was 21 years old. He proceeded as a Rhodes Scholar to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in psychology and physiology, and then a D. Phil. in medicine. He also holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge and has had faculty appointments with the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge, and Harvard.
de bono is the originator of the concept of Lateral Thinking, which now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Lateral thinking is sideways thinking. It allows a thinker to cut across conventional patterns of logic and to come up with new concepts and ideas. Although de Bono's intellectual interests span everything from education to philosophy, his focus recently has been business and organizations. He has published 27 books which have been translated into 20 languages.
Prompted by his work, many countries have instituted thinking courses in schools. In Venezuela, for example, over 120,000 teachers have been trained in what is now the largest curriculum program in the world for the direct teaching of thinking. By law, every school-aged child in that country must do two hours of thinking per week throughout his or her primary education. The same program is being used today in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia. And the same methods being taught in the jungles of South America are being used in the board: rooms of major corporations and by the leaders of several countries.
Peter Ueberroth, who became Time magazine's "Man of the Year" after his successful co-ordination of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, credited his creative problem-solving skills to the thinking and techniques he learned in a seminar given by Edward de Bono several years earlier. de Bono has written that thinking is the ultimate resource and that every organization should make an effort to raise the ability and potential of its workforce through the direct teaching of thinking. In the future, he says, the success of enterprises will depend on their ability to generate new concepts and more creative solutions than past patterns of thinking have provided. Perhaps de Bono's most ambitious project to date is his current project to offer political leaders creative solutions to world conflicts. He has established an international "think-tank" called the Supranational Independent Thinking Organization (SITO).
Like Napoleon before him, de Bono distrusts the spirit of criticism-thinking against instead of thinking for-that pervades most universities of the day. Perhaps, as he suggests in this interview, this is the end of an era, the end of academics in ivory towers and executives in skyscraper isolation. The beginning of a revolution in thinking.
Aurora: Change in the 1960s and 1970s came by protest and compromise. How would you characterize the mood of the 1980s?
de Bono: People are becoming much more pragmatic than ideological. The political parties in many countries, for example, have lost their previous identity. In Australia, a labour government acts conservatively. In France, a socialist government acts capitalistically. On the other hand, parties are polarized in England; maybe it is the same in Canada. However, in many countries, people are saying, "Let's do the sensible thing. We all know what it is. It doesn't matter who is in power; it has got to be done." Gorbachev's perestroika is an example of this kind of thinking. So there has been a certain reduction in the polarization of politics. I would say we are in a much calmer and more constructive atmosphere.
Aurora: Will this atmosphere continue?
de Bono: Once the intense "yuppie phase" has passed, the positive attitudes will remain. We must get past this attitude of, "To hell with everyone else! How can I make the most money?" It is an attitude of intense personal greed.
Aurora: Every corporation likes to think it is constantly on the lookout for new ideas and how to implement them. Are they?
de Bono: Absolutely not. Corporations hate new ideas. They really do because an idea is a risk to someone. Ideas divert people from whatever they are doing. We've got new corporate strategy divisions, but all they do is find targets for takeovers. A culture of innovation is very difficult to establish no matter what an organization says. If you get a product championed by an individual, it might happen: But not normally.
Aurora: What about the public sector? How can a progressive-thinking public administrator systematically seek opportunities?
de Bono: That is difficult in a public institution because whenever you make a mistake, the press is on your back. If you do something good, they ask why you took so long. When you have just discovered how to do something better they ask why you've been wasting money for 20 years. So, the rewards and motivation for innovation are difficult, and the risks are high. Also, you can't try things out. You can't say, "Okay, we're going to try this tax system this time, and if it doesn't work, we'll drop it." The whole area of public administration needs very serious, focused attention. We need to ask how we can test things in public administration, how we can motivate and reward people, and so on.
Aurora: You have been convinced for some time that the business world uses thinking more than any other sector in the world. What makes this sort of thinking different from that of the academic world?
de Bono: Well, in the business world there is a bottom line. You have got to sell things or your market share shrinks. If you set mortgage rates at 13 per cent while other people set them at 10 per cent, you've lost your market. So there is an intense pressure to engage in problem solving. And there are very definite results.
In most other segments of society, including the academic world, it may be enough to defend your point of view. If you are an economist and you write a good paper defending the idea that monetary theory is wonderful, that is all you are asked to do.
This applies not only to the academic and political world but even to domestic life. Take, for example, a husband and wife arguing; all they are doing is justifying themselves.
Aurora: What is preventing academics from teaching thinking?
de Bono: Academics have not really begun to realize the importance of perception. Even in science, people still believe that if you analyse data, you will get ideas even though everyone says, "No, that is not true." So, we spend all our time teaching science-how to set up experiments, how to analyse data - but very little on how to form a hypothesis. People are still bogged down in finding truth and building arguments. The whole culture of academics is way behind. I have much more hope for teachers and students at secondary and primary schools than I do for academics. Academics are highly intelligent people, so they are very good at defending their position, or dismissing something, or retreating into a corner and saying, "It doesn't affect me."
There comes a point when you cannot talk about belief, reality, and logic unless you understand how the information system in the brain handles these things. Take, for example, free will, which is a cornerstone of our culture. What does free will actually mean in physiological terms? If you understand that, free will means a very different thing. But if you are just talking about free will on an empirical phenomenological basis, you really won't get very far. A philosopher in the future has got to be an information theorist and a physiologist.
Aurora: You have said that the most dangerous fallacy in education is the belief that intelligence and thinking are the same thing. How do they differ?
de Bono: An intelligent person scans quicker. He may cover four or five activity areas in the brain, while another person covers only two. You can test intelligence by such things as reaction times. There is a physiological component to intelligence, but how you use your intelligence is a matter of strategy. If you use your intelligence just to defend your point of view, you will do a good job of defending your point of view. But intelligence by itself is only a potential. Now there we run into one of those silly difficulties with language, because we say everything that is right must be intelligent. Therefore, an intelligent person can't do anything stupid. Then you have reduced the word "intelligence" to mean nothing. You just mean that any good behaviour is intelligence, and if you have that wide a description, it means nothing.
Aurora: You have said that in order to succeed in today's highly competitive world, the business community needs schools and universities to graduate people who can not only solve problems and make decisions but who also can generate new knowledge. Why are efficiency, new technology, and problem-solving no guarantee of success?
de Bono: Efficiency helps you slim down the organization by selling off operations, reducing your work force, and putting in automation. But gradually you come toward a baseline where everyone else is doing the same. For example, if you decide you are going to run a steel plant with 20,000 people instead of 30,000, your competitor will do the same. So you have no competitive edge.
What is going to make a difference to your competitive position is your concepts or initiatives. People will still copy you and catch up, but you will have leadtime. That is the only area in which you can actually do something different from other people. I'm not saying efficiency and the other things aren't useful. I'm saying it is like a stool with three legs. One leg is problem solving, one leg is efficiency, and the third is concept generation.
Aurora: How can we ensure that technology does not drive education?
de Bono: The use of a computer expands to equal the capacity of the computer; therefore, people may end up doing things that really do not need doing. Or they may do them in unnecessary detail because of the computer's power. So they say, let's simulate this, and let's modulate in five dimensions instead of using the computer as it is needed. It is a danger. I would even state a rule of thumb: at any time, 25 per cent of computer capacity should be unused in order to give you the possibility of using it. If it is all filled up, there is no gap, no margin.
Aurora: That is going to be seen by some as a terrible dilemma.
de Bono: No. It is like a university. You could also say that 20 per cent of university positions should be unfilled so if a good guy comes along you can hire him. You can't say, "Wait five years; maybe one of our guys will die."
Aurora: Are universities becoming more like businesses and corporations more like universities?
de Bono: Certainly universities have become more like businesses in that they often have to raise funds in the market place, get paid for research, and all that sort of thing. At the senior level people spend something like 70 per cent of their time handling funds and administering things.
Aurora: You have said that the quality of society depends on the quality of its members. Are we getting better people from universities than the ones we send in?
de Bono: Sure, but only marginally so. One way to look at it is to ask if it would be better if those people hadn't gone to university. The answer is probably not. But do we get as much out of that allocation of their time and the national resources in going to university? I would say absolutely not. In other words, given their time and given those resources, we could get much better people.
Aurora: You have written about the Japanese today and yesterday. Many Canadians feel that now is the time to be making some kind of agreement with Japan rather than the United States.
de Bono: I'll tell you what the Japanese are going to do. In some ways it is very interesting, and in some ways it is very sinister. They are setting up a high tech city in Australia, a city that will have lots of Japanese working in it. The city will carry out research, production, and so on. It is a form of colonialism-that is the sinister side. On the other hand, it is productive. They know that they can't just be in Japan. They are overcrowded already. Now, in Canada, where you have got all the space in the world, you could do the same thing Australia is doing.
Aurora: We are doing it now, in Alberta. The Japanese have run out of resources, but we have a lot of trees. So the companies are building log homes and transferring them from Canada to Japan. They are very popular.
de Bono: In about 1910, lots of Japanese went to Brazil. There were something like two million Japanese around São Paulo. They still have their customs, and they work much harder then anyone else. But they are Brazilians as well. And I really don't think it is a bad thing.
Aurora: Someone has predicted that by the year 2,000, almost half the population of Canada will be of Asian or Oriental descent. Some people think that is a pretty good idea.
de Bono: I don't think it is a bad idea. Orientals work hard, and they are not too interested in political power. In Hong Kong, for example, they say, "If the British are stupid enough to want to run the place, let them run it. We'll go on making money." So, they are not politically aggressive. They certainly have organizing ability and money.
Aurora: Will you explain your view that humour is the most significant characteristic of the human mind?
de Bono: Humour is a strong indicator of a self-organizing, nonlinear system, whereas reason is quite easily imitated with cog-wheels, boxes, channels, or any sorting system. Humour can only occur in a nonlinear patterning system, where you get this "flip-flop" of patterns. In system terms, it is a very significant phenomenon.
Six Thinking Hats, 1985
Conflicts: A better Way to Resolve Them, 1985
Tactics: The Art and Science of Success, 1985
de Bono's Course in Thinking, 1982
Atlas of Management Thinking, 1981
Future Positive, 1979
Opportunities: A Handbook of Business Opportunity Search, 1978
The Happiness Purpose, 1977
Wordpower, 1977
The Greatest Thinkers, 1976
Teaching, Thinking, 1976
Eureka: An Illustrated History of Inventions from the Wheel to Computer, 1974
Children Solve Problems, 1972
Po: Beyond Yes and No, 1972
Lateral Thinking for Management, 1971
Article originally published Spring/Summer 1989
Edward de Bono's official website
Updated July 2001
Aurora Online
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Interview by Peter Chiaramonte. Change: Edward de Bono Aurora Online: