Edward de Bono

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Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono (born May 19, 1933, in Malta) is a British physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He is best known as the originator of the term lateral thinking (structured creativity) and the leading proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking in schools.

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[edit] Biography

Edward de Bono studied at St Edward's College in Malta and subsequently gained a medical degree from the Royal University of Malta. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he gained an M.A. in psychology and physiology. He also has a D. Phil in Medicine and a Ph.D. from Cambridge, a D. Des (Doctor of Design) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; an LL.D. from Dundee. He holds professorships at the Universities of Malta, Pretoria, Dublin City University, and the University of Central England. The New University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix AZ appointed Dr. de Bono Da Vinci Professor of Thinking in May 2005.[1]

He was formerly married, has two sons and resides on the Channel Islands.

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 spent the last 30 years teaching thinking, including working with governments, corporations, organisations and individuals, speaking publicly or privately on many matters. 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 detailed a range of 'deliberate thinking methods' - applications emphasizing thinking as a deliberate act rather than a reactive one. His writing style has been lauded for being simple and practical. Avoiding academic terminology, he has advanced applied psychology by making theories about creativity and perception into usable tools.

De Bono's work has become particularly popular in the sphere of business - perhaps because of the perceived need to restructure corporations, to allow more flexible working practices and to innovate in products and services. The methods have migrated into corporate training courses designed to help employees and executives think outside the box.

The popularity of his work extends, too, into the sphere of worldwide popular culture; in the popular Japanese anime series Azumanga Daioh, the character Osaka is known for her skill at solving lateral thinking puzzles such as those pioneered by de Bono.[citation needed]

[edit] Achievements

[edit] Lateral Thinking

de Bono's contention is that everyone should strive to be more creative, but that unstructured creativity such as brainstorming is less effective than following the techniques that he prescribes.

The most comprehensive exposition of de Bono's techniques for generating creative ideas was published in his 1992 book, Serious Creativity.[2]

[edit] Direct Teaching of Thinking

de Bono argues that most of the problems in thinking are at the perceptual level - that is, that many more mistakes are made by people jumping to the wrong conclusion than by behaving irrationally once all the relevant facts are known.

To address this problem, he created attention directing tools under the name of CoRT, later as DATT and also included as Code 2 in the de Bono Code.

As the name suggests, the tools operate by directing peoples' attention to different aspects of the situation for a couple of minutes. For example, an OPV (Other Peoples' View) 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.

While this may sound like an exercise in altruism, it need not be. Say you've got a selfish desire (eg. you're a kid wanting ice cream), then doing an OPV will help you anticipate and plan for other peoples' responses (eg. "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.").

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

[edit] Language

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

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]

[edit] Ideas

Edward de Bono is a prolific originator of ideas, only a few of which are listed here.

  • 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.[6]
  • He has also 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, critics argue[weasel words] 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.

[edit] Games

As with ideas, Edward de Bono has been an enthusiastic inventor of games[citation needed], two of which are listed here:

  • De Bono invented the L Game, a simple board game that requires strategy to win.
  • Another game called 'Concept Snap' requires participants to think of ways in which different objects can be used to perform similar functions.

[edit] Movements

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At various junctures Edward de Bono has tried to create new movements in the hope that people pulling in the same direction at the same time will achieve more than people acting independently.

Some of these movements include:

  • Network. Introduced in the book, "The Happiness Purpose"
  • The Positive Revolution
  • YEAH Teams
  • H+

Despite these ideas being well thought out and valuable, they do not seem to have been taken up by more than the occasional de Bono devotee. There may be several reasons for this:

  • The ideas are owned by a single person, and others may not feel motivated to join when they cannot share ownership.
  • The movements were designed to counter society's deficiencies and so are of necessity, unfashionable.
  • Blanket, uniform media coverage has washed away minority cultures. If the practice of thousands of years of people singing folk songs together can be wiped out in a couple of decades, how difficult would it be to start such a movement from scratch?

[edit] 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."[7]

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."[8]

[edit] Controversy

[edit] Dispute over origin of the Six Thinking Hats

About two decades after the publication of Edward de Bono's book "Six Thinking Hats", a relatively unknown [9] Australian by the name of Michael Hewitt-Gleeson claimed that he had helped originate the concept and that de Bono has unfairly claimed ownership of the work.[10]

This claim has been strongly refuted by de Bono, who has levelled his own charge of plagiarism.[11]

[edit] Published works

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, suggests that the mind is a pattern matching machine
  • 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 13-978-0060110246, ISBN 10-0060110244
  • 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 (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 (1982), ISBN 0-88496-199-0
  • Tactics: The Art and Science of Success (1985)
  • Conflicts (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 (1990) ISBN 0-14-012678-3
  • 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 - creating value monopolies when everyone else is merely competing.
  • Teach Yourself How to Think (1995)
  • How to Be More Interesting (1998)
  • Simplicity (1999)
  • Thinking in 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 1597775444

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

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ About Edward de Bono. Edward de Bono's Personal Web Site (2008-05-05). Retrieved on 2008-05-05.
  2. ^ de Bono, Edward (1992). Serious Creativity. 
  3. ^ About Edward de Bono. Edward de Bono's Personal Web Site (2008-05-05). Retrieved on 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. ^ Septoe Web Site. Innovation Delivery (2008-05-05). Retrieved on 2008-05-05.
  7. ^ Sternberg, R.J. & Lubart, T.L. (1999). "The Concept of Creativity", in ed. Sternberg, R.J.: Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ Google Trends Edward de Bono vs Michael Hewitt Gleeson. Google (2008-05-05). Retrieved on 2008-04-25.
  10. ^ The Hats: The Origin of the 'Thinking Hats' Idea. School of Thinking (2008-02-25). Retrieved on 2008-04-25.
  11. ^ Edward de Bono (2008-04-22). "Time to tell the truth". Press release. Retrieved on 2008-04-25.

[edit] External links

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