European Year of Creativity & Innovation 2009

Edward de Bono’s Message

There are thousands of people writing software for computers. Yet we have done nothing at all about software for the human mind, for ordinary thinking. We have been content to use the software developed 2,400 years ago by the GG3 (Greek Gang of 3: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle). When this thinking came to Europe at the time of the Renaissance, schools, universities and thinking were all in the hands of the Church. The Church did not need creative thinking. The Church did not need perceptual thinking. What the Church needed was analysis, logic and argument with which to defend the faith and to prove heretics wrong. So this thinking became the core of Western education and remains so to this day.

Our existing thinking is excellent just as the rear left wheel of a motor-car is excellent. It is excellent in itself but not enough. As a result, world thinking is very inadequate.

Analysis, logic and judgement give us TRUTH.

Design, creativity and perceptual thinking give us VALUE.

My design of New Thinking software is based on an understanding of how the brain works as a self-organising information system that forms asymmetric patterns. This was described in my book “The Mechanism of Mind” (1969). This book was very well received by the leading physicist in the world, Professor Murray Gell-Mann who received his Nobel Prize for discovering the ‘quark’. He commissioned a team of computer experts to simulate what I had written in the book and they reported that the system behaved exactly as predicted.

For the first time in human history we can understand idea creativity. We can use the formal tools of LATERAL THINKING to create new ideas. Use of just one of these tools by a workshop generated 21,000 new ideas in a single afternoon. The tools can be learned and used deliberately.

Argument is a very primitive and inefficient way of exploring a subject. Instead of argument I designed (in 1985) the parallel thinking method of the Six Thinking Hats.

At every moment everyone thinks in the same mode as determined by the Hat that is in use.

This method is now very widely used around the world from four year olds in school to senior executives and at top economics meetings in Washington. Meeting times can be reduced to one quarter or even one tenth of their usual time. Juries in court in some states in the USA are now using the method because it produces unanimous results much more rapidly (the first change in the jury system for over one thousand years).

When there was the tsunami in Sri Lanka the different aid agencies could not agree on what to do. So the government invited my trainer from Singapore to train the agencies in the Six Thinking Hats method. In one day they had a way forward. A major corporation in the USA could not agree on a $3 billion project. They invited one of my trainers in to help and very quickly they got agreement.

Research by Professor David Perkins at Harvard showed that 90 percent of errors in thinking were errors of perception not of logic. The CoRT School programme which I designed in 1973 is now in use in thousands of schools world-wide and in whole countries like Venezuela. The programme teaches perceptual thinking skills. Research shows that teaching this thinking as a separate subject increases performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 percent. Teaching this thinking to unemployed youngsters increased the employment rate 500 percent. Teaching this thinking to very violent youngsters reduced the rate of actual criminal conviction by 90 percent. These are powerful effects.

We have done nothing about human thinking for too long. This may be the biggest problem in the world bigger than climate change. We need better thinking to solve problems, to settle conflicts and to design the way forward.

The UN is unable to generate the new ideas and alternatives which are so badly needed. So I intend to set up a formal Palace of Thinking. This will hold regular meetings to apply creative and design thinking to world issues.

Human language is itself inadequate for describing complex situations. So I have designed a coding system which also has the advantage that it is immediately international. This can be seen at www.debonocode.org

There is a great deal of work to be done in this area and as EU ambassador for thinking I shall do my best to add new thinking habits and methods to our existing one.

Edward de Bono