‘idea creativity’

Classic de Bono Message – first published 15th December 2003

I continue to be amazed that so many people do not understand the ‘logical’ basis of creativity.

Essentially this is the behaviour of information in self-organising systems that inevitably form asymmetric patterns. All this is laid out in several of my books. Whenever I talk to audiences of top physicists and mathematicians they are full of agreement. There is no mystique. Yet serious people still treat creativity as some mysterious event about which nothing can be done except wait for it to happen.

I am writing here about ‘idea creativity’ not about artistic creativity. Once again we have the usual failure of language to distinguish between the two. That is why it was necessary to create the term ‘lateral thinking’.