A few years back I got to read some random pages of Edward De Bono’s “How to have a beautiful mind” and “Lateral
Thinking“ . Since then I had a curiosity about his ideas and wanted to read
one of his books from cover to cover. I
simply wanted to go for “ Think Before Its too late”
because I could relate it to my procrastination towards reading his
books and I thought to myself “Read it Before it’s too late” !
On doing some research about this
popular author, I came to know that the word “Lateral thinking“ in itself was coined by him. Not just this,
this physician from Malta who later studied psychology had developed and publicized
a lot of concepts related to creativity and thinking. He presently holds the Da
Vinci Chair for Thinking at University of Advancing Technology in Arizona and
has penned many books in this subject. I
feel that it’s always good to have a little bit of knowledge about the author
and his background to enjoy a book better.
“Think Before It’s Too Late”
starts like any other book by stating what to expect in the coming chapters and
how to make the best use of this book. But, the difference is that the “Introduction”
is a little lengthy. The book seems to revolve around a central idea of
considering “Thinking” as a serious subject and proving the complacency of
mankind in not progressing any further in this field. According to De Bono, most of our thinking is
based on either “Argument”, “Truth” or “Logic” because of the influences of the
famous Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (constantly referred by
him as the GG3 ie., The Greek Gang of Three).
In this book, he offers a different perspective towards looking at many commonly accepted and appreciated concepts like “democracy” and “Language”. Some of these appear to be quite rebellious and radical but have a certain degree of sense to it. As I was reading through I could see that this book comes as a summary of most of the popular concepts developed by him. Here are a few noteworthy ideas of the author from this book:
On creativity
1) Creativity
is not a gift and creative thinking could be developed by anybody with
practise.
2) “Creativity”
is often associated by people to “artistic creativity” and not “idea creativity”.
Being creative does not mean that one has to be different just for the sake of
being different.
3) It
is a logical process. The logic according to him is “patterns”. Asymmetry in patterns of thinking induces
creativity and helps in taking alternative routes over the obvious ones. This is the logic that links creativity with
humour.
On Lateral Thinking
1) “Lateral
Thinking “ is one of the effective tools for deliberate use of creativity. It’s
not about how deep you drill a hole but how many different holes you drill. This concept of moving from one idea to
another is called “movement”.
2) Some
tool for lateral thinking prescribed are:
Challenge ( question the obvious), Focus ( narrowing down on the problem
area), Concept ( forgetting practicality
for a while), Provocation ( making “what if…” type of statements that might be
illogical and wishful but would give a nice starting point ) and Movement (
shifting from obvious idea to alternate ideas)
On Judgement and Design
“Judgement“ is seeking the truth and making decision based on past experiences whereas “Design” is thinking about “what could be” by focussing on values.
“Judgement“ is seeking the truth and making decision based on past experiences whereas “Design” is thinking about “what could be” by focussing on values.
Importance of Possibilities and Alternatives
“Possibilities” or different ways of interpreting things are quite important for progress. This concept has been well explained through a beautiful example of how the cure for peptic ulcer was found by thinking of the possibility of it being an infection against the common beliefs of treating it as a permanent condition.
“Possibilities” or different ways of interpreting things are quite important for progress. This concept has been well explained through a beautiful example of how the cure for peptic ulcer was found by thinking of the possibility of it being an infection against the common beliefs of treating it as a permanent condition.
Arguments and Alternatives :
Argument is one of the widely used school of thought popularised by Socrates to establish the truth and has little room for exploration. De Bono suggests effective alternatives for this which are nothing but his most popular methods of thinking named “Six Thinking Hats” and "parallel thinking"
Argument is one of the widely used school of thought popularised by Socrates to establish the truth and has little room for exploration. De Bono suggests effective alternatives for this which are nothing but his most popular methods of thinking named “Six Thinking Hats” and "parallel thinking"
“Parallel
thinking”: Without immediately arguing
on ideas generated, each of those ideas can be analysed together by everybody in
a group, one after the other, before choosing the best one.
“Six
Thinking Hats”: It is a technique for switching to various modes of
thinking suggested by De Bono while working on ideas. Each of these working
modes are depicted by hats of different colors that one has to put on while
dealing with ideas. The hats are: blue (
to avoid distractions), while ( to deal with the inputs and information
required), Red ( this refers to use of feelings and emotions), black ( to
figure out the negatives), yellow ( to emphasize on positives) and green ( to
generate creative ideas).
The compilation of ideas from the
book is not an exhaustive one and can extend further depending on you. Most of these were extracted from the first
half of the book. However, towards the
end, I could not figure out the reliance on constant repetition of content to
justify the message to the readers.
There is a point where De Bono argues that language limits our “perception”
and words narrows our thinking. The overall compilation of this book
self-contradicts this as there are very few images throughout the book.
Especially the images could have been effective in explaining the tools
prescribed by him. The analogy of learning to swim or ride a bicycle by reading
a textual content comes to my mind while describing this ineffectiveness.
It was quite disappointing to read the
same set of examples like “Speaking French fluently in France doesn’t mean that
you would have an easy time in England” and “Reduction of fight between miners
of Karee” repeatedly. Apart from this,
De Bono goes an extra mile every time and justifies his concepts through a list
of achievements and places in which it had found success. A few chapters like “What could you do?” was
totally pointless as the sole intention of these is to persuade the readers to
suggest the books to others and spread the word. All these came as a hindrance to the flow of
an otherwise informative book.
But still, there was quite a bunch of
things that could be learnt from the book and I would try my luck at practicing
them. I am also optimistic about reading his other books after a gap to digest
this intensity and assimilate the content before forming opinions about De Bono’s
writings.
If you are one of those who got attracted to De Bono’s books by the provocative titles and huge expectations, then this is
definitely not the first book to get started.
