Short audio preview

Human beings base too much of their thinking on past experience: they're good at repeating activities that produce real benefits, but they're also good at repeating divisive mistakes. What they need to do more often and more effectively is to design a better future for themselves, to stop thinking "in parallel" and instead envision scenarios in which their interests converge harmoniously.

Such is the central thesis of Dr Edward de Bono, the 73-year-old psychologist who coined the term "lateral thinking" and whose advice on creativity has been embraced by leaders in business, politics and education the world over. You'd be forgiven for thinking a de Bono lecture would be a highly abstract and cerebral affair, but his address to the London Business Forum (LBF) was in fact highly practical, rich in advice that promised to help individual businesses as much as society at large.

The venue was the New Players Theatre, a cosy and characterful space built in the 1930s beneath the railway arches of Charing Cross. On stage, de Bono sat before an overhead projector as if it were a desk, spooling acetate film from an industrial-sized reel and attacking it with felt pens of different colours to illustrate his points.

One of the earliest of these points, and certainly the most emphatic, was that dialectics are hopelessly out of date. That is to say, the notion of reasoning through argument - popularised and bequeathed to the West by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle - is no longer adequate in the face of modern problems. "It has been very effective in science [but] relatively ineffective in human affairs," de Bono said. "What we need instead of just judgement is design. Judgement means analysing a situation, breaking it down into its component parts, recognising a standard element and then referring to a standard answer. Design means putting together the ingredients you have to deliver the value you want."

Dialectics often fail to resolve complex issues because they are intrinsically divisive, he asserted. "If you find 5% wrong in what another person says, you'll focus all your attention on that 5%, and not on the 95% on which you agree. Argument is about win/lose, attack/defend, egos. It's an extremely primitive system, and for 2,400 years we have been content with it because the Greeks liked to talk... and argument was one of their main amusements."

Furthermore, he continued, traditional argument neglects several vital modes of thinking. Take perception, for example. Professor David Perkins of Harvard University has shown that 90% of errors in thinking are errors of perception. "Logic plays only a small part in ordinary thinking," de Bono said. "Yet we [as a society] have done nothing about this."

The Cognitive Research Trust (CoTR) is the vehicle through which de Bono and his associates are trying to help solve such problems. Founded in 1969, it works with all types of organisation, from businesses to educational establishments, to promote empathetic communication and creative thinking. The main weapon in its armoury of understanding is de Bono's "Six Hats" methodology, which encourages individuals to adopt six different modes of thinking in turn, and thereby consider an issue from every possible angle. The "hats" and their corresponding modes are as follows:

• White. Searching for information. Determining what is available and what is missing, and in turn determining which questions need to be asked in order to fill in the blanks.
• Red. Expressing emotions, intuitions and feelings without having to explain or justify them. A chance to vent spleen so you don't have to waste time doing so (and, indeed, muddy the waters of any dispute resolution) later on.
• Black. Cautious, critical, risk-sensitive reflection. Typical questions here include: "What is wrong?", "Why won't it work?", "What are its faults?" and so on.
• Yellow. Considering the benefits and values of an idea. "This is especially important," de Bono says. "Most of education is about black-hat, critical thinking. We don't spend enough time developing value sensitivity, yet without it creativity is a waste of time"
• Green. Formulating possibilities and new ideas (see de Bono's comments on lateral thinking below).
• Blue. Relating your deliberations so far to the big picture. Blue is the "organising" hat, de Bono says. It provides the overview for an idea, focusing your mind on objectives.

This methodology has proven so simple to grasp that, according to de Bono, it has helped a variety of people: from CEOs to four-year-old children; from the multinational steering group of ABB, the Swiss power and automation technology group, to a primitive tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. "It is now replacing argument in many, many areas," he said, "because it uses all available brainpower to genuinely explore a subject, not just to defend a case."

As the originator of lateral thinking, De Bono took the opportunity to give the LBF audience some relevant tips for better "Green Hat" performance. First and foremost, he said, challenge ideas, even if they seem to be working fine. "Ask yourself: 'What alternatives can you think of?' This sounds easy to do but you need to be very disciplined."

Secondly, he suggested, if an idea is taking you in a particular direction then try to identify different ways to achieve the same thing. "Ask yourself: 'What do I want to achieve, and what are the broad concepts that will get me there?' This tends to have a cascade effect, multiplying the number of alternatives available to you."

Thirdly, he recommended a technique dubbed "provocation", something he warned was "totally different from normal thinking". As an example of the technique in action, he revealed some advice he had once given a car company: imagine your vehicles have square wheels. "Obviously that's totally unacceptable to an engineer: you'd need a huge amount of power, you'd shake [the vehicle] to pieces... and so on," he said. However, by imagining what the consequences of such an idea would be - the rising and falling of the vehicle, with a predictable motion, over the points of the wheels - the car company realised it could adjust the suspension to compensate. From this came the invention of anticipatory suspension.

Similarly, de Bono once advised a group of environmentalists in California to imagine what the effect of putting a factory "downstream of itself" would have on pollution. "This sounds totally illogical... but from it came a very simple idea," he said. "Normally a factory takes in water and puts out effluent. All we needed to do was legislate that the input must be downstream of the output, so the factory is the first to get its own pollution. That's now become law in several countries."

A related thinking technique is to choose a random point - say, a random word - from which to start thinking about a problem. "One of my trainers was working with a steel company, Iscor, in South Africa... and just using that one tool of lateral thinking the company generated 21,000 ideas in one afternoon. It took them nine months to sort through them all." de Bono said. When an LBF attendee later quizzed him on this, during the event's question-and-answer session, he said that sifting through such a huge number of ideas successfully depends on "profiling" what you're looking for: "Are you looking for small changes that are low-risk or big ideas that are high-risk?" he asked. Ideas should be funnelled based on strategic objectives, with a small percentage - say, 10% - of surplus ideas retained for further analysis if they are digressive but interesting.

Ultimately, De Bono says, organisations can learn to be more creative just as individuals can learn to be more creative. "These are all formal deliberate tools that can be used to generate ideas [and that] go way beyond brainstorming, which is just withholding judgement," he says. "Sometimes the most unlikely people turn out to be very creative once they learn the [right] habits, principles, attitudes and rules."