Method of thinking

Method of thinking can be traced back to Ancient Greek thinkers Aristotle,

Plato and Socrates. I wont even try to give a background into the philosophies of
these individuals but for the purposes of isolating their method of, or approach to,
thinking, it could be broadly described as follows:

Socrates explored subject matter by argument or debate. His method was

to ask leading questions (ones with obvious answers) and the answers would
therefore lead to inevitable conclusions. A criticism of this style is that it
ignores relevant and potentially-influential factors. Politics, for example, uses
argument as a way of examining a subject but this is actually quite a crude and
primitive method of thinking that emphasizes case-making rather than
exploration. This is likely due to the adversarial of politics and the positional
stance of individual politicians on any given topic. Also, Socrates method was
merely to point out what was wrong but not suggest how to make it better. He
was the original critical thinker (or critic).
Plato believed in ultimate truths, but not so much in democracy! In fact, his
book The Republic became the standard doctrine for the Nazi party in Germany.
Aristotle was, arguably, the most influential thinker. His contribution was to
set up principles, boxes or categories. Under this method, everything must be
judged and placed in a prescribed box or category, for example, things are
either right or wrong, there is no provision for things to be almost right, or a
little wrong. The rationale for this is that the human brain is incapable of
registering subject matter on a spectrum.

Such established human thinking is successful in science and technology but

not so much in human affairs. The natural behaviour of the brain is to set up stable
patterns for dealing with a stable world; it is what makes practical life possible.
Following on from that, with our brains box-labeling system comes an in-built
mismatch mechanism. While critical thinking has enormous value, you cannot
design a better way forward with judgment alone. This is where Design Thinking
comes into play. It focuses in putting things together to deliver value.
Untruth is not the opposite of truth. Our individual truths are the basis of our
own beliefs, our thinking, our actions and our philosophy. De Bono introduced the
notion of, what he calls, a proto-truth. This is a truth we hold to be true provided
we are trying to change it.

Whereas traditional thinking is consumed with what is?; design thinking

considers what can be?
De Bonos work is full of surprising facts, for example, did you know that
humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human brain and, conversely,
reason tells us very little?
 China used to be a global leader in science and technology (they created gun
powder and rockets) but their thinking at that time had no possibility system built
in i.e. they considered only what is instead of what can be i.e. creativity, design,
hypothesis
Parallel thinking gets every party thinking and looking in the same direction
at the same time and then, significantly, the direction then changes for everyone.
The example given in the book is about four engineers, each standing at different
walls to the north, south, east and west of a building arguing (by mobile phone)
about the best way to approach the building. But each is arguing from their own
particular viewpoint. Parallel thinking brings all four together, first to the north,
then to the south, later to the east and then to the west. Together they see all
angles of the building/issue.
This is different to lateral thinking i.e. you cannot dig a hole is a different
place by digging the same hole deeper!