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Edward De Bono
What is
After the Dark Ages came the Renaissance. Hellenic cul-
ture had gone to Alexandria then across North Africa and
back into Europe through the Arab philosophers in Spain.
This wonderful new thinking was eagerly embraced because
it was such a change from the dogma and doctrine of exist-
ing thinking. Humankind was now allowed to use logic and
reason. Humankind had a more central position in the uni-
verse. Not surpisingly, this new thinking was eagerly taken
up by the Humanists who wanted non-church thinking. Rather
more surprisingly the thinking was also taken up by the
Christian Church under people like Thomas Aquinas of Na-
ples.
So this thinking became – and has remained – the domi-
nant software of Western (and largely human) thinking ever
since. It has remained so because it is indeed excellent
just like the front left wheel of a motorcar is excellent (but
inadequate by itself).
This thinking was essentially the thinking of ‘The Gang of
Three’. The first of the Gang was Socrates who was trained
as a Sophist. In eighty per cent of the dialogues in which he
Approaches to thinking
Traditional approaches to thinking in philosophy and psy-
chology have been based on descriptions of events, descrip-
tions of behaviour, descriptions of words and descriptions of
description. There is a spiral of increasing complexity which
has very little practical value.
At the time of the Renaissance and in the Middle Ages,
thinking, education and universities were largely in the hands
of the Church. Such thinkers had no motivation whatsoever
towards creative thinking or design thinking. It was a matter
of defending the status quo and attacking heretics who
sought to de-stabilise it. There was a great deal of ‘word
play’ in the process – and this became the tradition of phi-
losophy.
So what is the alternative to descriptions of descriptions
and ‘word play’?
The alternative is to look at the way the neural networks of
Reinforcing
The excellence of the Gang of Three thinking was pre-
cisely that it reinforced the way the brain works. The brain
works in terms of established patterns as suggested earlier.
We identify the standard patterns and then know the stand-
ard answer. This is an excellent and immensely useful as-
pect of thinking – just as the front left wheel of a motorcar is
excellent and immensely useful.
Because the brain is powerful and effective in one direc-
tion may mean that it is weak and ineffective in another
direction. This other direction is ‘creativity’. The brain is de-
signed to be ‘non-creative’. This is because it is designed to
set up and use standard patterns. If the brain had to dither
and consider all possibilities at every point, life would be
totally impossible. The definition of a pattern is that at every
point the next point has a probability greater than chance.
So our existing software of thinking reinforces the way the
brain works naturally.
But we may also need software that forces, and helps,
the brain to do those things which it is not naturally de-
signed to do – like creativity.
Information systems
There are at least two types of information system.
For the first type, imagine a towel spread on a surface.
There is a bowl of ink alongside. You take a spoonful of ink
and pour it onto the towel. There is a record left of your
action. You repeat the action in a different place. In the end
the towel has a record of the incoming ‘information’. To make
sense of this you need an external ‘organiser’ that makes
sense of the inputs. Almost all our information systems (and
thinking about information) is of this type: passive systems
with an external organiser.
In the second system the receiving surface is a shallow
De Bono New thinking 44
Summary
Thinking is a skill about which we have done very, very
little. We have been satisfied with thinking concerned with
‘what is’ and have not developed thinking software for ‘what
can be’.