One day, discussing Edward de Bono’s work with Fr Peter Serracino-Inglott, I said my favourite work was the compendium of all his lateral thinking techniques, Serious Creativity. Fr Peter replied that his favourite was Why I Want To Be King of Australia.
He is his own enterprise’s best asset
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. I took notes from it.”
When the book later came into my hands, I could see why Fr Peter liked it.
While the title did nothing to counter one of the common accusations directed at de Bono – a huge ego – the book itself is a thought experiment on how the role of a President (de Bono himself suggested the title of Boomaroo, combining two Aussie icons, the boomerang and kangaroo) could harness ritual play and creativity for serious purposes. It is a book full of witty surprises.
De Bono turns 80 this weekend and, almost half a century after the publication of his first book, his thinking techniques have remained in demand and are now making inroads into the Chinese and Indian markets. Despite having a niche in Malta as well, however, attitudes towards his work tend to be polarised into two camps, both of which, in my view, miss the point.
One camp sees him, essentially, as someone who has codified a Maltese ‘philosophy of life’, a ‘Maltese form of thinking’ that’s essentially subversive of rules and therefore ‘lateral’.
I find it hard to believe that anyone who thinks this has ever read de Bono. His work tackles the human mind, its tendency to form patterns out of experience, and then to become mesmerised and trapped by them.
His earliest work offered a model of the basic ways in which such patterns were reinforced. Since the 1970s, he’s been focused on how the teaching of thinking can be adapted to the needs of schools and, especially, firms.
That has meant that his own name has become a trademark and that he is his own enterprise’s best asset. To advertise his wares he needs to promote himself incessantly, in interviews and books, something that has led an influential section of the British media to dismiss him as a snake oil merchant with an ego as big as his product is trivial.
The second camp reflects this attitude. The evidence for the prosecution includes the titles of some of his works (the Australia book for one; another is Six Thinking Hats) and the fact that his many books repeat some of the same material and examples.
There is also a notorious case where he is said to have advised the British Foreign Office, which asked for his suggestions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to ship crates of Marmite to the region (on the assumption that the aggression may be triggered by a yeast deficiency, thanks to unleavened bread).
But even this evidence misses the point. Whether the books contain useful techniques is one thing but whether these same books come accompanied by too much repetition is another.
The first is the test of whether they will help improve one’s thinking, the second is concerned with whether the book is overpriced. My own view is that I can think of only one book by him that contained nothing really new or worth knowing.
As for the Marmite, yes, it was a silly idea and it’s astounding he went ahead and proposed it. But the point of his techniques is not to produce necessarily good ideas. It’s rather to provide alternatives to orthodoxy without having to wait for inspiration.
If, at the end of the exercise, we conclude that conventional wisdom is right, not just conventional, then we have stronger reasons for sticking to it.
What is it about these techniques that is so useful?
First, he has found easy-to-learn methods of how to focus attention without missing the wood for the trees: ways of scanning issues without losing focus.
Second, the idea of parallel thinking rearranges the incentives of office meetings.
People now can get credit for finding faults in their own ideas and merit in that of others. They’re prodded to make their gut instincts explicit and to think about their relevance.
Third, many of his techniques come accompanied with a system of notation that makes thinking more clear.
The most striking, to my mind, is that offered in his Water Logic: a flow chart that offers a snapshot of one’s thinking and which practically writes out itself.
Paradoxically, we can see the significance of the achievement better by noting what is not original about them. His ‘direct attention tools’ are an inventory of the ways in which the mind can switch focus; they are the analogue of the catalogue of obvious and less obvious figures of speech compiled by classical Greek rhetoricians. Both are concerned with controlling the twists of thought the mind can make.
We can find various historic samples of ‘parallel thinking’, not least in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Indeed, his whole concern with improving thought processes, from generating ideas to rendering the process more efficient, had its parallel in the Soviet school of chess, which streamlined its chess education to the point that it could turn any schoolboy of average intelligence into an amateur expert.
De Bono’s achievement is that he’s done so much, largely on his own, in new contexts, outside that of rhetoric, religious houses and sport. If we only took the achievement more seriously, we might find we can build on it.
ranierfsadni@europe.com