If you believe that creativity is a natural talent, this interview is bound to surprise you. Maltese-born Edward de Bono was the first to challenge this notion and is now in demand by governments and multinational corporations for his revolutionary thinking techniques, not least of the lateral kind.

Prof. de Bono, what inspired you to come up with your revolutionary idea?

Well, I had studied psychology at Oxford, I had studied medicine in Malta. From psychology came an interest in thinking and from medicine an interest in self-organising systems - the glands, the kidneys, the respiratory system. I developed and applied the idea of self-organising systems to neuro networks. If the brain works like this, then what is it good at, what is it not good at, and what is creativity? From that basis I developed ideas about how we could make creativity happen more often.

What was the main aim behind developing these concepts?

It was really to see if we could take something like creativity, which has always been rather a mystery, and thought to be a special exotic talent, and find out what it actually means, how it works, if we can do it deliberately, thereby taking it out of the magic black box and turning it into something we can develop as a skill.

How has this idea developed locally and internationally over the years?

Locally there is the ministry of education, whose minister, Louis Galea, has been very supportive. Many schools are now starting to teach thinking, not necessarily only lateral thinking, but other aspects too. And various businesses have trained their people using trainers certified to teach my work.

Internationally, there is a lot of interest. In some countries now my work is a mandatory part of the curriculum, such as Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Malaysia and Singapore. The methods are widely used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

It has also been spreading in business, and I am often asked to talk at major conferences. A few weeks ago I was asked to open a world congress in Berlin on project management.

So people are coming to realise that we need to do more about thinking; just providing standard answers is not enough. There's been a very good response - my books are translated into about 38 different languages.

What has inhibited the advancement of the techniques further?

I would say ignorance. Most people in education and elsewhere believe that you cannot do anything about thinking, that if you are intelligent you are a good thinker, and if you're not intelligent that's too bad. That's total rubbish. Some highly intelligent people are poor thinkers, some less intelligent people are much better thinkers.

In England we taught thinking for just five hours to young people on a government programme for unemployed youngsters, and it increased their employment rate by 500 per cent, which was more powerful than anything they'd ever done.

But most people are unaware that thinking is a skill, that it can be taught, and that youngsters really enjoy learning and using thinking.

Do you recall a specific turning point that opened the way for international recognition?

No, it's been a gradual process. Sometimes there are individuals, such as a professor of philosophy in Venezuela who read my book, became interested, and when he became a politician asked to be given a new ministry - for the development of intelligence. He came to see me about what to do next and I trained 250 teachers, who then trained another 10,000 teachers. Sometimes individuals in positions of power see the need and make a lot happen.

So there is no one incident, but there have been individuals in different places who realised the value of the work and have taken it up.

Now that you are continuously in demand throughout the globe, what intrinsically motivates you to continue improving your foundations?

Well, one motivation is that there is so much more work to do; we haven't really done anything about thinking for 2,400 years. We need to develop new concepts, new methods.

And if you see that something makes a difference to youngsters and to business people there is also a certain motivation to try and give them the opportunity to learn about it.

Is creativity a natural talent?

If you do nothing about creativity then obviously it can only be a natural talent because you are doing nothing else. But if you teach people the skills of creativity, everyone can learn to be creative.

It is true that some people will be more creative than others, just like any skill, whether playing tennis or cooking. But everyone can learn a very useful level of skill. Creativity is a skill which can be developed, learnt and taught.

If we do nothing about creativity, then it has to depend on those people with the motivation to be creative and to spend more time at it, even if they are not very skilful at it.

Which are the people who tend to be more creative?

It's difficult to say, because in certain professions, such as advertising, the creativity is more obvious. But it hasn't been my experience that people in professions which need to be creative are actually more creative. They only have a greater need and motivation to be creative, so they spend more time at it.

Once people see that creativity is a usable skill, their whole attitude changes. People who hitherto have believed that they where not creative, suddenly find that they want to be creative, they can become creative, and they do become creative.

So your methods offer the opportunity for creativity to those who do not possess the talent naturally?

Creative thinking/lateral thinking leads to more creative results and yes, there are things which you can do deliberately. We have many experiments showing that using a technique produces a lot of ideas.

One afternoon one of my trainers was working with a steel company and set up 130 workshops, which used just one of the lateral thinking techniques. They generated 21,000 ideas, and it took them nine months just to sort through them.

From a business perspective, entrepreneurship and creativity are considered to be highly related. In your opinion what is the main link between them?

There is not necessarily a link. If you are an entrepreneur and starting something new you have to be creative to make something happen or to find a new way of doing something. But some entrepreneurs do things in a traditional way, perhaps just better. If you are running a business which has been there for years you can often do it simply by maintenance.

Entrepreneurs may need to be creative, whereas people running big businesses don't necessarily have the need or the motivation.

What are the most important requirements of being an entrepreneur?

Courage, single-mindedness and determination.

Courage to believe that you are going to succeed, single-mindedness to say, yes, this is what I am going to do, and determination and persistence to keep going when things go wrong.

What steps should Maltese society take to reach higher levels of knowledge?

I think we need to treat creativity, thinking, innovation much more seriously. A recent European Union report on the countries waiting to join the European Union said Malta spent derisory amounts on innovation. There's no serious effort in this area, which could be addressed much more directly, because it's going to be important for business in the future.

What do you consider necessary to be creative?

Very simply you have to want to be creative, and to believe that it's possible to have ideas by making an effort. Motivation is the most important thing.

A final comment...

We haven't paid attention to thinking for 2,400 years and we believe that analysis, recognition, judgment and argument are enough. They're fine for dealing with the past, but not so good for designing the future.

We need to pay much more attention to thinking. It should be on the curriculum on every school as a main subject. Businesses should get their people trained in creativity and they should spend time trying to develop new products, new services, new ways of marketing... In other words, creativity is becoming an essential ingredient in human life and in progress.

Conrad Buttigieg is studying commerce at the University of Malta.