Two thousand years ago China was far ahead of the West in science and technology. Then this progress came to an end. It is suggested that then progress ended when scholars started to believe that you could move from certainty to certainty. As a result they never developed the ‘possibility system’. This includes hypotheses, speculation and imagination. Without those things progress is impossible.
The same thing is happening in the West today. People are starting to believe that all you need to do is to collect information and that information will do your thinking for you. That very dangerous attitude is spreading rapidly.
There is a real need for creative thinking in order to interpret information in different ways. There is a real need for creative thinking in order to know what information to collect. There is a real need for creative thinking in order to put different information together to design and deliver value.
Dr. Edward de Bono
