Two thousand years ago China was far ahead of the rest of the world in science and technology. Then progress came to an abrupt end. Why? Because the scholars started to believe you could move from certainty to certainty and did not need  ‘possibilities’. As a result they never developed the possibility system including hypotheses, speculation, imagination etc.

The same thing is happening in the West today. People are starting to believe that all you need to do is to collect information on your computer. This information will make your decisions and shape your strategy. This belief is widespread in business and in government. It will lead to stagnation as it did in China.

There is a need for creative and possibility thinking in interpreting information, in putting different information together and in knowing where to look for information. Information by itself is rarely enough.

CAN THINKING BE TAUGHT?

A major corporation in Finland used to spend thirty days on its multi-national project discussions. When it adopted ‘parallel’ thinking the meetings were over in two days. Through this method meetings are reduced to one fifth or even one tenth of their previous lengths. Instead of argument parallel thinking gets people to think co-operatively and constructively – so getting the maximum from each participant.   This is the six hats method.

A medium sized company in Canada did a careful costing and showed a saving of  $20 million in the first year they used the Six Hats system. In Norway a problem which had been costing $100,000 a day was solved in twelve minutes with a saving of $10million through using this system.

Thinking can be taught as a curriculum subject. Research by the Atkey organization in the UK showed that teaching thinking directly improved the performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 percent. Teaching thinking for just five hours to unemployed youngsters on the government New Deal programme in the UK increased employment by 500 percent.

Youngsters too violent to be taught in ordinary schools in London are sent to a special Centre. A twenty year follow up showed that for youngsters taught thinking the rate of criminality was reduced to one tenth of the rate for those not taught thinking.

In South Africa a group of workshops using just one of the lateral thinking tools generated 21,000 ideas in one afternoon for a steel company. In a platinum mine there had been around 210 fights every month between the seven tribes working there. After thinking was taught to the illiterate miners the fights dropped to just four.

These are powerful results.

PERCEPTION

Research at Harvard has shown that ninety percent of the errors in thinking are errors of perception – not of logic. Godel’s theorem shows that from within a system you can never logically prove the starting points. The starting points are arbitrary perceptions.

In our obsession with logic we have never taught perception. The CoRT programme used widely around the world teaches perceptual thinking.

CREATIVE THINKING

There is no mystery about the creative thinking that produces new ideas and new approaches to problems and conflicts. 

The brain acts as a self-organising system to allow information to organise itself into routine patterns. That is the excellence of the human brain.

Patterning systems are always asymmetric: the path from A to B is not the same as the path from B to A.

From this basis we can design the formal tools of  ‘LATERAL THINKING’. These tools can be taught, learned and practiced as a deliberate skill. The tools include:  challenge;  concept extraction; the concept fan, provocation, movement, random entry etc.   There are over thirty years experience teaching these tools of creativity.

Thinking should be taught formally as a curriculum subject in all schools. There are countries already doing this. India has asked for the training of 50,000 schools. China has authorized a pilot programme under the National Institute of Education.

THE COUNCIL OF THINKERS

Democracies are not designed to put forward new ideas.   By definition, new ideas are new and therefore not representative of existing thinking.  So new ideas are high risk.

The Council of Thinkers is a separate body with the defined task of creative and constructive thinking.   Its role is to generate new ideas and to test these with opinion polls.   If the idea is positively received then the government takes up and uses the idea  - without the usual risk.

It is never the role of the Council of Thinkers to criticize the elected government or to offer better suggestion to government policies.

The Council of Thinkers can also act as a channel to receive ideas from any source.

The first Council of Thinkers was set up in Serbia in December 2005.

For further information see: www.edwarddebono.com & www.worldcentrefornewthinking.org

Dr. Edward de Bono