Think!
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We can transplant a human heart.
In the past, pneumonia was often fatal. Today it is a minor ailment treated with a short course of antibiotics.
Tuberculosis was a major cause of death less than a century ago. Today it has virtually been eliminated in developed countries.
We can alter the very genes themselves of plants, animals and humans.
We can clone animals (and soon people).
We can store a huge amount of data on a tiny microchip.
These are but a small sample of our wonderful achievements. They are the results of excellent thinking.
Different
A scientist holds a piece of iron in his hands. The properties of iron are known, permanent, constant. He puts the iron together with something else and the result is technology.
You call someone an idiot. Immediately that person is offended, changes and is no longer the same person you called an idiot. In human affairs there are interactive loops. Things do not remain the same. Human affairs are unpredictable.
Then there is the huge importance of perception in human affairs. Perception is far more important than logic, but has been totally neglected.
So, unfortunately, our excellent thinking in scientific and technical matters does not carry over to other areas. But our pride in our thinking does carry over – with the unfortunate result of complacency.
Excellent – but not enough
We are very complacent and satisfied with the excellence of our thinking because we have produced great achievements in science, technology and engineering (space, mobile phones, medicines, etc.). Yet in other, more human, areas, we have made no progress at all. We still seek to solve conflicts with 'judgement' instead of designing the way forwards.
There is a chef who cooks an excellent omelette. It is the best omelette in the world. It cannot be faulted. The chef is no good at cooking anything else. Here we have excellence, but it is not enough.
The rear left wheel of a particular motor car is excellent. It cannot be faulted or attacked on any grounds. But that wheel by itself is not enough. If you believed that all you needed on a car was one wheel, there would be something wrong with your thinking – not with that rear left wheel. We also need the other wheels. The rear left wheel is excellent – but it is not enough.
An educated man speaks English flawlessly. But when he is in France, he finds that although his excellent English is still excellent, it is not enough.
I believe that our existing thinking methods are excellent when applied to certain areas, and inadequate (and even useless) in other areas.
If the English-speaking person in France speaks more loudly and more forcibly, this does not make him better understood. Insistence on traditional thinking does not make it more adequate.
If a diner wants something other than an omelette, the fact that the chef can create a perfect omelette is excellent but will not work for that diner.
These thinking methods are excellent, but not enough. I believe that our thinking culture, methods and habits are excellent. Like the rear left wheel they are excellent in themselves. But they are not enough. We need to supplement them with creative thinking, design thinking and perceptual thinking (among other things). Unfortunately, our existing traditional thinking habits insist that you must attack something and show it to be bad before you can suggest a change. It is much more difficult to acknowledge that something is excellent and then to ask for change because although it is excellent, it is not enough.
MY THINKING
Throughout this book I shall use the term 'my thinking' to refer to any of the thinking methods and software that I have designed. This is simpler than spelling out in each case the particular method that is in use. To use just the word 'thinking' would be misleading, because it might be understood as referring to traditional thinking, critical thinking, and so on. The term 'my thinking' refers directly to the new thinking methods I have designed.
Many readers will know of my work in lateral thinking and may assume that all references are to this method. This is not the case. There are several other methods. There is the exploratory method of the Six Hats and parallel thinking (instead of argument). There is the perceptual thinking of the CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) method designed for schools (some of the basic tools of which are designed in more detail later in Chapter 10). There are also programmes for simplicity and value scanning. All these methods and more come under the term 'my thinking'.
There are times when my thinking is totally different from, and even contrary to, traditional logic (for example, with provocation). In general, however, I have no quarrel with traditional thinking. I merely think it is incomplete and inadequate in some areas. I would like to see my methods used to supplement traditional thinking – not to replace it.
How new thinking has worked
Over the last 40 years I have worked in 73 countries. These have been mainly seminars and lectures with some conferences and meetings.
I have taught thinking to four-year-olds and 90-year-olds (Roosevelt University has a special programme for seniors). I have taught thinking to top business executives and illiterate miners. I have taught thinking to Down's Syndrome youngsters and to Nobel Laureates. I once lectured to 8,000 Mormons in Salt Lake City. In Christchurch, New Zealand, I lectured for 90 minutes to 7,400 children (aged six to 12) who had been brought together by mayoress Vicki Buck.
Over the years I have been invited to talk to a large number of business corporations including BA, BAA, Bank of America, Barclays, BP, Citicorp, Ericsson, Exxon, Ford, GM, IBM, Kuwait Oil, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Shell, UBS and many others. I have also been invited to talk to government departments, cabinet offices, and so on.
In my experience, even the most rigid and authoritarian regimes welcome new thinking. I have given seminars in China many times and they are currently trying out my work in schools. Elsewhere in the world, the programme is widely used: in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, India (increasingly) and Canada. There is patchy use as well in the UK, USA, Ireland, Italy and Malta.
Below are some small examples of where my thinking (new thinking) has made a difference. These examples do not prove anything – they merely provide a perspective.
In the old days of the Soviet Union, I was on a visit to Moscow to lecture at various departments of the Academy of Sciences. I was also invited to a meeting of the Foreign Affairs committee of the Politburo. The chairman of the meeting had in front of him my book on conflict resolution, Conflicts. There were notes in the margin and underlinings. He saw me looking at the book and said, 'This is not Gorbachev's copy – he has his own.' I was later told by a senior politician from Kazakhstan that, in those days of perestroika, my books were top reading in the Kremlin.
John Buchanan, the former coach of the Australian national cricket team, came to see me to ask me to train his team in thinking. I gave them a short seminar. In their next encounter with the English team, they not only won easily, they inflicted the biggest defeat in the history of Test cricket. I had a note from John Buchanan acknowledging my contribution.
One of my trainers, Caroline Ferguson, was working with a steel company in South Africa. One afternoon she set up some workshops to generate new ideas. Using just one of the tools of lateral thinking (random input), they generated 21,000 ideas in a single afternoon. It took them nine months just to sort through the ideas.
The Hungerford Guidance Centre in London works with youngsters who are deemed to be too violent to be taught in ordinary schools: they have stabbed a teacher, for example, or set a school on fire. More than 20 years ago, the principal, David Lane, started teaching my ways of thinking to these violent youngsters. He has now done a 20-year follow-up and has shown that the actual rate of criminal conviction for those taught thinking is less than one-tenth of that for those not taught thinking. This statistic is a fact.
A school in Argentina teaches my thinking very thoroughly. In the national examinations, they
did so much better than all the other schools that they were investigated for cheating!
As a student, Ashok Chouhan was travelling from India to Europe. He had three dollars in his pocket. His plane was diverted to Paris. He had some time at the airport and went into the bookshop. He bought a copy of my first book (in English). At an evening lecture I was giving in Delhi, he told me he kept this book in his briefcase for 30 years. Today he has $3 billion in his pocket; he founded Amity University in India; and he was, at one time, the largest investor in East Germany. He believes that 80 per cent of his success was triggered by that book.
I was once giving a seminar in Barcelona. After the seminar a man from the island of Tenerife came up to me. He told me that when he was younger he had not been any good at school subjects. Then he read one of my books – I do not know which one. Today he owns seven companies in Holland and Spain.
The Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 lost a great deal of money (perhaps $1 billion). After Montreal, no city in the world wanted to host the games. Eventually, Moscow agreed to host the games in 1980. After Moscow, again no city wanted the games. Finally Los Angeles agreed to host the games. Instead of a loss, they made a profit of $250 million. As a result of this, today every city wants the games and competes to get them (there have even been allegations of bribery where cities are desperate). When Peter Ueberroth, the organiser of the LA games, was interviewed in the Washington Post, he attributed his success to his ability to generate new ideas through the use of my lateral thinking and he gave examples. I wrote and asked him where he had learned this. He reminded me that he had been my host in 1975 at a 90-minute lecture I had given to the YPO (Young Presidents Organisation) in Boca Raton, Florida. From that 90 minutes he had remembered enough to use the processes effectively nine years later.
I was on the Innovations Council of the State of Victoria in Australia. After a meeting of the council, Professor Doherty came up to me to tell me how he had read my first book. This had changed his thinking and, as a result, he won the Nobel Prize.
The Atkey organisation is an independent organisation that, for several years, has been introducing my work into schools in the United Kingdom and doing research. They have shown that teaching my thinking as a separate subject increases performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 per cent.
A town council that had been taught my methods by Vicki Cavins reported that in the first year they had saved $84 million on a single project.
Unemployed youngsters on the New Deal scheme in the United Kingdom were taught my thinking for just five hours by the Holst Group. The employment rate among those taught increased 500 per cent. A year later, 96 per cent of those were still in employment. This was more successful than anything that had been done before.
In Australia, Jennifer O'Sullivan was in charge of two job clubs, which were made up of groups of unemployed youngsters. The normal rate of employment out of such clubs was 40 per cent. She taught them my thinking and she got 70 per cent employment out of one club and 100 per cent out of the other. And every one of her youngsters was completely deaf.
I have been told that Siemens (the largest corporation in Europe) has reduced product development time by 50 per cent by using my thinking.
There are many such examples. I have written these things to show that there has been a lot of experience with these methods. They are easy to teach, easy to use and very practical. If nothing else, the books I have written reassure people that their unusual thinking is perfectly valid.
Boasting
William James is my favourite philosopher, because he was concerned with pragmatism. To paraphrase one of his sayings: 'You can describe something this way or that. In the end, what matters is the cash value.' He did not mean actual money, but practical value. What this means is that there can be many complex descriptions and theories. But in the end, what practical difference do they make?
So the practical examples of the use of my thinking scattered throughout the book are essential, even if they do seem like boasting. They show that these things work in real life: in business, in education, and so on.
I was once interviewed by a journalist who said that she did not want to hear about these practical effects of my work. You can imagine how useless the published interview must have seemed.
A Canadian educator once declared that my CoRT programme was so simple it could not possibly work. I told him that this was like saying that cheese did not exist – because the method does work, with strong results.
1 Creativity
We need to look closely at the ways in which our thinking doesn't work. I will be covering a different area of our thinking in each of Chapters 1 to 14. I am going to start with creativity because creativity is a huge deficiency in our thinking habits. We know very well that progress is due to creativity: to looking at things in a different way; to doing things differently; to putting things together to deliver new values.
We rely on creativity. We depend on creativity. Yet all we have been able to do is to hope that certain creative individuals will supply us with new ideas and new possibilities.
WHY WE NEED CREATIVITY
The human brain is not designed to be creative. It is designed to set up routine patterns and to use and follow these patterns. That is why life is practical and possible. We may need to use routine patterns 98 per cent of the time and only to be creative 2 per cent of the time.
To show this, there is a game where you start with a letter and then add another letter. At each point, as you add another letter, a whole word has to be formed.
Start with 'a'.
Add 't'. The new word is 'at'.
Add 'c'. The new word is 'cat'.
Add 'o'. The new word is 'coat'.
Add 'r'. The new word is 'actor'.
Until the addition of the 'r' it was quite simple to add the new letter to the existing ones to form a new word. With the 'r' it was necessary to go back and completely restructure the use of the previous words.
We live over time. New information comes in over time. We add this new information to what we already have. There may come a point where we have to go back and restructure what we had before. This is creativity. More often we are not forced to go back. We stick to what we have. If, however, we choose to go back and restructure then we get a much better arrangement. This is creativity we choose to use.
COMMODITIES AND VALUES
Technology is becoming a commodity. Everyone can have access to it. Manufacturing processes and efficiencies are also becoming a commodity available to everyone.
China and India are rapidly developing as manufacturing countries – and at a much lower cost.
In a free-trade world the only differentiator is going to be creativity. With creativity you use the commodities to deliver new products, new services and new values.
Creativity is needed to offer new values through new products and new services. Creativity can also design new and better ways of delivering old and established values. Creativity can also design new values directly – and then find ways of delivering these new values.
LANGUAGE PROBLEM
There is a language problem with our understanding of the word 'creativity'. As we understand it, if you create something that was not there before, then you are creative. But this may not necessarily be a good thing. You may have just created a mess.
This leads to the notion that creativity is just being different for the sake of being different – which is what far too many creative people believe.
If doors are normally rectangular and you suggest a triangular door, that is not creative unless you can show value for the new shape.
The problem then is that the word 'creative' does not distinguish between artistic creativity – as we understand it – and idea creativity, which helps with our thinking. That the result is something new is enough for us to term it 'creativity'. That is why it was necessary to invent the term 'lateral thinking' to refer specifically to idea creativity.
Idea creativity
Because there is no specific word in the English language for 'idea creativity' there is the possibility of dangerous confusion. Schools claim that they are indeed teaching 'creativity' when they are teaching some music, dancing and finger painting.
Many people believe that, if you create a mess, then you have created something new and, theoretically, you are therefore 'creative'. The production of something that was not there before implies creation without any regard to the value of that creation. Indeed, many people have come to believe that being different for the sake of being different is the essence of creativity.
There is a need in our language for a word that emphasises idea creativity, and that also indicates change, newness and value.
REASONS
There are a number of reasons why we have done nothing culturally, academically, etc., about creativity.
There is the language problem mentioned above. This leads to problems with understanding. If you claim to be able to teach people creativity, you are asked if you could ever teach someone to be a Leonardo da Vinci or a Ludwig van Beethoven, a Claude Monet or a Frédéric Chopin. Since this is unlikely, the conclusion is that creativity cannot be taught.
Since creativity cannot be explained or achieved logically, it must be some mysterious talent that only some people have and others can only envy.
All creative ideas will be logical in hindsight – that is, after you have come up with the idea, if the idea is indeed logical in hindsight, then it will be claimed that logic should have reached the idea in the first place. So creativity is unnecessary because logic is enough. The complete nonsense of this attitude in an asymmetric system will be explained later.