Think!

by Edward de Bono

  Nothing I write here is intended to attack or diminish the importance of judgement. That would be absurd. What I am insisting upon is that we introduce more design into our thinking and our education.

  Judgement is concerned with 'what is'. Design is concerned with 'what could be'.

  JUDGEMENT AND RECOGNITION

  A doctor is in his clinic. A child is brought in with a rash. The doctor thinks of possibilities: food allergy, sunburn, measles, scarlet fever. The doctor then takes the child's history from the mother and examines the child. The doctor may do some additional tests.

  In the end, measles is diagnosed. As soon as the diagnosis is made, the doctor can explain the progression of the illness to the mother. The doctor knows the probable course of the illness and the possible complications. Above all, the doctor knows the standard treatment.

  That is the model for 100 per cent of education and 95 per cent of daily thinking.

  Analyse the situation. Identify standard elements. Apply the standard answers. Education and training is all about identifying the standard elements and knowing the standard answers.

  With judgement you come to an idea and then you judge it. You accept the idea or you reject it. For most parts of our life, judgement is essential and extremely useful. The judgement of recognition allows us to make rapid use of past experience and also the experience of others. The judgement of assessment prevents us from making mistakes. Without judgement, it would be difficult to exist. So it is hardly surprising that we have put all the emphasis on truth and judgement.

  Is there anything wrong with this model? No. On the contrary, it is very practical and effective. But it is not enough. Instead of accepting or rejecting an idea you look at the idea in order to 'see where you can move to'. This puts a very different sort of usefulness on ideas. We need much more emphasis on design – for everyone.

  THE DOG EXERCISE MACHINE

  In an education magazine, I used to carry out a series of design exercises for children from the ages of four to 16. I would set a task and ask them to make a drawing showing how the task could be achieved.

  Drawing is much more powerful than writing. Many youngsters would show complex negative feedback systems they could never have described in words. With drawings you can see the whole process at once. You can put your finger on a spot and ask, 'How does this happen?'

  One of the design exercises was to design a dog exercising machine.

  There were many ingenious designs. Most of them had a sort of treadmill with a bone suspended at one end. The dog ran on the treadmill to get the bone.

  One youngster, aged five, had a different idea. His dog was towing a small trolley on which there was a car battery. An electrified prong came out of the battery. If the dog stopped, the trolley would run into it and the electrified prong would get the dog going again.

  Almost everyone else was trying to get the dog to exercise, to move. This youngster was trying to prevent the dog from stopping. These designs were published as a book, The Dog Exercising Machine. There was also another collection published, with the title Children Solve Problems. The children weren't being led by what they knew – they were more creative in their approach to a problem. Using drawings helped.

  OPERACY

  Unfortunately, kids don't remain that creative for long.

  Schools are involved with literacy and numeracy. They should also be involved with 'operacy', which is the skill of operating, or getting things done. In the real world, after leaving school, that is almost as important as literacy and numeracy.

  For many years I was president of the Young Enterprise organisation. This involves thousands of youngsters in Europe, Russia and some other countries setting up their own mini-businesses. They come up with a business concept, they devise the marketing and sales strategies and ultimately they learn the skills needed to operate a business. Some of them are very ingenious. Some of them are very successful. It is a wonderful concept.

  For traditional reasons, based in the early medieval times, education has tended to look down on business as money-grabbing, commercial and not concerned with the higher things in life. In those days the upper classes were not interested in business, because their serfs and tenants provided the money and labour. This is an absurd attitude in today's world.

  In the United Kingdom today, youngsters still leave school knowing the names of Henry Vlll's wives and even the date of the Treaty of Utrecht. At the same time they have no idea how the corner shop works or how the world of commerce operates.

  Design and operacy

  Every successful business started as a design in someone's mind. In general use, the word 'design' has an element of visual design and graphic design. Sometimes design is seen as a sort of cosmetic luxury. We badly need to broaden the meaning of the word 'design' to cover all those situations where we put things together to achieve some effect. Whenever standard routine is not enough, we need 'design'.

  Operacy is about action and the skill of thinking for action instead of thinking for description. Design is part of operacy. Like action, design always has a purpose. With action we set out to achieve something. With design we set out to achieve something. Design is the basis for action.

  DESIGN AND CONFLICTS

  In conflicts, we seek to identify 'the bad guys' and to condemn them for bad behaviour or for breaking some law. Naturally, we seek to punish them. This may involve sanctions, fights, war, and so on.

  The design approach is different and looks at the fears, needs and greed of those involved – on both sides.

  In a conflict, the leaders on both sides derive their significance and importance from the continuation of the conflict. They have no real interest in solving the conflict because they will then lose any importance. If these leaders can be given a permanent position of importance that does not depend on the conflict, then the conflict will end.

  I suggested this many years ago for the conflict in Northern Ireland. The conflict is now over.

  A designed way forward for the Israel/Palestine conflict is to let each side vote in the elections of the other side. This need not be a full vote; it could be a half-vote. There would then be a good possibility of constructive politicians getting elected. Hardliners would have a much reduced chance of election. With constructive politicians on each side, the way forward would be more positive.

  This design has a purpose, an aim to achieve something.

  The court of design

  Courts of law are always about judgement. Someone is guilty or innocent. Some party has done wrong to another party. They don't look at sorting out a way forward for the future. I once suggested to the top lawyer in the European Union the need for a court of design.

  There are many matters that go to court that involve disputes between parties. This type of dispute can often be solved by using design. ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) and sometimes family courts adopt this approach. Sir Lawrence Street, in Australia, who is interested in my work, runs a successful design process for people with disputes.

  Anyone could set up a court of design. It does not need to have official, government or legal standing. It just needs the people coming to this court to agree to take part in the process. They do not even need to agree to be bound by the outcome (this is not arbitration). This court, with staff skilled in creative design, will help them construct a way forward.

  4 Knowledge and

  Information

  Which is the more important on its own: a detailed road map or the ability to drive a car? Education is all about knowledge and information. This is necessary to fill the many hours devoted to education. How else would you fill these 'baby-sitting' hours?

  Nothing I am writing here seeks to diminish the importance of information. Thinking without information is a self-indulgent game similar to those some philosophers play. What I am commenting upon is the notion that information is enough, that information is all. As with many other things I mention in the book, information is excellent
– but it is not enough.

  CHINA

  Two thousand years ago, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in science and technology. They had gunpowder, printing, paper and the compass. Had China continued at the same rate of development, it would today be the hugely dominant country in the world in all respects: technically, scientifically and economically. So what went wrong? What brought the progress to a dead halt?

  Scholars were a very important part of Chinese culture. They had a central position. One theory holds that the scholars decided that you could move from fact to fact to fact. As a result, they never developed the 'possibility system'. They never developed speculation, hypothesis and possibility. So progress came to an end, because without possibility you cannot progress.

  Today the Chinese government is doing pilot projects with my school work in five provinces. If they like the results, it may be put into millions of schools.

  COMPUTERS

  The development of computers, with their superb ability to handle information, has made matters worse.

  What happens when very young children are given computers? They develop the habit of searching for the answer they need. They no longer have to think – they just search for the answer. While the ability to search on a computer is excellent, the ability to think is also important.

  The development of the Internet has allowed the organisation of a communal brain where lots of people apply their thinking to an issue. Unfortunately, a thousand poor thinkers does not itself give you good thinking. I know; I have tried it. The method is useful to sample what people are thinking but does not itself produce great thinking.

  What about computers doing the thinking themselves? This is a possibility I would not rule out. They can already do some excellent thinking: analysis, extracting patterns and applying judgement. It is said that computer diagnosis of medical conditions is better than that of 90 per cent of doctors – providing the right information is fed into the computer.

  So computers per se are not the problem. The main problem is perception, which I shall deal with later in this book. If computers have to work with our packaged perceptions, then they will not do better than us. If we can design computers to do their own perceiving, not guided by our frameworks, then computers will really think. That will be a good thing.

  CORPORATIONS

  What happened to China is happening today to major corporations. The excellence of our computers allows corporations to feed all the necessary data into a computer. The computer analyses the data, and this analysis forms the basis for all decisions and strategy.

  This is very, very dangerous. Because unless you make the effort to look at the data in different ways, you stagnate in the old concepts. I have seen that happen to many major corporations.

  ALTERNATIVES AND POSSIBILITIES

  As with China, the traditional logic habits within our education system do not put much emphasis on possibility – for obvious reasons. Possibilities are a very important part of thinking, but we regard them only as a way of getting to the truth. I have been at some of the most prestigious universities in the world: Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard. At none of them was any significant amount of time spent on possibilities and speculation. There is a brief acknowledgement that the 'hypothesis' is important in science – but that is all.

  Possibilities and science

  There is a very close link between possibilities and creativity because it is creativity that produces the possibilities. Almost every advance in science has depended on a creative possibility or hypothesis. Someone has often seen a possible alternative leading to an advance within the scientific field.

  Peptic ulcer (stomach ulcer or duodenal ulcer) is a serious and widespread medical condition. In the past, people with this condition might have spent 20 years or more on antacids (to counter the acid in the stomach). They were supposed to avoid alcohol and spicy foods. Their life was a misery.

  One day in the early 1980s, a young doctor in Western Australia named Barry J. Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren thought of the possibility that a peptic ulcer was an infection rather than a permanent condition. As an infection it could therefore be treated. Everyone roared with laughter. How could any bacteria survive the strong acid in the stomach? To prove his point, Marshall made a culture of the bug he suspected, drank it and gave himself an ulcer. Point proved.

  Today, instead of spending 20 years or more on antacids, you just take antibiotics for a week and you are cured. Marshall and Warren won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005 – they deserved it.

  I was once taken out into the Arizona desert and shown some tall pillar-like cacti. I asked why cacti had spikes on them. That was apparently a silly question. Everyone knew that cacti had spikes on them to prevent animals from eating them. I observed that there were many parts of the world that had both plants and animals to eat them – so why did those plants not have spikes?

  I suggested that there was a possibility that the small spikes on the cacti had nothing to do with animals. Those small spikes kept the boundary layer of air next to the plant stationary. That way the plant lost less water through transpiration and evaporation. I happened to tell someone my idea. He told me that the Israeli government were doing research on exactly this point – they were looking at how to grow plants with spikes so that they could survive in the desert.

  Because action requires truth and certainty, we greatly underestimate the importance of possibilities. Most great advances in science are based on possibilities.

  Research shows that people who smoke a lot of cannabis have an increased chance of developing schizophrenia. This may be so. But if we look at this information in a different way there is a possibility that people with a schizophrenic tendency enjoy cannabis more, and so more people with this tendency smoke cannabis heavily.

  I once commented that I did not think that the Harvard Case Study method was a good way of teaching. Someone pointed out that a lot of brilliant people came out of the Harvard Business School. I pointed out that if a lot of brilliant people make their way towards an archway, then a lot of brilliant people will emerge from that archway. The archway has contributed very little. To get into Harvard you have to be brilliant, so when you come out you are still brilliant. There is a very real need to look at the information and data in new and different ways.

  Possibilities and creativity

  As we've seen, one of the formal tools of lateral thinking is 'challenge'. We need to use this to open up possibilities even when we are sure we have the right, and only, answer.

  In traditional thinking, if there is an obvious and apparently satisfactory answer we stick with it and never explore other possibilities. We use possibilities only as a way of getting to the truth. If we believe we have already got to the truth, we do not need possibilities. One of the very important roles of creativity is to seek to look at data in different ways. Otherwise we remain stuck in old concepts, which the data can be used to support. Simply analysing data will not produce new ideas. If you want a really new idea you have to be able to start it off in your head, with creativity, and then check the idea out against the available data.

  I have mentioned it before, but it is important enough to mention again. Once we have found the 'right answer' and the 'truth' we stop thinking. What is the point of thinking further?

  The result is that there are many excellent ideas that completely block further progress. We do not think about these matters. There is the dangerous habit in psychology (especially in the USA) of calling all thinking 'problem solving'. So, if we do not perceive a problem, there is no point thinking about it.

  I would say that this may be the most serious barrier to human progress.

  Religion – truth or heresy?

  Religion needs certainty and truth. It would be hard to be a martyr for possibility. Galileo got into trouble when his 'possibilities' challenged the certainty of the Church.

  The Church needed the logic and certainty of t
he GG3 in order to prove heretics wrong. The Church could never accept heresies as possibilities.

  While logic, truth and certainty (with the possibilities of hypotheses) have been very powerful in science, they have been limiting and even dangerous in other areas. Other people have other truths.

  In perception, possibility is central. Do you look at a situation this way – or that way? You always need to keep possibilities in mind.

  If we really want truth, why should we bother with possibilities? There are a number of reasons:

  There is the obvious need for possibility as a hypothesis or framework on the way to finding the truth.

  Truths accepted too easily can be challenged by opening up alternative possibilities (as suggested above).

  There are times when you have to live with many possibilities as you cannot determine the truth. This is often the case with perception.

  The pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece had much more to say about 'possibility' and invented the hypothesis. For obvious reasons the Church preferred the logic and truth of the GG3.

  Creative possibilities

  There is a type of examination called 'multiple choice'. The candidate is asked a question and then given a list of possible answers. The candidate then chooses their answer from this list.

  The advantages of this system are obvious in terms of marking the papers. Has the right answer been chosen or not? Papers can be marked mechanically by computer. This is much more fair than the subjective judgement of an essay.

  Research has shown, however, that creative students get marked down with such a system. The less-creative student chooses answer 'C' and cannot see the possibility of any other answer. The creative student can see that under certain circumstances the answer could be 'D'. In choosing 'D', or even in spending extra time deciding between possibilities, the creative student is going to do less well than the uncreative one.