De Bono: Four Ways to Kick-Start Creative Thinking

Dr Edward De Bono was in London this week to promote his new book and extol the virtues of creative thinking.

The celebrated pioneer of lateral thinking thought (his works are now compulsory reading in Argentina and India) has just published this latest title, "Think! Before It's Too Late".

De Bono argues the adversarial way we argue concepts out and assume there is a right way and a wrong way, the way we draw conclusions about the world through the use of Aristotelian box-logic is very good at producing scientific results, but bad at creating value, which is essentially what innovators do.

By understanding the mechanisms of the mind, you can become more creative in your thinking, De Bono says, allowing you to come up with ideas that transform your business.

Here are four of the frameworks De Bono uses to nurture creative thinking:

1. Challenge the process: This doesn't mean attack it. Go back to the first principles of the problem and review the direction of the process.
   Example: a local authority in New Zealand wanted to free up parking spaces but the cost of monitoring parking was expensive. The solution was to allow free parking to anyone who kept their headlights on while parked.
2. Set up a provocative statement: This means looking at the solution to a problem in an impossible or contradictory way.
   Example: a number of factories were ignoring anti-pollution regulations and polluting a river. The provocative statement was: "The factories have to be downstream of themselves". The resulting solution was making every factory build their inlet pipes downstream of their outlet pipes -- they are now the first to suffer from their own polution.
3. Use random words: Adding an element of chance will allow you to come at a problem from a different starting point, one you would not have ordinarily chosen. Picking random words out of a bag forces your mind to make random associations, effectively producing solutions you wouldn't be able to arrive at using well-worn analytical processes.
4. Use parallel thinking: Instead of going into teams to argue the relative merits of a number of solutions, everyone approach each solution together in every way. De Bono advocates the symbolic wearing of six coloured hats to adopt positive, negative, rational and emotional standpoints. Organisations such as Boeing, JP Morgan and IBM have used this device to reduce meeting times by up to tenfold.