Complacent, adequate, sufficient all imply that something is not wrong or bad. Our normal language and thinking behaviour does not have a convenient way of saying: “That is excellent but not enough”. Or we might need to say “That is excellent but that is only part of the picture”.
When I talk about the need for better thinking people often assume that I am attacking existing thinking as being wrong. It is not wrong. It is only wrong when it assumes that it is sufficient. We need to add perceptual thinking, creative thinking, design thinking and exploratory thinking.
Our habits of thinking are too much judgement based and not enough design based. This arises from the origin with the GG3 (Greek Gang of Three). When this thinking came into Europe at the Renaissance, the Church ran schools, universities and thinking in general. What the Church needed was truth, logic and argument to prove heretics wrong. So we developed an excellent thinking system for ‘finding the truth’ but we never developed thinking ‘for creating value (design)’.
Our language also forces us to use judgement. We need to judge whether something is a ‘chair’ before we can us the word ‘chair’. We cannot easily say ‘a sort of thing for sitting on’. So everything ends up in sharp edged boxes. To these we can then apply the logic of Aristotle.
Sooner or later I am going to develop a very different sort of logic.
Interested in Thinking Differently?Learn the thinking tools that have revolutionised many public and private sector companies, helping them to innovate on demand.Attend a Dr Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking™ & Serious Creativity workshop across the UK - Go to http://www.indigobusiness.co.uk/workshops/workshop.php?wid=4 .
The brain is designed to allow incoming information to form itself into routine patterns. Without this life would be impossible. With eleven items of clothing to put on in the morning, it would take seventy six years to go through all the ways of getting dressed - spending just one minute on each.
It is the same with organisations. People working within an organisation become aware of the idiom, the culture and the guiding frames for that organisation. That is why they perform well.It is very difficult for executives to think outside this box. What is worse is that when someone makes a conscious effort to jump out of the box, they usually jump too far.
It is even more difficult to think of an idea which is only slightly outside of the box. Of course, executives should learn the specific thinking tools of Lateral Thinking™. These can be very powerful. Use of just one tool generated 21,000 new ideas in a workshop in one afternoon. There is also another approach which I shall outline in my next message.
There is a growing tendency for corporations to feed all available data into a computer. The computer analyses the data and this shapes the strategy of the corporation and makes decisions. This is a dangerous tendency because thinking is locked into the old concepts which form the basis of the analysis.
There is a need for creative thinking in order to look at information in different ways. This is quite separate, and additional, to the use of creativity to find new ways of using the data.
There are examples of medical research which seems to prove a point but only because the original data has been assumed to be one thing when it was actually another. Does smoking cannabis produce schizophrenia or do people with a schizophrenic tendency enjoy smoking cannabis more than others?
Edward de Bono - is the worlds leading authority on the use of creative thinking in business.To learn Dr de Bono’s revolutionary thinking tools, join us at http://www.indigobusiness.co.uk and be trained by an officially recognised de Bono Master Trainer.
Many corporations believe that it is enough to collect all data on their computers and then to analyse this data. This sets strategies and makes decisions. The process can be very competent and relieves executives of these complex tasks. But there is serious danger. The danger is that you remain stuck in the old concepts and stagnate.
Creativity is needed to look at the data in different possible ways. Once again this is the huge importance of perception. As I have suggested before, poor perception and excellent logic may be worse than excellent perception and poor logic.
Information is not enough. Information may indeed give us an answer. But is this the only answer or even the best answer? While we put more and more technical effort into the excellence of our computers we make almost no effort to improve our handling of information.
The answer is very obvious. People like to know where they are going. It would also be impossible to design a new route to satisfy all passengers. Perhaps there could be special bus stops dedicated to certain destinations. If enough people collected at such a stop then a bus would appear and take them there.
For most of our thinking we are very happy to have fixed routes. This allows us to predict effects and actions. We design a way to get to our required destination by combining known routes. This is what technology is all about. Architects rarely design new windows or new arches. They use existing ideas in new combinations. There is very little opportunity, or even need, to invent everything from scratch.
Indigo are authorised distributors for Dr Edward de Bono’s training techniques. If you, your team or your whole organisation wish to be trained in Dr de Bono’s Thinking Skills, call Indigo on 020 7924 8760
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