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SIX HATS

Item A: 'Everyone to work from home one day a week.'
Positive Points:
Before: 197 After: 693 (351%)
Negative Points:
Before: 135 After: 650 (481%)

Item B: 'Everyone to do one year of community service after leaving school.'
Positive Points:
Before: 196 After: 650 (331%)
Negative Points:
Before: 110 After: 542 (493%)

DE BONO AND THE BEEF CRISIS

Our company is one of Europe's largest beef processors. In March 1996 we lost 86% of our turnover overnight with the BSE crisis. Not suprisingly it was an extremely difficult task to try and think in such circumstances. Managers were fully occupied coping with the sudden loss of business, but we resolved to examine what options we did have.

I had just completed my Edward de Bono Six Thinking Hats accredited trainer's course two weeks before and suggested that out approach should use this Creative Thinking Method which was unknown to most of the group.

Twelve of us met and the result of a sixty minute meeting using Six Thinking Hats was:
30 cost reduction ideas
35 commercial ideas

We were able to subject each of these individually to the Yellow and Black Hat process at subsequent meetings, with the benefit of keeping time focussed and to a minimum for each.

Inevitably the new ideas were viewed with scepticism initially as everybody focussed inwardly and were unable to come to terms with the enormity of what was happening.

THE RESULT?

25 ideas were put in place

Before the introduction of the Six Thinking Hats Method it would have taken several weeks of meetings with no guarantee of coming up with anything we could implement.

The highlights included

Major capital investment in a a new plant to participate in the Government OTMS Scheme. (This is not perhaps the sort of opportunity one would normally contemplate taking in such circumstances, but when the idea was targeted with the Yellow and Black Hats, the Yellow Benefits outweighed the Black Cautions.)

Our previously in-house only Distribution Division went 100% open Market commercial, and established such a reputation and portfolio of business that we have had to expand this operation too.

The overall result is that we came through the crisis with a strong company
and survived six long weeks of no revenue

Six Thinking Hats is shortly to be used in a major marketing conference
for another Division of the Group

Paul Dennehy, Accredited Six Thinking Hats Trainer.

LATERAL THINKING

"...the programme has been of benefit to the company on a number of levels. People are definitely generating more and better ideas: it has reduced the amount of time being spent in meetings; the decision-making process has been speeded up; and significant cost savings have been made as a result of ideas generated by people from the Certified Thinker groups."

Certified Thinkers are graduates of a 14 hour voluntary training programme conducted after hours. Ninety five of the company's 250 permanent staff have satisfied the requirements to become Certified Thinkers. The programme is designed and conducted by Lynch, an accredited corporate trainer in both Six thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking. Homework and final exams, creative thinking competitions, and Alps Summer School are all components of the Certified Thinker project.
The Certified Thinkers meet weekly in groups of 4-9 to apply their thinking skills to topics referred to them by senior management or generated within the groups.
Blue Hat leaders key to success
Lynch has trained 14 facilitators to conduct ongoing Blue Hat functions in the groups. He meets informally with each of them weekly, by phone, or in person to keep the process on track.
Training facilitators and giving them ongoing support is the key to the successful implementation of the de Bono thinking skills in the workplace, according to Lynch. Before facilitators were in place, groups seemed to dissolve into old thinking habits after initially positive start-ups.
Certified Thinkers design new keyboard
ALPS Electric Ireland is part of the Japanese ownes ALPS Electric Group employing 20,000 people internationally. ALPS supplies peripherals to such customers as the European subsidiaries of IBM, Apple and Microsoft.
One Certified Thinker group recently used de Bono techniques to originate and design a new computer keyboard - now being distributed.
Better thinkers, happier homes
Benefits to ALPS Electric Ireland and its employees from their training in de Bono thinking methods don't stop when the employees leave work.
"People tell us that the programme has helped them not only at work, but also in their private lives, where they can bring the same skills to bear to solve personal and domestic problems," says Lynch.

CoRT THINKING LESSONS

Excerpts from "Research and Realities in Teaching and Learning" by Dr John Edwards, Associate Professor of Education, James Cook University of North Queensland

.....This brings me to my research on teaching thinking in schools. Cognitive process training has a long history, dating at least from Ancient Greeks (Mann:1979). Despite this there are masses of research studies from around the world to show that even our best students master little more than the art of regurgitation of knowledge. As Perkins (1992, p.7) recently stated:

The bottom line is that we are not getting the retention, understanding, and active use of knowledge that we want.

I began directly teaching children to think in my classroom in 1977. This was through using de Bono's (1987) CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) Thinking Skills program in our science curriculum. Practical results in the school were very positive, with strong supporting anecdotal evidence from teachers, parents and students. Research data (reported in Edwards and Baldauf:1983) also revealed strong benefits from the direct teaching of the CoRT Thinking.

Edwards: 1991a, 1991b, 1994b and 1995 review most of my research on CoRT. This series of studies indicates that student thinking can be improved in a range of respects through the direct teaching of the CoRT program. Improvements in scholastic aptitude scores, scores on the [?] tests or Creative Thinking, scores on self-perceptions of use of CoRT thinking approaches, and often improvements on heavily content-based school exams, were found for students taught the ten lessons of the CoRT-1 program when compared with control groups. However the effects were often short term. Eriksson (1990) reported similarly promising results in South Africa from a comparative study of CoRT. The study used mixed-race gifted upper primary school children at an after-school centre, [?] and showed significant improvements in creativity and locus of control.

A major study began in North Queensland in 1987 looked at teaching a group of 12 year olds, in their last year of primary school, all sixty lessons of the CoRT program - two lessons a week for thirty weeks. The teacher was helped to infuse the CoRT thinking skills, once learned by the students, through all disciplines of the curriculum. Once again students showed improved scores on a range of quantitative measures. In addition, the teacher showed growth on a range of measures (Clayton and Edwards: 1989). Both the teacher and the headmaster, who also regularly took the class, reported impressive benefits. The teacher noted that her teaching style had become much more interactive; she now used group work more; she knew her students and their thinking at a much deeper level than ever before in thirteen years of teaching; the students had achieved outstanding and unexpected results on a set of standardised national tests; and the students now contributed many more ideas of a far higher quality than they had done before CoRT instruction.

The teacher who taught them the year before reported: "there are a couple of good workers, the rest you have to really push hard .. to get anything out of them." The headmaster agreed they had been like this, but now they were responsive and more confident in their thinking than any group he had taught. He referred to 9 lower ability students in the class who had seldom contributed in class during their six years in the school;

It's marvellous. Not just a minor miracle to change that sort of behaviour, six years or more of habit forming and then in eight months to change it to: 'I have something to contribute'

When the results on the standardised national test arrived near the end of the school year he reported: "I was thrilled ... they were certainly startling and outstanding". The test (ACER-TOLA) consisted of five sub-tests, each designed to produce a standard distribution. This meant that 31% of the students tested would normally fall one or two standard deviations above the mean. The rsults of the CoRT trained group, and for the mean scores from the six years of grade 7's at this school were, in relation to proportion of the students above the mean as follows:

	Proportion of Students Above the Mean
	National Norm	School Norm	CoRT Group

Test A	31%		39.5%		52%
Test B	31%		31.2%		48%
Test C	31%		24.8%		52%
Test D	31%		42.8%		62.4%
Test E	31%		35.8%		50%

(Test A - Test of learning abilities, Test B - Study skills, Test C - Mathematics skills, Test D - Language vocabulary, Test E - Language comprehension)

Feedback from the children was also positive, with the majority reporting big improvements in their thinking and self-confidence, and many reporting wide use of CoRT skills across the curriculum and in their everyday life. These students completed their secondary education in 1992. In the state of Queensland all students are given an overall level of achievement, based on school ratings moderated through a state-wide set of standardised tests. The scores allocated to students range from a high of 1 to a low of 25. The CoRT trained group had a mean score of 10, compared with a mean of 15 for the other students in the school. A score of 15 would not get you into university, a 12 would get you into education. Most parents in the state would kill for a one point jump in Overall Performance score. These results reinforce the obvious potential of programs such as CoRT for improving the thinking of students, particularly if the skills are infused broadly through the curriculum and reinforced once learnt......

We have recently been involved in a major study to infuse the CoRT program through the curriculum of a large secondary school in Brisbane...

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