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The significance of de Bono's twenty-five year old theory is momentous, universally applicable and dimly realised.

Adapted and updated from an article in the London Sunday Times
by Nicholas Berry, 4 October 1992

Nearly 25 years ago a former Rhodes scholar and doctor, from an Anglo-Maltese family, had a new theory as to how the brain works. Might it be possible, he asked, to generate new ideas on demand, artificially, instead of waiting around for inspiartion? His answer was yes.

According to Edward de Bono, then aged 36, whose education mixed computing with medicine and psychology, the human brain makes sense of the world by building up patterns based on experience. There patterns allow us to see the world in a particular way, and, in so doing, we reinforce the patterns - like falling rainwater collected in contours set by previous downpours.

Such patterns representing experience, continued Edward de Bono, are indispensable for everyday existence; for example, how could people get dressed in the morning if they did not know in advance from experience in what order to put their clothes on?

But they also contain an inevitable drawback: unless you learn to escape from the obvious way of looking at things, you will not develop new ideas. De Bono christened the escape process "lateral thinking" in his book The Use of Lateral Thinking, and he has been working, writing, lecturing on and thinking about the subject ever since.

Humour is the key to the system About 10 years ago he added a second insight, Humour was far more important than anyone realised: it was in fact the clue that illustrates the system at work.

Consider the following simple joke: "Bob Hope had a bad Christmas. He received three golf clubs and only two of them has swimming pools." First, the mind pays attention to golf clubs, then, with the punch line, comes the mental switch over from one idea of a golf club to another. That punchline in humour is analogous to originality in thinking.

The logical alternatives are easily explored in most situations. But logic is not effective in coping with the elusive, open-ended problems. It takes a long time before an unjustified step is taken (as no one feels justified in taking it). Yet only unjustified steps are likeley to open up new patterns of thought.

How does de Bono suggest you take these unjustified steps? The thinker relates the problem in hand to a random input, such as to a word chosen by chance in a dictionary, and then sees if he can, by connecting the two, open up a new approach to the situation. A second technique is the making of a nonsensical statement, them examining it to see where it leads. This method was applied in recent years with devastating effect in the insurance industry by Ron Barbaro, a man who has since become president of Prudential Insurance in America. Searching for a new product idea in his field, he played with the apparently absurd notion "You die before you die". From this, he derived the much less absurd, and ultimately usable concept that in case of life-threatening diseases, insurance companies should make an advance payment to the living insured. And that has since been widely adopted.

The difference between people What will be the difference in effectiveness between people who are more or less equally energetic, more or less equally qualified, except superior imagination?

The significance of de Bono's theory is therefore momentous, universally applicable, and still dimly recognised. When it eventually percolates through to the world's cultural intelligentsia (as it has into the scientific mainstream), it will turn de Bono into one of the leading change-makers in the 20th century.

Imagination is more important than data collecting, since there is shortage of the former, and a surfeit of the latter. Indeed, information by itself will rarely give a good idea. It is the imaginative skill applied to looking at data that makes the big difference.

Consider a rough relationship between value (new ideas) and information: an increase in information causes a greater increase in new ideas. But there comes a point where a person is so overloaded with information and experience that he is unable to generate anything new.

The relationship between information and imagination Like many trailblazers, scientific or otherwise, de Bono is a highly effective lecturer. As a one-man show, his seminars are a world-wide tour de force. These two day events are spiced up with topical jokes and references. Over lunch the slightly sardonic lecturer open-mindedly explores any subject.

Some of his seemingly endless publications are more important than others. His book, Serious Creativity (Harper Collins 1992), combines the theoretical background, with techniques, and examples. Here are some of the ideas thrown up by these methods:

Thinking like the Ancient Greeks There will be those who continue to believe that the highest form of mental activity is to think like the ancient Greeks. It is indeed extraordinary that outside mathematics we have not invented any new thinking tools since Socrates polished up the argument as an alternative to random discussion.

In law and politics, following our esteemed adversarial system, energy is used up attacking the other side. There is no attempt to explore or develop new ideas. The lack of any constructive design thinking explains the unnecessarily brutal changeover from communism to 1920's Chicago style capitalism in Russia since 1991. How often does a politician or economist come up with a new idea?

In case you feel that your natural creative skill is sufficiently great to render any further study of the matter unnecessary, let me propose a simple test.

Why not take a newspaper, and using it in any way you like (but without any outside aids), construct a tower as high as possible. Difficult?

The best approach, which is to make a tripod, occurs to about one in 100 people.