Reports are coming in from people who have just read my latest book, WHY SO STUPID?. While there are complaints about the seemingly high price, there is an understanding that this is not just a book. It is a change agent in the form of a book.
If you want to get your board members or executives to supplement their 'judgement thinking' with 'design thinking', what do you do? You can talk to them. You can send them on a seminar. Or, you can give them a copy of the book and then discuss it with them.
Water is essential for soup. But soup is more than water. Competence is essential for any sort of business. But competence may no longer be enough. Competing organisations can also be competent. What then? Competence is merely the baseline. To the competence must be added the 'value' that you want to deliver. There are the usual values - but others are delivering those as well. So the emphasis is on the design and delivery of new values. You cannot do that just by judgement. Recognising standard situations and giving the standard response is no longer enough. But that is how executives have got to be where they are. How do you supplement the existing thinking with 'design thinking'. It is not enough to say that some people do the design and others do the judgement. Everyone has to understand the 'design mode'. That is what the book is all about. The human race has learned judgement thinking but not design thinking.
Edward de Bono nmt
13th April 2003
New York
