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MESSAGE FOR WEEK BEGINNING 23rd January 2006 Truth and Untruth
No one would be in favour of 'untruth'. But we are over obsessed with 'truth'. This is because early thinkers needed to show that they were superior to others. They also needed to prove others to be wrong. From a religious point of view there was a great need for 'truth' to persudae others to believe what they should believe .
There are times when a deliberate untruth is useful. In Lateral Thinking a provocation is a deliberate untruth and is used to get us out of the rut of the usual pattern in order to find new ideas. There is nothing mystical or magical about this. In any self-organising information system provocation is required to get us out of 'local equilibria'.
You can have truth about the past and the present. But not about the future. The future needs creative thinking and design thinking. The future needs 'possibility' thinking just as science needs the possibility of the hypothesis
Edward de Bono |