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 dangderous tendency because thinking is locked into the old concepts which form the basis of the analyis.
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
12th November 2008