Think! (2 page)

There is a chef who cooks an excellent omelette. It is the best omelette in the world. It cannot be faulted. The chef is no good at cooking anything else. Here we have excellence, but it is not enough.

The rear left wheel of a particular motor car is excellent. It cannot be faulted or attacked on any grounds. But that wheel by itself is not enough. If you believed that all you needed on a car was one wheel, there would be something wrong with your thinking – not with that rear left wheel. We also need the other wheels. The rear left wheel is excellent – but it is not enough.

An educated man speaks English flawlessly. But when he is in France, he finds that although his excellent English is still excellent, it is not enough.

I believe that our existing thinking methods are excellent when applied to certain areas, and inadequate (and even useless) in other areas.

If the English-speaking person in France speaks more loudly and more forcibly, this does not make him better understood. Insistence on traditional thinking does not make it more adequate.

If a diner wants something other than an omelette, the fact that the chef can create a perfect omelette is excellent but will not work for that diner.

These thinking methods are excellent, but not enough. I believe that our thinking culture, methods and habits are excellent. Like the rear left wheel they are excellent in themselves. But they are not enough. We need to supplement
them with creative thinking, design thinking and perceptual thinking (among other things). Unfortunately, our existing traditional thinking habits insist that you must attack something and show it to be bad before you can suggest a change. It is much more difficult to acknowledge that something is excellent and then to ask for change because although it is excellent, it is not enough.

MY THINKING

Throughout this book I shall use the term 'my thinking' to refer to any of the thinking methods and software that I have designed. This is simpler than spelling out in each case the particular method that is in use. To use just the word 'thinking' would be misleading, because it might be understood as referring to traditional thinking, critical thinking, and so on. The term 'my thinking' refers directly to the
new thinking methods I have designed.

Many readers will know of my work in
lateral thinking and may assume that all references are to this method. This is not the case. There are several other methods. There is the exploratory method of the
Six Hats and
parallel thinking (instead of argument). There is the perceptual thinking of the
CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) method designed for schools (some of the basic tools of which are designed in more detail later in Chapter 10). There are also programmes for
simplicity
and value scanning. All these methods and more come under the term 'my thinking'.

There are times when my thinking is totally different from, and even contrary to, traditional logic (for example, with provocation). In general, however, I have no quarrel with traditional thinking. I merely think it is incomplete and inadequate in some areas. I would like to see my methods used to supplement traditional thinking – not to replace it.

How new thinking has worked

Over the last 40 years I have worked in 73 countries. These have been mainly seminars and lectures with some conferences and meetings.

I have taught thinking to four-year-olds and 90-year-olds (Roosevelt University has a special programme for seniors). I have taught thinking to top business executives and illiterate miners. I have taught thinking to Down's Syndrome youngsters and to Nobel Laureates. I once lectured to 8,000 Mormons in Salt Lake City. In Christchurch, New Zealand, I lectured for 90 minutes to 7,400 children (aged six to 12) who had been brought together by mayoress Vicki Buck.

Over the years I have been invited to talk to a large number of business corporations including BA, BAA, Bank of America, Barclays, BP, Citicorp, Ericsson, Exxon, Ford, GM, IBM, Kuwait Oil, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Shell, UBS and many others. I have also been
invited to talk to government departments, cabinet offices, and so on.

In my experience, even the most rigid and authoritarian regimes welcome new thinking. I have given seminars in China many times and they are currently trying out my work in schools. Elsewhere in the world, the programme is widely used: in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, India (increasingly) and Canada. There is patchy use as well in the UK, USA, Ireland, Italy and Malta.

Below are some small examples of where my thinking (new thinking) has made a difference. These examples do not prove anything – they merely provide a perspective.

• In the old days of the Soviet Union, I was on a visit to Moscow to lecture at various departments of the Academy of Sciences. I was also invited to a meeting of the Foreign Affairs committee of the Politburo. The chairman of the meeting had in front of him my book on conflict resolution,
  Conflicts.
  There were notes in the margin and underlinings. He saw me looking at the book and said, 'This is not Gorbachev's copy – he has his own.' I was later told by a senior politician from Kazakhstan that, in those days of perestroika, my books were top reading in the Kremlin.
  
• John Buchanan, the former coach of the Australian national cricket team, came to see me to ask me to train his team in thinking. I gave them a short seminar.
  In their next encounter with the English team, they not only won easily, they inflicted the biggest defeat in the history of Test cricket. I had a note from John Buchanan acknowledging my contribution.
  
• One of my trainers, Caroline Ferguson, was working with a steel company in South Africa. One afternoon she set up some workshops to generate new ideas. Using just one of the tools of lateral thinking (random input), they generated 21,000 ideas in a single afternoon. It took them nine months just to sort through the ideas.
  
• The Hungerford Guidance Centre in London works with youngsters who are deemed to be too violent to be taught in ordinary schools: they have stabbed a teacher, for example, or set a school on fire. More than 20 years ago, the principal, David Lane, started teaching my ways of thinking to these violent youngsters. He has now done a 20-year follow-up and has shown that the actual rate of criminal conviction for those taught thinking is less than one-tenth of that for those not taught thinking. This statistic is a fact.
  
• A school in Argentina teaches my thinking very thoroughly. In the national examinations, they did so much better than all the other schools that they were investigated for cheating!
  
• As a student, Ashok Chouhan was travelling from India to Europe. He had three dollars in his pocket. His plane was diverted to Paris. He had some time at the airport and went into the bookshop. He bought a copy of my first book (in English). At an evening lecture I was giving in Delhi, he told me he kept this book in his briefcase for 30 years. Today he has $3 billion in his pocket; he founded Amity University in India; and he was, at one time, the largest investor in East Germany. He believes that 80 per cent of his success was triggered by that book.
  
• I was once giving a seminar in Barcelona. After the seminar a man from the island of Tenerife came up to me. He told me that when he was younger he had not been any good at school subjects. Then he read one of my books – I do not know which one. Today he owns seven companies in Holland and Spain.
  
• The Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 lost a great deal of money (perhaps $1 billion). After Montreal, no city in the world wanted to host the games. Eventually, Moscow agreed to host the games in 1980. After Moscow, again no city wanted the games. Finally Los Angeles agreed to host the games. Instead of a loss, they made a profit of $250 million. As a result of this, today every city wants the games and competes to get them (there have even been allegations of bribery
  where cities are desperate). When Peter Ueberroth, the organiser of the LA games, was interviewed in the
  Washington Post,
  he attributed his success to his ability to generate new ideas through the use of my lateral thinking and he gave examples. I wrote and asked him where he had learned this. He reminded me that he had been my host in 1975 at a 90-minute lecture I had given to the YPO (Young Presidents Organisation) in Boca Raton, Florida. From that 90 minutes he had remembered enough to use the processes effectively nine years later.
  
• I was on the Innovations Council of the State of Victoria in Australia. After a meeting of the council, Professor Doherty came up to me to tell me how he had read my first book. This had changed his thinking and, as a result, he won the Nobel Prize.
  
• The Atkey organisation is an independent organisation that, for several years, has been introducing my work into schools in the United Kingdom and doing research. They have shown that teaching my thinking as a separate subject increases performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 per cent.
  
• A town council that had been taught my methods by Vicki Cavins reported that in the first year they had saved $84 million on a single project.
  
• Unemployed youngsters on the New Deal scheme in the United Kingdom were taught my thinking for just five hours by the Holst Group. The employment rate among those taught increased 500 per cent. A year later, 96 per cent of those were still in employment. This was more successful than anything that had been done before.
  
• In Australia, Jennifer O'Sullivan was in charge of two job clubs, which were made up of groups of unemployed youngsters. The normal rate of employment out of such clubs was 40 per cent. She taught them my thinking and she got 70 per cent employment out of one club and 100 per cent out of the other. And every one of her youngsters was completely deaf.
  
• I have been told that Siemens (the largest corporation in Europe) has reduced product development time by 50 per cent by using my thinking.
  

There are many such examples. I have written these things to show that there has been a lot of experience with these methods. They are easy to teach, easy to use and very practical. If nothing else, the books I have written reassure people that their unusual thinking is perfectly valid.

Boasting

William James is my favourite philosopher, because he was concerned with pragmatism. To paraphrase one of his sayings: 'You can describe something this way or that. In the end, what matters is the cash value.' He did not mean actual money, but practical value. What this means is that there can be many complex descriptions and theories. But in the end, what practical difference do they make?

So the practical examples of the use of my thinking scattered throughout the book are essential, even if they do seem like boasting. They show that these things work in real life: in business, in education, and so on.

I was once interviewed by a journalist who said that she did not want to hear about these practical effects of my work. You can imagine how useless the published interview must have seemed.

A Canadian educator once declared that my CoRT programme was so simple it could not possibly work. I told him that this was like saying that cheese did not exist – because the method does work, with strong results.

We need to look closely at the ways in which our thinking doesn't work. I will be covering a different area of our thinking in each of Chapters 1 to 14. I am going to start with creativity because creativity is a huge deficiency in our thinking habits. We know very well that progress is due to creativity: to looking at things in a different way; to doing things differently; to putting things together to deliver new values.

We rely on creativity. We depend on creativity. Yet all we have been able to do is to hope that certain creative individuals will supply us with new ideas and new possibilities.

The human brain is not designed to be creative. It is designed to set up routine patterns and to use and follow these patterns. That is why life is practical and possible.
We may need to use routine patterns 98 per cent of the time and only to be creative 2 per cent of the time.

To show this, there is a game where you start with a letter and then add another letter. At each point, as you add another letter, a whole word has to be formed.

Start with 'a'.

Add 't'. The new word is 'at'.

Add 'c'. The new word is 'cat'.

Add 'o'. The new word is 'coat'.

Add 'r'. The new word is 'actor'.

Until the addition of the 'r' it was quite simple to add the new letter to the existing ones to form a new word. With the 'r' it was necessary to go back and completely restructure the use of the previous words.

We live over time. New information comes in over time. We add this new information to what we already have. There may come a point where we have to go back and restructure what we had before. This is creativity. More often we are not forced to go back. We stick to what we have. If, however, we choose to go back and restructure then we get a much better arrangement. This is creativity we choose to use.

Technology is becoming a commodity. Everyone can have access to it. Manufacturing processes and efficiencies are also becoming a commodity available to everyone.

China and India are rapidly developing as manufacturing countries – and at a much lower cost.

In a free-trade world the only differentiator is going to be
creativity. With creativity you use the commodities to deliver new products, new services and new values.

Creativity is needed to offer new values through new products and new services. Creativity can also design new and better ways of delivering old and established values. Creativity can also design new values directly – and then find ways of delivering these new values.

There is a language problem with our understanding of the
word 'creativity'. As we understand it, if you create something that was not there before, then you are creative. But this may not necessarily be a good thing. You may have just created a mess.

This leads to the notion that creativity is just being different for the sake of being different – which is what far too many creative people believe.

If doors are normally rectangular and you suggest a triangular door, that is not creative unless you can show value for the new shape.

The problem then is that the word 'creative' does not distinguish between artistic creativity – as we understand it – and idea creativity, which helps with our thinking. That
the result is something new is enough for us to term it 'creativity'. That is why it was necessary to invent the term '
lateral thinking' to refer specifically to
idea creativity.

Although my thinking is quite widely used in the artistic world (especially in music), I am writing here about
idea creativity.

Idea creativity

Because there is no specific word in the English language for 'idea creativity' there is the possibility of dangerous confusion. Schools claim that they are indeed teaching 'creativity' when they are teaching some music, dancing and finger painting.

Many people believe that, if you create a mess, then you have created something new and, theoretically, you are therefore 'creative'. The production of something that was not there before implies creation without any regard to the value of that creation. Indeed, many people have come to believe that being different for the sake of being different is the essence of creativity.

There is a need in our language for a word that emphasises idea creativity, and that also indicates change, newness and value.

There are a number of reasons why we have done nothing culturally, academically, etc., about creativity.

There is the language problem mentioned above. This leads to
problems with understanding. If you claim to be able to teach people
creativity, you are asked if you could ever teach someone to be a Leonardo da Vinci or a Ludwig van Beethoven, a Claude Monet or a Frédéric Chopin. Since this is unlikely, the conclusion is that creativity cannot be taught.

Since creativity cannot be explained or achieved
logically, it must be some mysterious talent that only some people have and others can only envy.

All creative ideas will be logical in hindsight – that is, after you have come up with the idea, if the idea is indeed logical in hindsight, then it will be claimed that logic should have reached the idea in the first place. So creativity is unnecessary because logic is enough. The complete nonsense of this attitude in an asymmetric system will be explained later.

Intelligence is not enough for creativity. So intelligent people defend the position given them by their intelligence by claiming that creativity is not a learnable
skill but an inborn talent – which they cannot be expected to acquire.

These are some of the traditional reasons why we have paid very little attention to creativity.

This method originated in the advertising industry as a formal approach to creativity. It has some value, but overall it is very weak.

Imagine a person walking down the road. This is an ordinary person – not a musician. This person is then tied up with a rope. Someone now produces a violin. Obviously the person tied up with the rope cannot play the violin. It is then suggested that if the rope is cut, the person will be able to play the violin; to become a violinist. This is obviously nonsense, but it is similar to what happens in brainstorming – simply removing inhibitions (as in cutting the rope) is not enough.

If you are inhibited and if people attack every one of your ideas, then creativity is indeed difficult. So if we remove the inhibition and we remove the attacks, surely everyone will be creative. This has a little bit more logic than cutting the rope in the above example because it assumes that everyone has some creative talent.

Brainstorming does have a value, but it is a very weak process compared with some of the formal tools of lateral thinking. Just removing inhibitions and suspending judgement is not enough. The traditional process of brainstorming sometimes gives the impression of shooting out a stream of (often crazy) ideas in the hope that one of them might hit a useful target.

There is a need for more deliberate processes to encourage and enhance creativity actively.

This is a very fundamental question. If creativity is an inborn talent then we can search for that talent, nurture it, develop it and encourage it. But there is nothing we can do for those who do not have this inborn talent.

I remind you that I am writing about idea creativity and lateral thinking rather than artistic talent.

If idea creativity is a skill then everyone can learn this skill, practise it and apply it. As with any skill, such as tennis, skiing and cooking, some people will be better at the skill than others. Everyone, however, can acquire a usable level of the skill. Idea creativity can be taught and used as formally as mathematics.

There are some people who do seem to be more creative than others. This is because they enjoy and value creativity. As a result they spend more time trying to be creative. They build up confidence in their creative abilities. All this does is make them more creative. It is a positive feedback system.

Some people seem more curious than others. Some people seem to enjoy creativity and new ideas more than others.

This does not mean that those who do not have this temperament cannot be creative. They can learn the deliberate skills of
lateral thinking just as they might learn the basic skills of mathematics. Everyone can learn to add up numbers and multiply them.

The argument that creativity cannot be taught is usually based on pointing to extreme cases of creativity and talent, such as Einstein, Michelangelo, Bjorn Borg. But imagine a row of people lined up to run a race. The starting signal is given and the race is run. Someone comes first and someone comes last. Their performance depended on their natural running ability.

Now if all the runners have some training on roller skates, they all finish the race much faster than before. However, someone still comes first and someone still comes last.

So if we do nothing about creativity then obviously
creative ability depends only on 'natural' talent. But if we provide training, structures and systematic techniques, then we raise the general level of creative ability. Some people will be much better than others but everyone will acquire some creative skill.

Then how is this skill to be acquired? Exhortation and example do have some effect, but only a weak one. There is a need for specific mental tools, operations and habits,
which lead to creative new ideas. These tools and techniques can be learned, practised and used in a deliberate manner.

It is no longer a matter of sitting by a stream and listening to Baroque music and hoping for the inspiration of a new idea. You can try that, by all means, but it is far less effective than the deliberate use of a lateral thinking technique.

As you acquire skill in the techniques, you develop more confidence and the result is that you get better and better ideas.

All the
lateral thinking tools are designed on the basis of understanding the brain as a self-organising information system that forms asymmetric patterns. Over 40 years of use, the tools have been shown to be effective across a wide range of ages, abilities, backgrounds and cultures. This is because the tools are so fundamental. This is because the tools affect behaviour.

It may surprise many people to learn that idea creativity is a logical process, because they believe that logic can never achieve creativity. Creativity is indeed logical, but it is a very different sort of logic.

Logic defines the rules of behaviour within a certain universe. With our normal logic, the universe is one of language or discrete elements: language refers to separate
things like box, cloud, smile, etc. These are discrete or separated elements. With creativity, the universe is that of a self-organising patterning system that makes asymmetric patterns. Logic defines the rules of behaviour within this rather special universe.

Patterns

One morning a fellow gets up and realises he has 11 items of clothing to put on. In how many ways can he get dressed?

He sets his computer to work through all the ways of getting dressed. The computer takes 40 hours to go through all the ways (this was tested some years ago; today's computers will be faster but the concept is the same). With 11 items of clothing, there are 39,916,800 ways of getting dressed.

There are 11 choices for the first item, 10 choices for the next, and so on.

If you were to spend just one minute concentrating on each way of getting dressed, you would need to live to the age of 76 years old – using every minute of your waking life trying ways of getting dressed.

Life would be impractical and rather difficult if the brain worked that way. You would take forever to get up in the morning, cross the road, get to work, read and write.

But the brain does not work that way. We exist because the brain is a self-organising information system that allows patterns to form from incoming information. That
is its excellence. All we then need to do is to recognise the routine 'getting dressed' pattern, switch into it and go through that normal routine. That is why you can drive to work in the morning, read, write, and all the other things you do in your day-to-day life.

Imagine you have a piece of paper and you make marks with a pen on that surface. The surface records the marks accurately. Previous marks do not affect the way a new mark is received.

Change the surface to a shallow dish of gelatin. You now put spoonfuls of hot water on to the gelatin. The hot water dissolves the gelatin. In time, channels are formed in the surface. In this case previous information strongly affects the way new information is received. The process is no different from rain falling on a landscape. Streams are formed and then rivers. New rain is channelled along the tracks formed by preceding rain. The gelatin and landscape have allowed the hot water and rain to organise themselves into channels or sequences.

In my 1969 book
The Mechanism of Mind
I showed how the brain, unlike computers, is this second type of information-receiving surface. I showed how neural networks act like the gelatin or the landscape.

What is a pattern?

There is a pattern whenever the change from one state to the next one has a higher chance of happening in one direction than in any other. If you are standing on a path
in a garden, the chances of you proceeding another step down the path are much more likely than of you wandering off the path.

How the brain forms patterns is described in my book
The Mechanism of Mind.

We can even represent a pattern by that path. At each moment we are more likely to take the next step in one direction than move down the path in any other direction. Under given circumstances a certain 'state' in the brain is more likely to be followed by one particular other state than by any other.

Asymmetry

Patterning systems tend to be
asymmetric, though.