Lyndall Crisp of the Australian Financial Review is loose with the facts. Crisp tells us (p61, AFR 16/05/07) that Edward de Bono now claims to have originated ’software for the brain’.

This ‘news’ is in spite of the fact that a very convenient Google Scholar search would have provided Crisp with the inconvenient fact that Software for the Brain was written by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson 18 years before Edward makes this claim!

Has Edward had another memory lapse? Has AFR’s Crisp had a fact-check lapse? Or, is this like BRW’s Leo D’Angelo Fisher ‘thinking hats’ deja vu all over again? Come on Fairfax, give the Aussie product a fair go. Let’s get it right!

Ross Cambell author of Crisis Control says:

“Those companies that do not have crisis-ready websites and supporting technology may lose control of their message and their slow response adds another crisis to the original crisis. The crisis-ready websitite is the most essential drive of an organisation’s message strategy. It can be used for immediate warnings internally. Information updates. Victim support. Virtual media conferences. Community trauma and counselling support and, importantly, recovery plans and business continuity.

“And when cell phones fail, as they have often done in high traffic crises, SMS messaging has shown to still get through.”

From The Guardian: The father of lateral thinking tells Angela Balakrishnan why, 40 years on, his theories are as relevant as ever …

For Edward de Bono, the man who 40 years ago coined the phrase “lateral thinking”, the ability to think is the most important human skill, but one he feels is often neglected.

“What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.”

This is where de Bono believes he has changed things. Born in Malta into a family who had been doctors for seven generations, he gained a medical degree from the Royal University of Malta. But then, with a Rhodes scholarship, he found himself at Oxford, where he gained a degree in psychology and physiology and a DPhil in medicine. It was during this time, in the 1960s, that he realised his studies could be applied to the mind.”I was looking at the glands, kidneys, circulation and respiration and the idea of self-organising systems,” he says. “I realised that the same principles could be adapted to the neuron brain, which is when I wrote The Mechanism of the Mind.”

His principles were explored in a computer-generated experiment, which found that if the brain worked in the way De Bono said it did, then routine was not good for creativity. “For the first time in history, thinking was based on what was happening in the human brain and not the words of philosophers.”

He says that, with the help of more lateral thinking, many issues that dominate the political agenda could move beyond stalemate. “Look at Iraq. If the US said they were going to leave on a certain date, then for every week without any killings, the date would move forward, and for every week with a killing, the later and later the date would be delayed. This way those who killed would not be seen as heroes but those keeping the Americans in the country.”

It may not be the most conventional approach to international relations but it is, in de Bono’s words, a case of “thinking outside the box”.

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas, but there are several steps. The first step is imagination, the capacity that we all have to see something in the mind’s eye. Creativity is then using that imagination to solve problems — call it applied imagination. Then innovation is putting that creativity into practice as applied creativity.

There are several common misconceptions about creativity. The first is that people think that only SOME are creative. yet It’s in the nature of human beings that we ARE creative.

The second misconception is that creativity is about design and marketing. What the TED conference shows is that creativity is central to the practice of science and business and more. Creative initiatives should help you find what you are passionate about.

The third misconception is that you can’t do anything about it. Yes, you CAN cultivate creativity.”

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Special Treat: Stop everything! Sit back, take a deep breath, relax for 15 minutes and enjoy one of the world’s best speakers on Creativity & Innovation–Sir Ken Robinson–who will entertain and inspire you and make your day.