The 100 lessons of English Thinking are designed to give Members two things: knowledge and virtuosity.

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1. Knowledge

English Thinkers need to know about the history and the three dominant methods of English Thinking:

1. Greek Logic,

2. The Scientific Method, and

3. Cognitive Science.

First, they learn how logic and judgmental thinking and the ideas of the Greek Thinkers–Plato, Socrates and Aristotle–were taken up by the European church through Thomas Aquinas. How these ideas became the cognitive operating system of European thinking and were then spread virally around the world by Christian missionaries and throughout countries like America and Australia 200 to 300 years ago. How, even today, children in these countries are still taught Right/Wrong, Yes/No thinking. And, Western parliaments, legal systems, the media and religious institutions still use pre-Enlightenment dialectic thinking to prosecute their cases and take their decisions.

• ‘The Tree of Life’ from Charles Darwin’s personal notebook •

Second, the great escape from these ideas led to the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolutionary thinking and the Scientific Method–the combined cognitive engine behind the great march of Western science and technology. These methods rely on the value of hypothetical research, repetitive experimentation, measurement and observation and a strategic appreciation of the role of surprise and mistakes. This kind of thinking employs quite different but complementary methods and values to Christian Logic or judgmental thinking. These methods were introduced and spread throughout Western society through universities and scientific journals and the rapid growth of the commercial publishing industry.

Third, since WWII thinkers like Alan Turing empowered the invention of cognitive machines, machines that think, there has been an unprecedented tsunami of interest in computing, networking and the accelerating developments of  cognitive science.

This has led to much faster and more powerful models of thinking and innovation and the more recent developments of software for the brain in countries like America and Australia.

These methods are being adopted by both human and artificial intelligences. They have now spread rapidly through the big global corporations like IBM, Apple and GE via their enterprise training departments. These methods have infected the world wide web and in the last few decades have become a permanent part of Western education systems from primary schools to tertiary institutions.

The 100 lessons of English Thinking simply and clearly show and tell Members how to understand these three dominant methods and how to apply them. They also contrast them with the methods of Confucian Thinking so as to make comparisons and to better understand the differences.

2. Virtuosity

Knowledge without skills is pointless when it comes to English Thinking. So, for 16 weeks Members are given daily opportunities through PRR (practise, repetition, rehearsal) over the course of these 100 lessons to transfer these skills into their own personal and daily life.

The unique goal of this program is to ensure that Members become SKILLED in the daily use of English Thinking.

BOOK: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams.

Although they are often labeled “quiet,” it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society — from van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.

Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so.

Taking the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie’s birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical megachurch, Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects.

She talks to Asian-American students who feel alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. She questions the dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked. And she draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to reveal the surprising differences between extroverts and introverts.

Perhaps most inspiring, she introduces us to successful introverts — from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Finally, she offers invaluable advice on everything from how to better negotiate differences in introvert-extrovert relationships to how to empower an introverted child to when it makes sense to be a “pretend extrovert.”

This extraordinary book has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how introverts see themselves.

Drew Berry is a biomedical animator whose scientifically accurate and aesthetically rich visualisations reveal the microscopic world inside our bodies to a wide range of audiences. His animations have exhibited at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Royal Institute of Great Britain and the University of Geneva. In 2010 he received a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Award”.

The Wikipedia article says:

Origin

During the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church a  Devil’s advocate was a canon lawyer appointed by Church authorities to argue against the canonization of the candidate. It was their job to take a skeptical view of the candidate’s character, to look for holes in the evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were fraudulent, etc.

I wish I were the devil’s advocate in the case of the canonisation of John Paul II. The due diligence which has been put forward to verify such a cause is so flawed and so antilegal that it would be a doddle to argue the case against it. The case FOR argues there is a causal link between the claimed cure of Parkinson’s disease and a pattern of thought  in the brain of the patient. The supposed evidence is that just because that thought process was focused on John Paul II that it was therefore enough to cure the body’s disease. Of course, if this could be proved in any real legal sense it would be enough to win a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Now, if the miraculous patient was also a Muslim, a Jew or an Atheist it would still require a balance of evidence to support the medical claim of a cure but at least there would be an honest and level playing field. But what do we find? Mirabile dictu – the patient was a Roman Catholic nun!! She’s on the payroll!! Helloo!!

No-one questions the righteous sincerity of the obedient sister’s own convictions but here we have such a glaring case of conflict of interests that it would never stand up in any real court of law. But, of course, Pope Benedict has his own canon law court where, apparently, anything goes.

Saints R Us

Benedict’s unseemly rush to canonise his mentor has drawn criticism from around the world. “What’s a saint worth these days?” you may well ask. John Paul II created a riot of saints with the same papal enthusiasm that his predecessor Leo X had shown for creating indulgences. JP2 notoriously created more saints than all all the popes in history! Now Benedict wants to add his master to the saintly crush.

Where’s a good pope like a John XXIII when you need him.

In the boardroom, innovation has become flavour of the month … again.

THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BECOME A THINKING INSTRUCTOR!

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SOT members who have completed all 79 lessons in the following two SOT training programs are qualified to apply for the TISOT Certificate and have their name registered on the Roll of Thinking Instructors:

1.  Beyond Critical Thinking – 47 Lessons

2. Advanced Leadership Training – 32 lessons.

The Thinking Instuctors training can be undertaken by anyone and is under the personal direction of Michael Hewitt-Gleeson.

Pro bono: There are no fees for this training. Application: If you wish to apply write to Michael by clicking here.

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The ‘Brilliant’ Model:

Why “Thinking Instructors”?

Michael originated the idea of training thinking instructors when he co-founded School of Thinking with Edward de Bono in 1979 in New York.

Edward was very keen on the ‘train-the-trainer’ model and described it as ‘brilliant‘. He wrote to Michael from Cambridge (where he was a Professor of Investigative Medicine) saying, “training instructors has much more motivation”. After much discussion and planning, they decided to combine Michael’s CAP Train-the-trainer 6 principles with Edward’s CoRT Thinking syllabus and they started the School of Thinking on November 17, 1979 in New York.

The first intake for Thinking Instructors (TISOT) graduated in March 1980 in New York. One of the original graduates was Eric Bienstock who became the first Chief Instructor SOT and is now Vice Principal of the school.

Who Can Be A Thinking Instructor? There are no special qualifications for being a Thinking Instructor other than a genuine interest in thinking and in teaching thinking. Many Thinking Instructors are school teachers, business people, sports professionals, parents and neighbours. There are four different types of Thinking Instructors:

Self: Practising the skills in one’s own life for personal advancement, cognitive skill and well-being.

Family: Teaching the skills to one’s family and friends and as a forum for family discussions to avoid conflict and deal with family crises.

Business: Sharing the skills with colleagues, workmates, associates and clients to solve business problems and explore potential commercial opportunities. Also to find ways to cut costs and increase revenues. To raise morale and communications through employee participation and involvement in decision-making.

School: Practising the skills in classrooms to accelerate learning and discussion skills and even, where possible, to teach THINKING as a separate curriculum subject.

- The above quote is from the  Learn-To-Think Coursebook and Instructor’s Manual co-authored by Edward de Bono and Michael Hewitt-Gleeson (Capra/New, Santa Barbara USA, 1982, ISBN 0-88496-199-0).

In 1982, Michael and Edward co-authored this book which became a cover story on all global editions of Readers Digest (at that time, the world’s highest-circulation magazine with 68 million readers) and SOT launched the biggest program in the world for teaching teachers-of-thinking.

The idea behind the School of Thinking’s ‘Thinking Instructor’ concept is threefold:

1. Thinking is a skill. It can be taught and learned like other skills.
2. The skills are designed to be simple, robust and effective. They are easy to teach and easy to learn.
3. Anyone who is interested can teach these skills to anyone who is interested in learning them.

As mentioned above, there are no special qualifications needed to learn SOT thinking skills and there are no special qualifications needed to pass on the skills as a Thinking Instructor. Having said that, SOT is also willing to list on our site those members who have completed the qualifying series of SOT training courses listed below and to issue them with the Thinking Instructor SOT (TISOT) Certificate.

•• Click to download a Sample Certificate

Certified Thinking Instructor – TISOT

SOT members who have completed all 79 lessons in the following two SOT training programs are qualified to apply for the TISOT Certificate:

1.  BCT: Beyond Critical Thinking – 47 Lessons
This training introduces the idea of software for your brain and the relationship between the brain as a necktop computer and the inadequacy of the existing software, Critical Thinking: the 2500 year-old Greek software known as logic, which is so fixated on our judgement of the past rather than our design of the future. Critical Thinking is also known as Black Hat Thinking. BCT training discusses PTV and other cognitive traps and trains the member in the SOT suite of brain software called SDNT cvs2bvs QRH PRR.
• To apply for the TISOT Certificate you must have a BCT Certificate as a result of having successfully completed the 47 lessons of BCT training.

2. L-MHG: Advanced Leadership Training – 32 lessons.
This training was my own personal view of leadership. My experience was partly derived from leadership training designed by the Australian military and adapted with other world class learnings I have received over the past 40 years. The two main strategies were The Pipeline and PTO-Peel The Orange.

In addition, this training now includes the new module Think Darwin! (10 lessons). The purpose of this training was to help you raise your darwinian intelligence, your ability to survive and grow in rapidly changing environments. Few people understand Darwin’s Theory (as it has evolved today) enough to be able to apply it on a daily basis to their lives yet it is one of the most powerful truths in science
• To apply for the TISOT Certificate you must have successfully completed the 32 lessons of Advanced Leadership Training.

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If you can find a way to multiply your thinking skills by ten and also multiply your selling skills by ten, then you will also find that you have–as a result–multiplied your leadership skills by ten. This can be done through training and coaching.

I look forward to personally working with you in this next class of Thinking Instructors and, on the successful completion of your TISOT training, to present you with your TISOT Certificate.

Best wishes,

Michael

“2012 is the Year of t4t“, proclaimed the Principal of the School of Thinking, Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, in Melbourne today. “For the next 12 months the School of Thinking will elevate the topic of t4t to its Official Theme of 2012 and propagate this meme around the world“.

On January 4 2011 the School of Thinking proclaimed 2011 to be The Year of Dual Consequences.

School of Thinking elevated the topic of DUAL CONSEQUENCES to its Official Theme for 2011 and continues to propagate this meme around the world in order to draw attention,  raise consciousness and create awareness of this topic.

“2011 is the Year of Dual Consequences“, proclaimed the Principal of the School of Thinking, Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, in Melbourne today. “For the next 12 months the School of Thinking will elevate the topic of DUAL CONSEQUENCES to its Official Theme of 2011 and propagate this meme around the world“.

Dr Hewitt-Gleeson says:

30 years ago I had an idea.

That idea was to start a Learn-To-Think Project to train 300,000 ‘teachers of thinking’ around the world. I shared this idea with Edward de Bono who suggested we call this project the Edward de Bono School of Thinking and so we kicked it off in New York on 17 November, 1979.

This project was so successful that it has led to the largest program in the world for the teaching of thinking skills. Even in China they are now training ‘teachers of thinking’ because they realise that China’s greatest asset may be the potential brainpower of ALL of its people.

SOT is also focusing attention on amazing India and for the next five years we will launch Learn-To-Think in Africa where our goal is to train 10,000 ‘teachers of thinking’ for the one billion people on that great mother of all continents. Then follows Brazil.

In business in the 80s, CEOs like Jack Welch of GE were among the first to see the value of innovation which could come from the brainpower of GE’s knowledge-workers. Since then, other companies like Apple and Google have followed suit and developed employee brainpower to deliver extra value to their shareholders.

Over the years, this Learn-To-Think Project has sourced, created, developed and published an evolving range of cognitive technologies including CoRT thinking skills, School of Thinking caps, universal brain software (cvs2bvs) and the XIO memeplex. In 1995 I put the School of Thinking (SOT) on the internet. This was the first school on the internet and it began to send out millions of pro bono thinking lessons by email to students in over 50 countries worldwide and it still does this every day. These technologies have reached over 100 million people worldwide since 1979.

But, here’s the thing.

Everything has consequences. Dual consequences. These consequences are always a mixed bag. There are good consequences and there are bad consequences. There are now consequences and there are later consequences. There are even unintended consequences and many of these consequences are very difficult to foresee. And, these consequences go on for a long time in time scales beyond normal human short term thinking.

It is so difficult to see these consequences that SOT has been teaching this as a thinking skill for 30 years yet most of our students find thinking about consequences to be one of the most difficult of all the skills that we teach. It’s hard for adults to see not only the immediate consequences of their actions or decisions but also the consequences that come after a year, five years or 25 years and beyond. It’s almost impossible for children to comprehend such consequences at all!

For example, after 30 years, what are the consequences of my Learn-To-Think idea? Now that there ARE hundreds of thousands of ‘teachers of thinking’ around the world who are teaching thinking every day to millions of children what are the consequences of this? I have given a lot of thought to this problem over the years and I still really don’t feel satisfied that we have the answer. We ask for and get feedback every day from our students online. Overwhelmingly the feedback is positive—better health, increased productivity, better relationships, business growth etc etc. We rarely get any negative feedback from individual students at all.

In business, companies like GE say that their business has flourished from using SOT brain software for their workers. In the early 80s I initiated a program for Jack Welch who was CEO of GE called GE XIO: How to multiply GE by ten. GE subsequently did multiply its business by ten from $35 billion to over $300 billion in the 80s and 90s.

Jack Welch has written in his books about how he has used these ideas as part of his business strategy. Apart from making everything from light bulbs to locomotives, GE also makes nuclear weapons. Is the growth of this part of their business a good consequence or a bad one? I once had discussions with their top scientists at a conference in Acapulco about this. Their view was that they think a lot about dual-use technology and that they have used their innovations to design weapons, so powerful, that the weapons can never be used. So far so good.

Another way to use XIO thinking is to divide by ten. Around the same time I was invited by the Pacem in Terris Society at the United Nations in Manhattan to give an address entitled Lateral Thinking for World Peace. My main point was that the US and Russia could start a reverse arms race: to divide their nuclear weapons by ten.

Since 2005 I’ve been mentoring a global NGO devoted to women’s health and family planning. They provide education programs and have quite heroically, in the face of much church and state opposition, established family planning clinics in 42 countries serving millions of women who do not have access to basic sexual and reproductive health services. I have been a patron for nearly ten years. These services also include safe abortion and post-abortion care. Recently they have used my XIO strategy to multiply these services by ten. What are the dual consequences of this? I have given this a lot of thought.

Here’s another example. 40 years ago the US Defence Department made a fateful decision in human evolution. It had no way of seeing the consequences of this decision. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency known as DARPA had an idea! They realised that it was possible to take a quantum leap in communications between their scientists and researchers based at different geographical locations. They networked (joined by telephone) four of their large computers and established DARPANET.

By 1972, this had grown to 37 networked computers and the name had evolved to ARPANET. One of the consequences, they now realised, was that the information in all these computers did not only reside in the computers but now also existed in a kind of cloud above the computers which became known as cyberspace. They also realised that this would provide a defence solution to information that was vulnerable to nuclear attack (remember the Cold War with Russia). So if San Francisco was blown off the map all the critical data in the great Livermore computers would still be safe in cyberspace etc etc.

In addition to exchanging boring (but no doubt important) defence information the users on ARPANET began sending each other personal messages by electronic mail – email – and that’s when the communications big bang really took off. By 1987, any educational facility—academic, military or government—could use the network in any country allied to the US. Scientists could now exchange scientific papers in milliseconds. By 1990 the ARPANET had become the INTERNET, the network of networks, with the subsequent arrival of ecommerce 24/7 and the World Wide Web.

By 2011, cyberspace as we know it has evolved into YouTube and Facebook with new developments arriving at the speed of light. This has all happened in 40 years and who could have foreseen these consequences?

At that same time, 40 years ago, when the US Defence scientists in Washington were giving birth to the internet something else quite unrelated happened in a place called Townsville in Australia. Mrs Assange was giving birth to a boy she named Julian.

And so, in retrospect, we can see how the mixed bag of consequences have unfolded. If DARPA could not have foreseen the internet it certainly could not have foreseen wikileaks. When defence people did see how the internet could be a protection of information against Russian bombs they didn’t see how it would be so vulnerable to leaks by hackers and internet activists.

In the early days of the internet (which, remember, was essentially a scientific and academic community) the culture of the net was information wants to be free. This was the mantra of the net and it was in this spirit that SOT, as an online school, remained pro bono and distributed its lessons for free around the world. It is an important academic principle and tradition that scientists and other academics should share their information with one another. Censorship is deeply anticultural to scientists. Seeking patents and the protection of IP for commercial purposes is de rigeur but censorship is another matter.

In 2011 the world has witnessed to big examples of dual consequences: The News of the World and wikileaks.

The NOTW story seems to be a case of what can happen when too much power lies in the hands of one man without any accountability to anyone.

But what about wikileaks? The debate is raging across the world. If information wants to be free then what role, if any, should censorship play in the discussion about wikileaks?  This is the Wikileaks Dilemma.

The WikiLeaks Dilemma is useful because it brings to the surface a very important discussion that the world needs to face up to today more than ever before. This lack of this discussion is a big elephant in the boardroom of every company. It’s an elephant in every science lab. It’s an elephant in every pulpit. It’s an elephant in every livingroom. It’s the Dual Consequences  Discussion.

DFQ: We are planning to offer advanced training in thinking about CONSEQUENCES. It will be a one month interactive course of daily lessons. Do you think there would be value in this training? What would you most like to see included in this training?

Please post your comments:

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The Details: How? Who? What? When? Why?

To jump on the publishers’ bandwagon of making new year predictions, as publisher of this blog, I’ll make my personal prediction here:

In 2012 we will all begin to witness the unprecedented and order-of-magnitude effect of the world wide economic catastrophe (2012wwec) that began with the GFC butterfly that flapped its wings in 2008.

or

2008GFC XIO = 2102wwec