Edward de Bono
Dr Edward de Bono:
“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong,
than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”
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Edward de Bono and I co-founded the School of Thinking (SOT) in New York in 1979. Since then Dr de Bono’s work in the teaching of thinking has become renowned worldwide.
My interest in his work began after I had returned from Vietnam ten years earlier in 1969. I was shown one of his first books by an RAAF Education Officer in the Officer’s Mess at Point Cook in Victoria.
I first met him in 1972 when he visited Melbourne on his first lecture tour. He was a Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge University. He told me that he had developed a syllabus for ‘teaching thinking as a skill’ and was trying to get it off the ground. I offered to help him and asked him to send me a copy.
As a result of my war experience and inspired by Edward’s CoRT Thinking syllabus I then became convinced that ‘teaching people to think for themselves’ was one of the most worthwhile things I could probably ever support and so I committed myself to the long term, ultimate mission of getting ‘thinking’ on the school curriculum.
I’ve done that for 30 years. I’ve used my wits, time and energy and financial resources to promote the cause. I still believe Edward de Bono’s work is farandaway the best work in the field although I found that some of the techniques, like CoRT Thinking, are often too complicated for general distribution.
I pioneered a much simpler concept for teaching thinking called “School of Thinking Caps” which I passed on to Edward in 1983. He developed the idea, published it as Six Thinking Hats and through 20 years of hard work has now successfully spread the concept around the world. It is used widely in business and in schools.
Many people ask me about the genesis of the Thinking Hat idea.
I think Edward’s greatest contribution is that written up in his most important book The Mechanism of Mind (1967) although he became most popularly known for his invention of the term lateral thinking which is now in the Oxford Dictionary.
When Dr de Bono, was Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge in England he was an expert in body systems. In The Mechanism of Mind which he wrote 35 years ago, Edward de Bono builds a model of how the brain, as an organ of the body, is very likely to operate as mind. This model shows how the brain system, by operating along the lines of other body systems like the liver system or lung system can produce a mind, a biological system to process information. By showing how the brain operates as a self-organising, patterning system de Bono saw the need to promote lateral thinking as a compensation mechanism for some of the limitations of the brain/mind patterning system.
Visit Edward de Bono’s Personal Website at: http://www.edwarddebono.com/
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:55 am
An enthusiast of deBono for more than 20 years now, I am still always in wonderment of the possibilities of these techniques as I reach an age where I can appreciate all of his goodies.
March 18th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
i would like to think better and be a better person
October 19th, 2006 at 2:23 am
Some of my most fulfilling teaching experiences were with the Learn - to- Think course which I learned from Michael and Alex Jane Noble. Best to you, Maralee