Strategy - Edward de Bono - Playing a six-hat trick

Liam White doffs his hats - all six of them - to Edward de Bono, lateral thinker and business guru.

[QQ]Edward de Bono, 'inventor' of lateral thinking, parallel thinking,ateral thinker and business guru. and arch-proponent of hat-wearing, is telling me perhaps the most improbable story I've ever heard.[QQ] Adjusting his characteristic thinker pose from one fist to the other, de Bono recalls some successes of his techniques in extreme situations - particularly one from a teacher in a very dangerous area of South Africa.[QQ] 'One day,' de Bono says, 'a 14-year-old boy comes in with an AK47 assault rifle, puts it to the teacher's head and says to her: "I'm going to blow your head off." She replies: "OK, let's do a PNI analysis - Positives, Negatives, Interesting points." And the kid went through it with her and said: "If that's what you're going to teach, I'll be in your class." He handed over the AK47, sat in the class, and now he's a third-year medical student.'[QQ] Before I can recover, de Bono starts recounting another story, concerning the teaching of another technique to 'totally illiterate miners who had never been to school in their lives'.[QQ] He says: 'The company used to have 210 major stoppages a month due to fighting between tribes - after teaching, that dropped to just four. And production's up and safety has improved.[QQ] 'Another miner wanted me to hear his story really badly. Eventually, we got his story translated, and discovered that whenever he went home to Lesotho, his wife used to beat him up. "Anyway," the miner had told de Bono, "I taught her how to think, and now she's stopped beating me up."'[QQ] I've come to interview Dr de Bono in his house - a charming old place off a little courtyard in London's Piccadilly. Passing though a reception to the leafy courtyard, there are numerous plaques on the wall to commemorate characters who have lived on the square, ranging from the poet Lord Byron to late 19th century prime minister and historical colossus, Gladstone.[QQ] The fact that the din from Piccadilly can only just be heard in the courtyard accentuates the feeling that you have suddenly passed into another world of unspeakable grandeur. Once inside, as befits a house formerly occupied by one of history's greatest prime ministers, the place even smells grand, like a museum.[QQ] As it's been a while since his TV show was last aired, I don't recognise de Bono at first. He has a somewhat tired air of effortless authority and worldliness. In his head, you get the idea that he's seen it all. When thinking about what to say, his chin becomes glued to one or other of his fists, indicating that this chap thinks an awful lot. He's very grand, too. His braces have little coats of arms on them.[QQ] One thing de Bono is really very tired of being associated with is the more touchy-feely creative thinking gurus. It's enough to send him off on a bit of a ramble, returning to trivia such as my questions when it suits him.[QQ] 'Some of the approaches to creativity have been to feel liberated, be inspirational, stand in the corner and take three deep breaths - all that lot is a bit weak,' he pronounces curtly. The thinker and author of more than 50 books is more concerned with what, fundamentally, the brain is good at. Interestingly, this includes how the brain differs from a computer.[QQ] 'The brain is a self-organising system which makes patterns - it does a little calculation, sees a pattern, a relationship, then acts on it. That's how it works.[QQ] 'For example, when I get up in the morning I've 11 pieces of clothing to put on. How many different ways are there of getting dressed with these 11 bits of clothing? Factorial 11 - a grand total of 39,960,800 different ways of getting dressed. And if you spent one minute on each way, you would have to live to be 76 years old and use your entire life figuring out how to get dressed.'[QQ] Just when you think de Bono will ramble on indefinitely, he comes sharply back to the point, usually adjusting his 'thinker' pose chin rest from one fist to the other.[QQ] 'So we should be immensely grateful that the brain is so excellent at forming patterns. The purpose of the brain is to adapt the organism to a stable environment. To learn in that environment, it has to establish patterns. And that's fine - that's what the brain was designed for, that's how it evolved,' he says.[QQ] 'But in a changing world, where we need change and creativity, we have to intervene because its natural mode is not that.'[QQ] So lateral thinking was the good doctor's first step. But he has added many other techniques, for instance, parallel thinking with six colour-coded hats for different types of thought (see box, below).[QQ] 'The idea is that instead of argument, where each side takes a judgmental position opposing the other, parallel thinking is used. This means that at each moment, everyone is thinking in the same way, the same direction, the same mode.'[QQ] This saves a lot of pointless arguing, apparently. He adds: 'It's very widely used by top executives at Siemens, IBM, NASA.'[QQ] In fact, de Bono seems to have quite a chummy relationship with Big Blue - and, for that matter, with Harvard Business School, the alma mater of IBM's boss Lou Gerstner. The Harvard Business Review has had plenty of nice things to say about his work, particularly the hats.[QQ] Does he know Mr Gerstner?[QQ] 'No. Well, over the years I've done many, many things with them ... I don't know what's changed,' de Bono says, casually.[QQ] 'Anyway, essentially, parallel thinking is now widely used. ABB (a multinational electrical engineering firm) used to spend 20 days a year on its multinational project team. Now it spends just two days.[QQ] 'IBM is getting one of its top labs to implement it, and has reduced leading times by one quarter.[QQ] 'StatOil had a problem with an oil rig that was costing it $100,000 a day for weeks. It reckons it has since saved $10,000,000.'[QQ] Without pausing for breath, de Bono immediately starts to break out in several new directions.[QQ] 'So, parallel thinking is additional software to the argument system. A key point to my work is that I don't believe existing thinking is bad, any more than I think the front left-hand wheel of a motor car is bad. It is excellent. But it is inadequate.[QQ] 'I don't have to say it's bad to say you need some additional software,' he explains.[QQ] Software projects come to mind where the specification is met perfectly, but turns out to be completely inadequate, since all the business requirements never matched the spec. De Bono swaps elbows again, indicating a change of tack.[QQ] 'But we need much more constructive idioms, and Western culture has never really developed idioms of constructive thinking. Idioms of judgement - yes. These are of high value, like a doctor making a judgement on the condition of a patient. Once you identify the situation, you apply the standard solution. There's nothing wrong with that, it's an extremely effective mode of behaviour.[QQ] 'So we are way behind using the potential provided by technology, because we can't think more constructively. I was at a conference last September on education and high technology, and the technology was wonderful. But it's the value concepts which are (grouped around) design that technology will have no problem in applying.[QQ] 'So, the emphasis is shifting from just more and more information, more and more technology, to the value concepts. And that needs creativity.'[QQ] De Bono is in full flow now, but his chin remains firmly glued to his fist.[QQ] 'At another conference with Nathan Mhyrvold, head of technology at Microsoft, we went out to lunch to discuss the future and stuff like that. Now, what I said at the conference is that the Information Age, as such, is over - meaning that information used to be (the bottom line), and the more we got, the better our decisions, the better our planning.[QQ] 'But it is no longer (the case) - we can get all the information we want. It is thinking, value creation, design, which is the edge. An example I often use with people in the US is the search engine. On the Internet, there are four million references to my work. Since there's only 10 million references to sex, that's not bad.' De Bono chuckles to himself.[QQ] 'Anyway, if you spent one minute on each, and you worked a normal working day, it would take you 30 years just to look at them all. A lot of people are realising that the key thing in the future is going to be the design of value-delivered ideas.'[QQ] This is the thrust of de Bono's upcoming book, Simplicity, he explains, adjusting his thinking position again.[QQ] 'Simplicity is about information overload and the coming revolution's role in solving this - particularly in design.[QQ] 'We now know, through research conducted at Harvard, that 90% of the brain's areas of thinking are of perception - areas of logic are very few and limited.[QQ] 'Areas of perception deal with things like how broadly do we look, how far into the distance do we see, what alternatives do we perceive? These are all perceptual methods. Logic will only work after perception has provided the mind with inputs. The processing, we've done damn all about.[QQ] 'All of our mathematics, statistics and logic deal with processing, not perception. Consequently, our use of them has been very limited.[QQ] 'Perception is what they teach you in schools. Nowadays, you have kids in schools who know all the names of Henry VIII's wives, but don't know how the corner shop works.[QQ] 'Worldwide there's a growing sense that we need more constructive thinking. So although people know me for lateral thinking, actually a lot of the other stuff - like the six hats and parallel thinking - have had much more penetration.[QQ] 'In Venezuela, by law, every school child has to spend two hours a week on my work. In Singapore they're putting it in all the schools; in Malaysia they've had it in their schools for 10 years. Australia, New Zealand and the US also ... with the six hats. England's far behind, far behind in using these thinking tools, which I call human software.'[QQ] On a historical thread, de Bono then explains how the West has really made little progress in this area, 'essentially, since the gang of three - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. And their point was judgement'.[QQ] 'The effect of the Greek culture on education has been disastrous. They hated work - hated it. They considered it a disgrace that mathematics could be applied to anything useful. The whole of Athenian civilisation never produced a single invention,' he claims.[QQ] 'It was a culture which was very fond of itself. They spent most of their time giving clever speeches, attacking each other - very malicious, full of vengeance. And it was OK if you were a landowner, you could come and sit and talk, but everyone else was despised. The whole culture, and partly English culture too, has the attitude that business is for the serfs, not us. It's quite incredible.'[QQ] De Bono smiles with the satisfaction of someone who has finally made their elusive point.[QQ] 'So we need a whole new way of thinking: design thinking, creative thinking, practical thinking - all these areas which our normal habits of judgement thinking do not sufficiently cover.'[QQ] A good example of the need for practical thinking can be seen as I struggle to replace the cassette in my new tape recorder. 'You've got a lovely example in that tape,' de Bono says. 'It should be so obvious which way to put the tape in - it should be half black, half yellow, and you just put it in to match. But all you've got is a tiny arrow.'[QQ] He smiles again.[QQ] 'The people who write instruction books know the system. And it doesn't occur to them that a user might not know the system.'[QQ] These small observations tend to bear out de Bono's points rather well.[QQ] Ultimately, you do have to acknowledge that a good deal of what he says makes sense.[QQ] Especially if you have found yourself struggling with an ill-thought-out manual. Some people just aren't thinking.[QQ] [QQ] LANGUAGE - A BARRIER TO PROGRESS?[QQ] 'Language is by far the biggest barrier to human progress,' de Bono says.[QQ] 'There's many problems with it because it forces you to look at the world in a certain way. So I've created a new language, which allows you to come up with new concepts and escape from old ones. It's just a question of how and when to launch it. If I just wrote a book, it'll just sit on the bookshelf. It's a matter of finding a really killer application for it.' De Bono could do worse than look up Nathan Mhyrvold, Microsoft's head of technology, again, and perhaps try it out on some large Windows NT implementations. De Bono adjusts his thinking fist again and says he'll consider it.[QQ] [QQ] WHY SIX HATS ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN ONE[QQ] 'Basically, the hats are perceptual pegs,' explains de Bono. 'We can say we're now in this mode, now in that mode, now the underlying values are these.'[QQ] According to de Bono, the key is that everyone takes turns looking at the various different aspects of the problem, so ownership between individuals and their initial point of view is broken down.[QQ] 'There is evidence that the brain chemicals, the balance of neurotransmitters, is different when you're being cautious than when you're being greedy or creative. For instance, if an antelope grazing in Africa hears a noise in the grass, immediately all the antelope's neurotransmitters concerned with danger are pre-activated.[QQ] 'So, as soon as the lion appears, there's a predisposition to recognise it. And if it had to start from a zero baseline every time, there would be no antelopes left. So this pre-sensitising is a very necessary thing.[QQ] 'However, you can't have five different chemicals in the brain saying different things at the same time - which is the physiological reason for the hats method of thinking. Instead of having to respond to what the last person just said, the person is looking forward. And, of course, the ego's taken out of it.'[QQ] According to de Bono, this helps remove all the adversarial elements to the exercises - people are focused on a common goal with each task, and therefore forced to work together. Of course, everyone has their own point of view, which they get to express at the appropriate point. But the clever bit comes up when those with entrenched or very strong points of view come to look at the situation from the opposite angle.[QQ] 'For instance, if you don't like an idea, then you're probably only going to think of things to support your case. However, in the black hat, you're encouraged to be as critical, as risk-sensitive, as possible. Whereas in the yellow hat you're now expected to look for value.[QQ] 'If everyone around you is seeing value - yellow hat - and you're still thinking critically with the black hat, you're suddenly seen to be stupid. Instead of ego being the way of showing off, performance-thinking is now the way of showing off.[QQ] 'So under the yellow hat you say there's this value and that value. If you don't like an idea, fair enough. But at least you've seen the values.[QQ] It's not: "I'm attacking your idea, you've got to find the values - I don't have to find the values." Which is the normal way. It's like in law courts - if we're opposite sides, and I think of something which helps your case, there's no way I'm going to say it. But here you have to.'