Edward de Bono Keynote transcript 2006

Introduction - Heather Reid



Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our final keynote lecture of SETT 2006, the Scottish Learning Festival.  It’s been a very busy two days.  I’m sure it will come as no surprise to learn that this has been the biggest SETT conference ever, with the most delegates, the most seminars, most spotlight sessions and most keynote lectures.  The exhibition has been truly amazing, with the largest display of educational products and resources available here in Scotland.  I’m sure, like me, many of you will have enjoyed some excellent presentations by young people in the education village.  The weather has been a little mixed, but the sun is now shining.  Our visitors from overseas and south of the border probably haven’t seen Glasgow at its sunniest best, and it wasn’t even Scotland’s fault.  It’s ex-hurricane Gordon.  It all started on the other side of the Atlantic, so unfair.  But before I introduce this afternoon’s speaker, can I say that SETT 2007 is already in the planning, so Learning and Teaching Scotland would appreciate any feedback or suggestions you may have for next year’s conference, please use the web address and all the usual contact details.  Can I also ask that everyone ensures their mobile phone has been switched off?  Can I also point out the fire exits within the auditorium, they’re at the side and also at the back.  And to be honest, our final speaker this afternoon really doesn’t need any introduction, although he did suggest to me that I could possibly say that he was as strong as Arnold Schwarzenegger, as attractive as Brad Pitt and as intelligent as Albert Einstein.  Now, undoubtedly, all three of those facts are true, but one thing’s for sure; he’s attracted the largest audience we’ve ever had here at SETT.  Doctor Edward De Bono is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading thinkers on creative learning and conceptual thinking.  He’s written over sixty books, was the originator of the famous term “lateral thinking” and also as many of you in the audience will know, invented the popular six thinking hats concept.  His influence is widely felt in the business world and he’s also made many television programmes including De Bono’s Thinking Course, for the BBC.  Today, he’s here to tell us more about the powerful effects of teaching thinking explicitly as a skill.  So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Doctor Edward De Bono.

Presentation

[pages rustling] Just testing my microphone’s on.  Good afternoon, blonds, ladies and gentlemen. [laughter]  Now, you may wonder why I used that particular address and I’ll explain it later.  It’s very relevant to what I’m going to be saying.  I’m just fixing my pens.
 
For two thousand four hundred years, we’ve done virtually nothing about human thinking.  Why two thousand four hundred years?  Because two thousand four hundred years ago, we had the GG3.  Who were the GG3?  The Greek gang of three.  And who were the Greek gang of three?  Well, there was Socrates, and from Socrates came the habit of arguments.  Socrates was very interested in dialectic and argument.  Then there was Plato.  Plato was strongly influenced by the mathematician Pythagoras and Plato believed there was ultimate truth everywhere.  There is considerable danger in that, as we’ll see later.  As a matter of interest, Plato did not believe in democracy, he thought it a very silly system, particularly since the Athenian democracy was heavily taxing his family, which was one of the rich landowning families in Athens.  Then there was Aristotle.  Aristotle introduced our type of logic, essentially what you might call box logic. For example, Aristotle believed that men had more teeth in their mouth than did women, and although he was married twice, he never asked either of his wives to open their mouth to count their teeth. [laughter]  He didn’t need to because he knew. [laughter] Because apparently with horses, the stallion has more teeth than the mare, so he established a general principle that the male of the species has more teeth than the female, therefore he had more teeth than his wives and although he was married twice, he never asked either of his wives to open their mouth and count their teeth, and they probably had bad breath anyway.  So, what Plato did, he said from the past experience we will create categories, classifications, principles, boxes of one sort or another.  When something came along we judge; is it in the box?  Is it not in the box?  It cannot be halfway, it cannot be anywhere else, and that is the basis of our logic. It’s not unlike a doctor in a clinic and a child is brought in with a rash and the doctor has to figure out what is this.  The doctor thinks of some possibilities, it could be sunburn, it could be food allergy, it could be measles.  The doctor examines the child, takes the history, does some tests and when the doctor has judged, diagnosed, that is it measles, the doctor knows the course of the illness, the possible complications and of course, the treatment.  And that is the standard model for most of our thinking.  It is the standard model for one hundred percent of education and ninety percent of daily thinking.  And what it amounts to is we have a situation, we analyse it, we identify a standard element and then we provide the standard answer.  Now, that thinking is excellent.  It is so excellent that we have never thought of any need to change or improve it.  It is based very largely on recognition and judgement.  It is excellent in the same way that the rear left wheel of a motor car is excellent, nothing wrong with it at all, it’s excellent.  But if you believe that that was all you needed in a motor car then there’s something wrong with your belief, not with the rear left wheel.  So our existing thinking systems are excellent, but they’re not enough.  We need design.  Judgement is all about the past, all about what is.  We have never sufficiently developed the thinking concerned with what can be; what can be.  To be sure, individuals have done it, but it has never been part of our educational mix.  We have been very concerned with truth but not enough concerned with possibility.  And that’s why in my greeting at the beginning, there are four possible ways of interpreting that greeting.  I shan’t explain them because you are fully able to see them.  Possibility very, very important.

Two thousand years ago, China was way ahead of the West in science and technology.  They had gunpowder, rockets and so on.  Had China continued at the same rate of progress, today China would easily be the dominant power in the world, scientifically, technically, militarily, economically.  What happened?  What went wrong?  What went wrong was the scholars, who were very strong in Chinese culture, the scholars started to believe that you can move from certainty to certainty to certainty.  And as a result of that belief, they never developed the possibility system.  They never developed hypothesis, speculation, imagination and without that you cannot make progress.  So progress came to a dead end.  Interestingly at the moment, the Chinese government is carrying out a pilot project with my work in schools in China, and if that succeeds, they’re considering putting it into four million schools in China.  Now the same sort of thing is beginning to happen in the rest of the world today because of the excellence of our computers, people are starting to believe that all you need to do is collect information on your computer, analyse it, that will set your strategy and make your decisions.  It’s a very dangerous belief.  That leads to stagnation, because you need creative thinking to interpret the data in different ways, design thinking to put that data together with other data to deliver value.  The notion that information is enough is a very stagnating idea.  Information is essential and there is no substitute for information, but information by itself is not enough, not enough.

Generally, science and so on is all about understanding what is, not designing what can be.  My interest has been to design software for human thinking, not just saying “this is so, this is so” and so on, and I’ll tell you of a very interesting piece of research, which someone told me about quite recently and this was the US Air Force top level research.  And they wanted to research the best way of putting together a team, so they put together teams on two bases; one was on personality tests, things like Myers-Briggs and other tests and the other way they put together teams was very simply on preference for one of the six thinking hats; that’s all, preference, not saying they were any good at it, just which do you prefer; red, white and so on.  What happened?  On every single score the hat preference teams beat the personality teams, on every single score.  Whereas the personality teams say “you’re this, you’re this, you’re this”, this; “which do you prefer?”  That’s all.  Probably what happened is something called cognitive dissonance that once you’ve made a decision you live up your decision, so they started using those modes of thinking in their team meetings.  It’s very interesting research.

So one of the things which in general we don’t perhaps pay enough attention to in education is a word I invented, called [no sound from 00.13.00 to 00.13.03] literacy, we have literacy and numeracy, but not operacy.  Operacy is the skills of doing, not just knowing, absorbing knowledge, doing, making things happen, and whenever a youngster leaves school, he or she is going to have to use operacy for the rest of his or her life.  For some years I was president of Young Enterprise Europe.  Young Enterprise Europe, we had a million and a half youngsters in Europe, Russia and Israel, for some reason, who set up little businesses while at school, mini businesses while at school, had to set them up, design them, raise funds, get products, sell them.  One year I remember, they had a competition each year and that year the competition was won by a team of twelve years olds in the Republic of Ireland, and they designed a one-stop wedding site on the internet.  So you could go to that site and order your hall, your music, your drinks, everything except the bride, it was very successful. [laughter] Operacy, the skills of doing.
 
Now what are the results of teaching thinking explicitly and directly as a subject?  Well, I’ll just go through some of them.  The AdKey organisation, I’ll put up their information later, show that teaching thinking explicitly as a skill improved performance in every other subject by between thirty percent and a hundred percent, every other subject, just teaching thinking directly.  In London, there’s a place called the Hungerford Guidance Centre, which takes youngsters who are too violent to be taught in ordinary schools.  They’ve stabbed a teacher or set the school on fire, they all get sent to the Hungerford Guidance Centre.  Many years ago, the principal, David Lane, started teaching my thinking to these very violent youngsters.  He’s now done a twenty year follow-up and showed the level of actual criminal conviction for those taught thinking is less than one tenth, compared to those not taught thinking, so it’s a ninety percent reduction in criminality.  Or, they were smart enough to avoid being caught. [laughter]  Another example; unemployed youngsters on the government New Deal programme for unemployed youngsters, the [unclear region] group in England were teaching them thinking for just five hours in all, in all.  Employment increased five hundred percent, five hundred percent increase in employment and a year later, ninety-six percent were still in employment.  In Argentina, there’s one school who uses my work thoroughly.  They did so well in the national exams, so much better than any other school, that they were investigated for cheating. [laughter]  In Australia, John Edwards did some work in a school and this school normally got twenty-six percent in the top level of mathematics.  After teaching thinking, that improved to fifty percent; just teaching thinking, not extra maths.  The same fellow, John Edwards, was teaching science and he decided instead of teaching so much science, he would reduce the amount of science taught and teach some thinking as well.  In the science exams, those youngsters who were taught thinking, even though they’d been taught less science, did much better than those just taught science.

Then there’s another interesting aspect, which is to do with self-esteem or confidence.  Dyxlexic youngsters who have lost confidence, lost self-esteem, because they can’t manage so much on the reading and writing, teaching thinking increased their self-esteem dramatically.  As one example, I’ll give you an example; a fellow came over to see me from Dublin.  He said at school he was so dyslexic the teacher put him at the back of the room and said “you’re going to spend your life digging ditches because you’re not going to useful for anything else”.  According to him, he read one of my books and is now a very successful businessman.  Again, self-esteem among youngsters.  Another story from Ireland, there’s a competition among schools, it’s to do with thinking and problem-solving.  There’s one school which uses my work and they were so successful they won this competition three times and finally the organisers asked them not to enter the competition because other schools wanted the chance to win.  In Singapore, a person who teaches my work quite a lot showed that when he asked seven year olds to write on a subject, they would write four lines.  After teaching them the six thinking hats, they wrote forty lines.  They had a framework for thinking.  In the business world, I’ll give you an example; MBC in Canada did a very careful costing, and they reckoned the first year they used the six hats saved them twenty million dollars.  Stat Oil in Norway had a problem with an oil rig, which was costing them a hundred thousand dollars every day until they solved it.  They’d been thinking about it for three weeks, hadn’t got anywhere, then one of my trainers, [unclear name] introduced the six hats.  In twelve minutes, they had a solution, which saved them ten million dollars.  The change in the thinking from argument to parallel thinking is huge.  ABB in Finland used to spend thirty days on their multi-national project discussions.  They’re using parallel thinking and they now do it in two days.  IBM are the top research laboratory in South Carolina, have reduced meeting times to one quarter of what they were, just using different thinking, parallel thinking.

Now, let’s look at some of these specifics.  One of the habits which we have used for two thousand four hundred years is argument.  In argument, A says it’s this, B says it’s that, you argue, and one or other believes it has won the argument.  It’s an extremely crude, primitive, inefficient method of exploring a subject.  Why?  A number of reasons:  imagine a court of law and that is your prosecuting lawyer and that’s your defence lawyer.  Imagine that your prosecuting lawyer thinks of some point which would help the defence case.  Is the prosecuting lawyer going to mention it?  Certainly not.  If the defence lawyer thinks of a point which would help the prosecution case, is the defence lawyer going to mention it?  Certainly not.  You’re not exploring the subject, you’re making a case.  Then again, in argument, if you’re arguing is it A or B, there’s no effort to design C, D or E as possible outcomes.  Then again, in argument, if there’s five percent wrong in what the other party says, you spend all your time on the five percent not on the ninety-five percent on which you agree.  Then there’s the emotions, win, lose, attack, defence, being superior and so on.  Then there’s another aspect, which is quite interesting.  There’s a fellow who painted his car in rather an unusual way.  This is an overhead view of his car.  He painted his car half black and half white.  And when his friend said to him “why did you paint your car in that unusual way?”, he said, “because it’s such fun.  Whenever I have an accident, it’s such fun to hear the witnesses in court contradict each other”. [laugh]  Then one witness says a black car came round the corner and knocked the cyclist over and the other witness, also under oath says “no, no, it was a white car”, and that’s typical of many arguments, where each side is completely right but looking at a different part of the situation.  Ideally, what we would like is some way in which this person could go round and look at it from there and this person could see it from there.  Well, we can do that, and that is what is called parallel thinking.  Imagine we have an overhead view of a building and there’s four people, each facing one side of the building and through a mobile phone, each person is insisting that what he or she sees is the best view of the building.  Parallel thinking means everyone goes round here, what do we all see from here?  Then everyone goes round there, then round there and then round there, so at any moment, instead of A arguing with B, which is the normal argument, A and B are looking and thinking in the same direction, but the directions change.  The directions change, so we cover the whole subject.  In order to symbolise the directions, we need some sort of symbol, and we use the symbol of the hat, so as you sit thinking, there are six imaginary hats you put on or take off.  Each indicates a mode of thinking.  What is very important is when the method is being used, everyone is wearing the same hat, so if the green hat is in use, everyone is wearing the green hat.  That is extremely important.  That is what is meant by parallel thinking.  It’s now very widely used.  I’ll just give you an example of how widely used; each year I have a meeting of Nobel prize economists and at the end of last year in December, one of them said, he said “last week I was in Washington at the top economics meeting in the United States”, he said, “they were using your six hats”.  The top economic meeting in the United States.  Later, this year, I was in Aukland, New Zealand, and a woman came up to me and said “I was teaching your six hats in the highlands of Papua, New Guinea”.  Now, the highlands of Papua, New Guinea are about the most primitive place on earth, they’re almost Stone Age culture.  She said she went back a month later and they said “that’s changed our lives”, so from the top economists in Washington to Stone Age Papua, New Guinea, using the same framework.  Why?  Because it’s very powerful.  It reduces the time of meetings to one quarter, or even one tenth.  JP Morgan in Europe reckoned it reduced the time of the meetings to one tenth, must better at designing outcomes, much better at exploratory thinking and much better at constructive thinking.  There’s a colleague of mine in American who was doing some work with juries in court, and they reached … normally they disagreed and so on.  Using the six hats, they reached unanimous decisions very quickly, so much so that the law has now been changed and the judge can recommend that the jury be trained in thinking.  That’s the first change in the jury system for a thousand years.  What’s the problem?

We’re having a problem with the focus.  The focus on the projector …

The focus, oh gosh, yes, I’m sorry about that. [slight pause] It should be auto-focus. [long pause]  Maybe there’s something on the …

Yeah, yeah, that’s it coming back.  There we go.

Applause.

Okay.  Okay.  So, to repeat that, the colleague of mine was doing some work with the juries and found using the six hats, they reached unanimous decisions very quickly, the judges were so impressed that they’ve changed the law and the judge can now ask or recommend that the jury be trained in six hats thinking, parallel thinking.

Now, what are the hats?  I’ll go through them very, very quickly.  We have the white hat.  White hat is information.  What information do we have?  What do we need?  What is missing?  What questions do we want to ask?  How are we going to get the information that we need?  The whole focus is on information; what do we have, what do we need, how are we going to get it.

Then we have the red hat.  Red hat is full permission to express your emotions, your feelings, your intuition, without any need to justify them.  Before the first elections in South Africa, they asked me to teach the, the method to all heads of all the peace committees in all the towns and townships.  They would always start with a red hat.  Let people express their feelings, their emotions and once they’d expressed that, they saw no need to continue expressing them for the rest of the meeting.

Then we have the black hat.  Black hat is our normal, critical thinking.  Critical, caution, this won’t work, this doesn’t fit our resources, doesn’t fit our ethics and so on.
 
Then we have the yellow hat.  The yellow hat is for the positive; what are the benefits and values?  On the whole, we do not develop value sensitivity enough.  It’s rare in education to spend any time on value sensitivity.  On critical sensitivity, yes; that’s wrong, that’s not the way we do it, and so on.  Value sensitivity is the ability and willingness to look for values; very important in creativity.  I’ve sat in on many creative meetings where people have indeed generated very good ideas but been unable to see the value in their own idea because they’ve never developed value sensitivity; very important, value sensitivity.

Then we have the green hat and under the green hat people make an effort to be creative, to look for new ideas, alternatives, possibilities, very key, modifications of an idea and the tools of lateral thinking.  Under the green hat, you either make an effort to be creative or you keep quiet.  People don’t like keeping quiet; they make an effort and often surprise themselves by being creative.

Then the blue hat is the organising hat.  You can think of blue as sky and overview.  The blue hat decides what is the focus, what are we thinking about, what do we want to achieve, what sequence of hats do we use on this occasion, and so on.
 
The whole process is very simple.  It’s used by four year olds in school, it’s used by Nobel prize laureates and so on in top businesses.  It’s a very simple framework.  If you want to show off, you can show off, but not by proving someone else wrong, as in argument, but by performing better under each hat.  So under the green hat you think of more ideas.  Under the black hat you think of more caution points and so on.  As I say, very widely used.  There are times when argument might be more appropriate, yes, certainly, but as a way of exploring a subject, argument is not a good way of thinking about it.
 
Now we’re going to move to another aspect of thinking, which is perception; very, very important.  David Firkins, a friend of mine at Harvard did some research and showed that ninety percent of the errors of thinking were errors of perception; errors of logic are very small.  Logic plays a very small part in thinking.  Perception a key part and the way you look at a situation will determine your thinking and behaviour.  It’s even worse than that; there is a famous mathematical equation, Godel’s equation, which says that from within a system you can never logically prove the starting points.  The starting points are arbitrary perceptions, arbitrary values, so it doesn’t matter how logical you are, you are limited by your perceptions and your values.  I’ll give you a little story about perception.  It comes from Australia and there’s a little boy called Johnny, who’s five years old and his friends want to tease him, so they offer him a choice of two coins.  In Australia, the one dollar coin is rather big; the two dollar coin is small.  So they say to Johnny, “which of these do you want?  You can take and keep whichever one you want”.  Johnny, being young, reckons the bigger one is better, takes the bigger one.  His friends laugh and giggle and say “isn’t Johnny stupid?”  Whenever they want to make a fool of him, they offer him the coins, he always takes the bigger one and never seems to learn.  One day there’s an adult who sees this, calls Johnny over and says “Johnny, believe me when I tell you that the smaller coin is actually worth twice as much as the bigger coin, even though it is smaller”.  Johnny listens very politely and says “yes, of course”, he said “I know that.  But how many times would they have offered it to me if I’d taken the two dollars the first time?” [laughter]  In other words, perception.  If you saw it as a once only situation, take the two dollars; if you knew your friends, and how they’d like to go on teasing you, you take the one dollar.  Perception; a very key part of thinking.  And yet it’s something about which we’ve done very little.  So in the CORT programme, which is familiar to some of you, CORT stands for COgnitive Research Trust, we create some tools for perception.  In space we have directions; north, south, east and west and you can say “I’m going to look north, I’m going to look south”, some directions for attention in perception.  For example, we have a tool called CNS, CNS means looking at the consequence and sequel.  So one time in Canada there’s a special club of top women executives in business throughout Canada; two hundred and fifty and I said to them “wouldn’t it be a good idea if women were paid more than men for doing the same job?”  eighty-six percent said “yes, about time too.  Women have more responsibilities”, and so on.  I said “okay, now let’s do a CNS.  For three minutes, just look at immediate consequence, short term, long term”.  They did that, eighty-six percent dropped to fifteen percent.  Now every one of those people, if you’d said to her “do you think of consequence?”, would have said “of course.  I’m a senior executive, of course I think of consequence”.  But doing it deliberately and formally, a huge difference.  I’ll give you another example.  This was a group of schoolboys in Australia.  This was using the PMI.  PMI means looking at the plus directions, the minus and the interesting directions.  So I said “wouldn’t it be a good idea if youngsters were paid for going to school?”  Thirty out of thirty said “that’s wonderful, that’s a good idea.  We could buy sweets, comics” and so on and so on.  Then I introduced the PMI.  And in little groups of three and four they went through it, deliberately scanning plus points, minus points, interesting and at the end of that, twenty-nine out of thirty had totally changed their minds and decided it was a bad idea.  Another little experiment in England with people who were being detained for drugs, and asked “would it be a good idea to legalise drugs?”, this was a small group.  I think it was ten people.  Ten out of ten said “yes, time we should legalise drugs”.  After doing a PMI, nine out of ten said “no, we should not”.  In other words, scanning broader perceptions, you get a very different result.

I’ll give you an example of these things in use.  This is in a platinum mine in South Africa, the [unclear name] mine.  This has seven tribes working there.  The [unclear tribe name], Zulus, Shangaan, Sutu and so on, tribes with historical enmities.  They used to have two hundred and ten fights every month between the tribes.  After these simple perception tools were taught to these totally illiterate miners, who’d never been to school even for one day in their lives, the fights dropped from two hundred and ten to four.  One of the simple tools was the OPV, Other People’s Views, so make an effort to get inside the mind of the other person, see where they’re at and the fights just dissolved completely.  So these are very simple things.  As I say, they are taught now in many schools around the world.  In some countries like Venezuela, by law every school has to teach thinking.  Other countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Canada, have very high use.
 
Now, one of the reasons, which people don’t understand, they say “why do you need acronyms like PMI, CNS and so on? Why don’t you just say take a balanced view, look at the consequences?”  The reason is, those attitudes do not exist in the brain.  An attitude is in itinerary; it’s only there when you use it.  Acronyms have their place in the brain.  It’s rather like one time there was a fellow who had a stroke and the only thing affected by strokes were the names of vegetables, that’s all.  The name of a vegetable has a location in the brain.  You don’t go into a shop and say “I want those nice, red, round shiny things, which are good for salads”, you say, “I want a tomato”.  Similarly, you can say to yourself “I want to do a PMI here”, or someone else, “let’s do a CNS”, they exist in the brain, they have a location.  Attitudes do not have a location.  That’s why it’s necessary to have these names and so on.  So, these things are now as I say, widely taught and they help people to get on with each other, they resolve conflicts and so on.

Now we’re going to move to another aspect of thinking, which is creativity.  Why do we need creativity?  Well, it’s very easy to say we need creativity for progress, new ideas, new concepts, new designs, new products.  Yes, that’s fine, but there is a mathematical reason why creativity is, is essential.  It is this; we live over time, time passes.  Information comes in, spread over time.  Periodically, we have to make the best use of all the information we have up to that point in time, so we have a system with two characteristics; input over time, periodic best use.  That applies to all thinking, personal thinking, corporate thinking, cultural thinking and so on.  What can we say about any system with those characteristics?  The answer is; a lot, and I’m going to model it in a very simple way.  These pieces represent input.  At any point you have to make the best use of what you’ve got.  In this model, the best use means producing a simple, coherent shape that you could describe to someone over the telephone, so the other person could reproduce it.  So, you say it’s a rectangle, which is three times as long as it is wide.  Time passes; another input.  Sensibly, economically, efficiently, we build on that.  We get a rectangle which is four times as long as it is wide; perfectly satisfactory.  Time passes; yet another input.  Sensibly, economically, we build on what we’ve got and then we say “what a pity it does not fit”, or more often, more often we say “that’s good enough anyway”.  Now, what has happened is we’ve been perfectly correct with the first step, but in order to go forward, we have to go back and change an arrangement or a concept which was the best in its day.  We go back, we change that, we get a square.  The next stage, we just get a bigger square.  And that’s a mathematical system.  Any system with an input over time and the need to maximise will always be sub-optimal.  Why?  Because the sequence of the arrival of information plays too large a part in its disposition.  If you started with that piece, followed by these, you may well have done that, but if you started with those, that is the best arrangement and that’s the best change.  And now you’re committed in that direction.  Now just in case any one of you sitting there is saying to himself or herself “yes, but you, being different, you would not have done that, you would have done this”, well, I have to tell you that had you done that, then I, in my role as the future, would have given you this piece next. [laughter] And you would have been better if you’d done that.  Unless you have complete knowledge of the future, you cannot avoid the necessity for creativity.  It is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

Now, how does creativity work?  Well, in 1969, I wrote a book called “The mechanism of mind”.  The mechanism of mind, I applied the principles of self-organising systems to the neural networks in the brain.  That book was read by the leading physicist in the world, Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who said “it’s interesting.  You were talking about these things ten years before mathematicians started looking at chaos and complexity”.  He said “it’s all there, in your book”.  He commissioned a team of computer experts to simulate what I said in the book.  He said “it works exactly as you predict”.  He also became the world’s leading expert on complexity and set up the Santa Fe institute, which is the world’s leading body looking at complexity.  In that book, I showed how the known networks in the brain allow information to organise itself as routine patterns.  The purpose of the brain is to make stable patterns for dealing with a stable world, which I excellent, but the opposite of creativity.  What happens if we have two patterns?  We’re going along and there’s an alternative pattern, do we have to stop and decide which one we take?  If we did, life would be very slow.  That’s not necessary, because the way the nerves are linked up, if you have one area of excitation which is bigger than another, this will expand; this one is suppressed.  So that is suppressed, we go along in full confidence.  If, somehow, we move laterally and once we’re there, it’s obvious in hindsight.  I’ll draw that here differently.  And we go along the main track.  If somehow, we move laterally, once we’re there, that is obvious.  That’s A and B.  The route from A to B is very roundabout.  The route from B to A is direct.  That is the essential asymmetry, lack of symmetry of patterns.  Also for organising systems with a time dimension of pattern making systems, all pattern making systems are necessarily asymmetric.  From that, arise two phenomena; one is humour.  Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human brain.  It tells us more about the underlying system than anything else.  Reason tells us very little.  Any sorting system run backwards is a reasoning system.  Humour can only occur in a self-organising system, which makes asymmetric patterns.  You either have the pun, which emphasises that, or we’re taken here and in hindsight, it makes sense.  I’ll give you a simple example.  This old man of ninety dies and goes down to Hell.  As he’s wandering round, he sees a friend of his, also aged ninety, sitting there with a beautiful young woman sitting on his knee.  So he says to his friend, he says, “are you sure this is Hell, because you seem to be having a good time?”  The friend looks up and says “yes, it’s Hell alright”.  He said “I am the punishment for her”.  In hindsight, very logical.  Now that’s the same with creativity.  The sequence of our experience, as with those pieces I showed earlier set up the main track.  There are other tracks.  If, with lateral thinking, we make that jump, once we’re there, in hindsight, it’s absolutely logical.  Now, this has led to a huge problem, because any valued creative idea will always be logical in hindsight, otherwise you would not accept it as valuable.  So what we have said for two thousand four hundred years, we’ve said “if it’s logical in hindsight, then you should be able to use logic to get it” and the answer is: no, completely wrong.  But because psychologists and philosophers are just playing with words, not looking at asymmetric systems, they simply have never understood that point.

I’ll give you another example of a very simple asymmetric system.  We have a tree and the trunk of the tree divides and then there are branches, and then branches again, then there are twigs and finally there are leaves.  Imagine we have an ant on the trunk of the tree.  What are the chances of the ant getting to one specified leaf?  At every branch point, the chances diminish by one over the number of branches and on the average tree, the chances of getting there are one in eight thousand; not very high.  Imagine we have the ant sitting on the leaf.  What are the chances of getting to the trunk of the tree?  One in one.  There are no forward branches in that direction.  So once you’re there, very obvious, when you’re here, not at all obvious; asymmetric systems.  No magic, no mystery about them, very simple types of system.
 
So what can we do about it?  Well, what we can do about it, we can devise tools specifically related to asymmetric patterns.  I’ll mention them very briefly.  One of them is called Challenge.  Challenge means we look at the idea, the concept, the approach, we acknowledge it may be the best, it may be the only one, but we put a temporary block on it so we start looking in other directions.  I’ll give you a simple example of that.  Many years ago in 1970, I was doing some work for Shell Oil and they said “when you drill an oil well, you drill an oil well like that, traditional, no problem, always used”.  I said “Let’s challenge that.  Why not drill your oil well like that?”  They said “we can’t do it because the drill will not go round the corner”.  I said “yes, it will if you use a hydraulic head, you pull it round”.  Today, almost every oil well in the world is drilled like that.  Why?  Because you get between three and six times as much oil from this oil well as from that oil well.  Why?  The reason is very obvious.  If this is the oil bearing stratum, here you go through, here exposed for a long time, in fact Stat Oil Norway has one oil well going ten kilometres horizontally, but this had been used for seventy years.  No-one had argued with it, it worked, it didn’t need change.  Challenge means looking at something and saying “yes, that’s fine, but let’s challenge it”.  I’ll give you another simple example.  Many of you in the audience are wearing spectacles.  The lenses are always the same size.  Let’s challenge that.  Why?  Why not have spectacles with one big one, one small one.  What’s the value there?  That is one of your eyes is lazy and the other eye is doing all the work, you put your lazy eye here and make it do more work.  Now, I’ll tell you a little story attached to that.  I was in China once, and I said to the Chinese, “do you know why there are so many people in China”, they didn’t know so I told them.  Fifty-eight percent of Chinese wear spectacles.  It’s to do with the shape of the skull and the length of the eyeball.  So, I said “what did you do before spectacles were invented?”  Spectacles were only invented in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.  There were many centuries before that.  What happened before?  I said, “well, all the ugly men got married, that’s why there’s so many children”.  Now, I used to say “all the ugly women got married” but then people got very upset and I was at a seminar in Perth, Australia and I said that, and two ladies got so upset they walked out and asked for their money back, so today I say “all the ugly men got married” and there’s no problem. [laughter]  So, challenge.

Then, another approach is provocation.  Provocation is totally different to normal thinking.  Provocation means we set up a provocation and I invented the word “po”, meaning provocative operation.  We then use a mental process called movement to get there and once we’re there, we see it makes sense.  The provocation may be totally contrary to logic, experience or anything else.  I’ll give you a very simple example.  One time in California I was talking to the whole environmental department, about eight hundred people and they said “we’ve got a river and the river flows that way and factories here put out pollution.  People downstream suffer”.  So as a provocation, I said “Po.  The factory is downstream of itself”.  Now that sounds pretty impossible.  How can a factory be at A and B at the same time?  From that, comes a very simple idea.  It’s pretty daft to have the controls located exactly where you rest your hand to write. [laughter]  Downstream of itself.  From that comes a very simple idea that normally, you take in your water, you put out your pollution.  From that come the idea that we legislate that if you build a factory on the river, your input must always be downstream of your own output, so you’re the first to get your pollution.  That has now become law in many countries.  I’ll give you another example.  In London, there are very few taxis.   There are only, I think, fourteen thousand taxis compared to twenty-five thousand in Tokyo and New York.  So one day, the provocation, we say, “what do we take for granted about taxi drivers, that they know the way”, so our provocation is very simple.  Po: taxi drivers do not know the way.  Now, immediately, your black hat comes on and you say “that’s pretty stupid.  What is the use of a taxi system if the driver doesn’t know the way?”  But, we’re using movement, not judgement, so we imagine the scene.  You get in a taxi, the driver says “where do you want to go?” and you say “Marble Arch”.  The driver says “I don’t know the way”.  Now, I’m going to pause for ten seconds, while individually you imagine in your mind all the things that can happen after you say that.  Just imagine. [short pause]  Well, the driver may say “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, you better get another taxi”.  The driver may look at his book of maps, he may use his radio telephone, he may stop another taxi to ask the way, or he may turn to you and say “how do I get there?”  Immediately, your black hat says “that’s no use.  If you’re a tourist, how would you know the way?”  But not all taxi users are tourists.  So, you have a taxi, a normal type taxi, used by visitors, tourists, people who live in the country.  Then you have another type of taxi, the same in all respects except one, which is that on the roof there’s a big question mark as the driver doesn’t know where he’s going. [laughter]  Such taxis can only be used by residents, who know the way around their own town.  So you tell the driver left at the lights, over the bridge, stop on the right.  So now you have a type of taxi reserved for residents, because tourists do not use taxis with question marks.  Your driver gets paid while he or she is learning, moves up there, you get more taxis for everyone.  So what starts out as a very stupid idea ends up as a very practical one.
Provocation.
Then, there’s an even further technique, which is if we look at our asymmetry diagram again and if we start our normal thinking here, we go there.  If somehow, we start somewhere else, we increase the chance of hitting that track, we can use it.  The history of science is full of examples where random events have triggered important ideas, like Newton and the apple falling on his head, and so on.  No mystery about that.  But how do we get that starting point?  We cannot choose it, because if we choose it, it will lie along our normal thinking.  So we use chance.  And one of the simplest is a random word, usually nouns are easier to use.  Now why should that work?  Logicians get very upset.  They say “if it’s random, then any word would be used for any subject.  That must be total nonsense”.  The answer is: no.  In a patterning system, it’s the logical thing to do.  Imagine you live in a smallish town, and that’s your house.  And when you leave your house, you always use this main road.  But there are other, smaller roads, which you never use because your travel is dominated by the adequacy of the main road.  But one day on the outskirts of the town, your car breaks down, or something happens and you have to walk home.  You ask around for instructions, find yourself arriving home by a road you would never have taken on leaving home.  In other words, if you start at the periphery, you increase the chances of opening up other tracks.  So that’s how the random word process works.  It’s very, very powerful.  One day in South Africa, one of my trainers, Caroline Ferguson, was working for a steel company.  One afternoon she set up a group of workshops.  Just using this technique, that afternoon they generated twenty one thousand ideas.  It took them nine months to go through the ideas generated in one afternoon.
 
I’ll give you another little example.  And I was being interviewed on Dutch television in Antwerp and in the course of the interview, I said that Dutch was not a language, it was a throat disease. [laughter]  All those sounds they make like [croaking sound] and so on and so on.  The interviewer was not very pleased.  He said “I hear you’ve got this technique and I want you to use it here and now”, he said, “I’m sitting on a sofa.  I want a new design for a sofa.  By way of a random word, here is a magazine.  There’s a picture of Queen Beatrix”.  So he said, “the random word is queen”, so immediately, my thoughts go to a new design for a sofa.  From queen comes the idea of queen-sized bed, so the idea was a rather large sofa, but along the side were two rails.  And the back would slide along the rails.  The back was there used as a bed.  If you slid the back there you could lounge and watch television.  If you slid it further back you could sit on the edge and have cucumber sandwiches.  The whole process had taken ten seconds, and that’s a new design for a sofa.  It’s a very powerful system.

So these are just some examples of the frameworks, the tools, the software for thinking that can be very, very powerful.  There’s no mystery about them, but they are practical things to do.  They’re not just attitudes and encouragement and exhortation.  They’re specific attitudes, they can be learned and used just as formally as we learn and use mathematics.  They’re not just mystical attitudes.

Now at this point, I’m going to stop and give you a chance to ask any questions.  In the auditorium there are some microphones in the aisle and in the upper level there are some roving microphones, so if you put your hand up, or you go to a microphone, then I will answer your question and we’re going to get a lady here whose ears are younger than mine, in case I can’t hear exactly what you say, she will interpret it for me.

Q & A

End of transcript.
 

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