Sunday life: a cup of tea with Edward do Bono (tell me your take on this one…!)
This week I meet Edward de Bono, the world’s most well-known thinker.
So, it’s arranged we meet at an outdoor swimming pool on Friday morning. Which is a little odd. Edward De Bono, the world’s greatest thinker, is 75 and arrives with his aide, wearing a full suit and a superbly garish tie. He’s not here to swim. Odder still, he kicks off by grabbing my hand, leaning in close and telling me a really, really terrible… penis joke. The kind your Uncle Kevin tells at Christmas. He then suggests I marry a 6’4” Ugandan basketball player. Which, according to his aide, is what he tells all the girls.
Admittedly the penis joke loosely segued to the theme of happiness. Which is why we’re sitting poolside on a Friday. De Bono’s in Australia to talk at the Happiness & It’s Causes conference this week about how thinking makes life better. Me, I’m enduring penis jokes to ask, how so?
So we move on. And I put the inappropriateness down to a brilliant mind that runs out of avenues for its outpourings. Or a “provocation”, a De Bono concept describing a controversial idea you intentionally drop into a scenario to shift perspective. I can be generous like that.
De Bono is not a man to shoot the breeze. Barely pausing to let go of my hand, he rattles off what seems like four decades of theories on how to think outside boxes. He talks in anecdotes, using his own patented terms (Pos, PMIs, H+) and colossal achievements (three states in the US use his “Six Hats” theory in their jury systems; every kid in Venezuela is taught according to his “CoRT” methods) to make his points.
It’s fun. It’s fast. We talk in riddles. It’s the cerebral version of an It’s A Knockout obstacle course. Our problem, says De Bono, is we get stuck on dominant ideas. A man is tired of opening the door every time his cat wants to come inside. So he cuts a flap in the door large enough for the cat to pass through. The cat then has a kitten. What’s he do? Well, he’s so stuck on the brilliance of his flap idea, he cuts a smaller one next to it for the kitten. Der, hey!
To think creatively, he says, we must shift perspective and come at the problem upside down, back-to-front…whatever it takes. To do this he proposes scores of techniques for lateral thinking (De Bono, of course, coined the term back in 1967). How do you get a polluting factory to be eco-responsible? Legislate that any factory built on a river must have its inlet (taking in of water) downstream of its own outlet (effluent), an edict that’s now applied across parts of Europe.
It’s easy to get whipped up in De Bono’s rapid-fire logic. I did. He stresses thinking needs to be practiced. So I spent the week in the scary world of online lateral thinking puzzles. Right now it’s 4.14pm and I have spent the entire day solving problems, like this one: A man walks into a bar and asks the publican for a glass of water. The publican pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says thank you and walks out. Why?”* I even find myself suggesting to a friend we start a think club. Pizza and nine-dot brain teasers on a Tuesday night anyone?
But my question remains. Does all this dogma and stringent application of techniques and acronyms make life better? So much prescribed, didactic data grates with my intuitive sense that life is meant to be more… flowy.
Staggeringly, De Bono’s written more than 80 books full of this stuff. Some of them he churned out in a week; he wrote one on a plane trip. Dare I suggest it, but could this churning of information be a dominant idea that this great mind has become attached to? Just a provocation, perhaps.
I can safely say this week I looked at this issue from a lot of different angles (even from under my desk where I had to retreat after too many lateral puzzles). Then I remembered something De Bono said, an idea that forms the theme of his next book: don’t think to find truth. This is the old way, the way of logic. We’ve been raised, he says, to think in order to “hurry up and find an answer”. Instead, thinking should be about being open and random and exploring possibilities. It’s the process that matters. And from it, value – not answers – emerge. Which is not odd at all.
* Because the man has the hiccups!
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You Bono’d Bono; well done.
I agree, he has written a hell of a lot of books; I’ve scanned through a few (one at Sydney Airport whilst waiting for a flight; very easy to get through…so easy I got through it before I reached the cash register. Sorry, Edward dB…you have enough). They get a bit same-ish. If he were really creative, he’d have a sealed section.
His central idea is that you can learn to be creative…I think what he is actually trying to say is that you can learn ways to think unlike others around you, which is not the same thing. That is, not to have the same cultural reaction; respond laterally rather that react spontaneously. But lateral does not equal creative. It is a tool that MAY result in creativity, but not guaranteed.
Still, he has value.
I see him a bit as the traveller in Ozymandias (short ‘n’ snappy poem by Shelley); the first line is “I met a traveller from an antique land”. The imagery of this one line always makes me think we have lost something in the journey and guys like dB simply re-aquaint us with these forgotten antiquities; they look novel to us, but are nothing more than relics of past thoughts with the sand dusted off and presented in a contemporary context. Maybe he is the archetypal traveller.
Keep writing your good stuff.
Nothing like a charming penis joke to get things off on the right note I say!
Is there an answer you can give us re the walking into the bar thing??? Or is that the point, see what you can come up with?
Oh I don’t think thinking makes life better, I think less thinking would be better, less thinking and more feeling….less clutter in the brain is always my goal, but then I am an avid thinker as it is…. a good old fashioned creative brainstorm is always fun though.
Interesting man. Good story.
Ah, Sharni, the answer’s there now.
What is is about public figures and penis jokes? I was told them on multiple occasions during my time as a publicist, by media figures and authors. Do they just want to make you feel uncomfortable or do they think that you’ll like them more? Maybe it’s to get the interview moving, so there is no idle chit chat.
Is it there already?
ahahaha I am not made out for riddles… is it the gun thing that they have at pubs to pour drinks with, or am I thinking way too logically…. OK, no idea!!! This is hurting my head though…
“thinking should be about being open and random and exploring possibilities. It’s the process that matters. And from it, value – not answers – emerge” ….So true!
Ohh I was so hoping to give you feedback on this one.
I read one of Edward’s book cover to cover a few years ago. Something about how to be creative or how to come up with ideas. I hated it.
I tried so hard to be inspired by it, moved or changed.
But nothing. It is so pragmatic that any magic he might have is lost. On me anyway.
I can’t stand reading his work….
Funny also that you say he said that penis joke.
I won’t say how I know… BUT…. and is ‘alledgly’ not based on any fact i know directly… HOWEVER mister de bono is a bit of a womaniser and has been known to frequent the odd strip clubs.
One thing’s for sure he’s a great marketer! Great at marketing himself!
If you start the Tuesday “Think Club” I’ll fly down from the Gold Coast each week to attend!
Cheers
pete
[...] Sunday life: a cup of tea with Edward do Bono (tell me your take … [...]
Hah! Will let you know, Pete. Perhaps you could start one up your way?
What was the penis joke? Always up for a bit of smutty humour.
Thinking as an End in itself rather than a Means to an end.
I always thought so… Glad you brought this up.
Well Done & Keep it up!
[...] I had tea with Edward de Bono, he said much the same. He’s written 80+ books which makes him an authority. He told me he [...]