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Editorial Review Product Description
In this trailblazing book, Edward de Bono shows why our most crucial problems cannot be solved by traditional Western thought with its rigid insistence on facts. Genuinely revolutionary--a synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy--this work is bound to change the way we think. ... Read more Customer Reviews (15) 
Better Thinking for a Better Future
For me Edward de Bono is a fascinating thinker who does not get the attention he deserves.He puts forth many interesting ideas about how we think and how we can improve our thinking.If his ideas were adopted, I believe they would have a great positive impact on humanity.In an odd way, the non-application of his ideas confirms his theories about why old style thinking prevails and better design thinking remains the bailiwick of artists and visionaries, and out of the realm of the common man.
His basic premise is that traditional logic, analysis and judgment thinking are not good enough to move us forward to where we need to be.This thinking by its nature relies too heavily on existing frameworks and therefore does not lead to the kind of creative approaches required for breakthroughs.Instead, we make improvements at an evolutionary pace, complacent with the way things are (unless prodded otherwise by a crisis), and waiting for a creative genius to lead us forth at some future place and time.
De Bono argues that thinking is a skill that can be taught to anyone, particularly how to change perceptions.He developed the concept of lateral thinking, which works to help design new ideas by working with what he terms self-organizing patterns, as opposed to externally organized systems.This is actually, for me, the hardest concept to grasp, which is the idea of what a self-organizing system is. His main - and most important - example of this is how the brain works: it receives information which forms patterns.Future input follows these previous patterns so that we can only see what we are prepared to see.To see something different and new, or come up with a new idea, the brain needs a provocation to jolt it out of its previous patterns.This is how humor works: the punch line is unexpected, but follows back logically in hindsight.
De Bono's theories about thinking and how to improve it challenge the status quo and can be threatening to existing institutions, particularly education which, according to him, do not teach students how to think; instead schools and universities fill students with information to which they then react.They are left without the thinking skill he refers to as operacy, or the ability to come up with workable ideas.Perhaps his strongest case is in the observation that humanity has progressed significantly in technical matters, where analysis and logic are key, but barely in human relations, where more than just traditional thinking is required.He even proposed the creation of new words that will capture meanings that are not currently expressed in existing language.
There is some irony in De Bono's claims and approach, as he uses logic and criticism against logic and criticism; uses language, which he criticizes as constraining, to criticize language; provides a history of thinking while condemning the focus on history; and, in my opinion, one can claim that he applies a different philosophy to thinking while also declaring an end to philosophy.None of this is a condemnation of his work, but rather and acknowledgement that, ironically, any revolutionary thinker can only inherit for his work the very same tools he seeks to change.
I Am Right/You Are Wrong is a good explanation of his basic theories.It is worthwhile reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundation of De Bono's thought.
One of my favorite reads
I've read this book first time almost 20 years ago and enjoyed it then as much I did now. Excellent work with very specific practical implications for anybody who is interested in how human mind works, how to understand what people "really" mean, and what is making jokes funny :-). It is on my very favorite books list. Highly recommend it.
PO: Edward de Bono is a Rascal Sage (and I mean it as a comliment!)
Edward de Bono is a pattern-interrupting Savant Provocateur!
As a preview, here's an interruption of a pattern (of expectations) for you: de Bono - throughout the book - promises to go into some detail to explain the term "hodics" (which he conceptually previews as a shift in inquiry from "is" to "to").As you reach the last page of the book, you finally see a paragraph long C-level section in which de Bono excuses himself from his own mandate: he explains that he - "upon reflection" - decided not to "burden" the reader with too much about "hodics."End of story.The modern-day Diogenes of Synope has left the building, with the unabashed spontaneity of a Zen master that just cut a whole cat in half (just to make a point about the dangers of dichotomous thinking)!
Don't get me wrong: the book more than meets its lofty mandate (to herald a renaissance, no less!) - it's panoramic, it's thought provoking, it's original, it's "meta" in more way than one.
Reading De Bono is a kind of fun you get from watching Rubick's cubing on You Tube.There's the circularity all right.There are brilliant revelations as pseudo-chaos of pattern interruptions suddenly comes into crystal clear focus.The result is a contagious desire to try out the water logic yourself, to discover this amazing thought style that allows one to maneuvre around the unnecessary rapids of the false dichotomies and the situation-independent absolutes.
I love de Bono's pushy paradigm-shifting style.I enjoyed his "Lateral Thinking" and I really liked this work on "Water Logic."He is right.We are wrong.No "ifs, ands or buts" about it - just a neologistic pattern-interruption word-cue "po."
In sum, the "I am right you are wrong" is a must for psychologists, comedians, marketing/advertizing folks, politicians, scientists, and poets.All these seemingly unrelated vocational and avocational "factions" stand to improve the understanding of their respective perception-manipulating skills and arts.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.
LATERAL THINKING IS RIGHT-BRAIN PROCESSING
Lateral thinking is right-brain processing. de Bono didnt invent anything new.
I'm a de Bono fan going back to 1968 and his book NEW THINK. But since 1972, or so, all de Bono does is repackage NEW THINK and sell it to new converts and acolytes.
Out of the Box Thinking from the Man who invented it.
A Rhodes scholar, medical doctor, university professor, worldwide consultant and inventor of "lateral thinking," the actually precursor of what we have come to label as "out-of-the-box-thinking," renaissance man Edward de Bono, tells us in this book, how creative thinking is done and how it is to be put to good use in solving the most intractable problems facing mankind.
As in most of his other books, he uses his medical training to first explain the mechanics of brain functioning -- showing how perception is the natural and simple behavior of self-organizing neural networks in the brain and how the way these networks organize affect the way we think (or fail to think), plan, organize and solve (or fail to solve) both large and small problems.
What is different about this book, is that here he takes on as a challenge the problem of how to help erase a kind of mental laziness from the problem-solving context that results in an almost complete reliance on absolutes, that is in a complete reliance on black and white thinking; on binary logic, as in what can only be called the "dichotomy trap."
Although he does not single out the U.S. as the Western World's most egregious practitioner of this kind of "last resort thought process," it is safe to say that anyone who observes U.S. politics and approaches to social and political problem-solving, even for a minute, cannot come away without feeling that we Americans are the world champions of "black and white thinking." Almost every aspect of our lives are sliced and diced into finely grated black and white categories: our race problem, our politics, our religion, and economics just to name the most obvious of them -- all suffer from binary thinking in absolutes of only black and whites - seldom in grays.As a nation, we seem satisfied with our utter lack of reliance on anything near creative thinking to solve the problems that face us as a nation.
de Bono shows us the route to a new paradigm of thinking: as he sees that with global problems crowding in on us, failing to change and failing to begin to adopt new more creative ways of thinking and solving these deep and intractable problems, increasingly is ceasing to be a discretionary option. Sooner, rather than later we will have no option but to give up our almost total reliance on absolutes, and begin to deal in "grays." That is what this book attempts to do: teach us that the brain is more comfortable thinking in "grays," and that many of the solutions to the problems facing us as a nation and as a world, lie in this realm of creative thought. In is a somewhat vain but very sober attempt to shake us out of our comfort zone. The same thing that de Bono has been doing in the corporate boardrooms for the better part of a half century.
Five stars.
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