Professional thinking and learning processes
Thinking and Learning are professional skills that dramatically improve with specific training. Your improvement will be measurable in money and time saved. Edward de Bono
Dr Edward de Bono was a Rhodes Scholar has an M.D. and 2 Ph.D.’s, (philosophy & psychology). He held faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard.
Dr de Bono is considered the world’s leading authority in the field of creative and conceptual thinking and has spent his life traveling the world bringing his “new thinking” tools and methods to governments, organizations and people around the world who have applied his concepts to their specific situations.
Dr de Bono has made two TV series: 'de Bono's Thinking Course' for the BBC, and 'The Greatest Thinkers' for WDR, Germany.
Dr de Bono has authored more than 60 books in 35 languages and is the originator of Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking as well as other thinking tools. His Direct Attention Thinking Tools (CoRT) are used in schools around the world.
“Lateral Thinking” is his original concept and is officially recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Click on the picture below to see a short interview with Dr de Bono. Give it a minute or two to load.
Those who attribute their success to Dr de Bono’s thinking tools include:
- Peter Ueberroth, who organised the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, attributed the games financial success to the use of Dr. de Bono's Lateral Thinking tools.
- John Bertrand, the Australian skipper who won the America’s Cup attributed his successful challenge to the use of Lateral Thinking tools.
- Ron Barbaro, previous President of Prudential Insurance (USA), invented the “living needs benefits” package which changed the insurance industry for terminally ill people, attributes his invention to the power of the de Bono thinking tools.
Six Thinking Hats
Emotion, Intuition, Hunches and Feelings
Information available and needed
Alternatives & Creative Ideas
Benefits, Positives and Feasibility
Caution, Difficulties and Problems
Controls, Manages and Organises the thinking and sets out the Next Steps
Why Six Hats?
It's easy to learn, simple to use and practical.
Six Hats, 6 colours, represent 6 different types of thinking.
Red, white, green, yellow, black and blue. The colour relates to the “type of thinking” required when using the specific coloured hat. The colour assists in making it easier to remember the “type of thinking” required to be used at any one point in time.
Whilst each Hat represents a different type of “thinking” it is not:
- a way of categorizing people; nor
- a description of the way an individual person generally adopts for their thinking. For example, it is improper to describe a person who appears to see only the negative side of situations be classified as a “Black Hat” thinker.
As an attendee of a Professional Development Program, you will, immediately after the program, be able to use all 6 of the hats and create sequences for your specific situations.
When you use the Six Thinking Hats method with the 2 powerful lateral thinking tools you will gain the Competitive Edge. By ensuring your team members are trained in the Six Thinking Hats you will be encouraging collaborative thinking of your team and reap the results.
Ways you may Use the Six Thinking Hats method
- Individual use
- Conversation use
- Meeting use
- Negotiation use
- Reports, memos, e-mail, and presentation use.
Example
Meeting Use
Meeting time is reduced. In one company they reduced their meeting time to one tenth of the time previously spent.
In the United States, managers spend nearly 40 percent of their time in meetings. If in your organisation the use of the Six Thinking Hats method reduced all meeting times by 75 percent, you would have created 30 percent more manager time — at no extra cost whatsoever.
Parallel Thinking
In argument based “traditional thinking”, when a person makes a comment, others feel they have to respond with a view that is either for or against that comment.
Whereas with parallel thinking, every thinker at every moment is looking in the same direction. And their thoughts are laid out in parallel.
Participants do not respond to what the last person has said. Instead, another idea is laid next to it in parallel. The end result is that the subject is quickly and fully explored from all sides.
With parallel thinking when there are two different/opposing points of view laid out alongside each other and at the end it is considered essential to decide between the two, then these two ideas are treated as the focus and a decision is made. This avoids argument based “traditional thinking” at every step.
