Think! by Edward de Bono Page B

enough. We need a different method and framework (software) for exploring a subject in a constructive way.
    The US Air Force once published research on team performance. They compared teams put together according to psychological profiles and tests, and teams put together simply on a preference for one of the Six Hats. On every score the Six Hats teams performed better than the others. This may be due to what is known as cognitive dissonance (having made a choice, you live up to it).
SUMMARY: KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION
    Last year I was told by a Nobel prize economist that he had been at the economics meeting in Washington the previous week, and they had been using the Six Hats. Later in the year, a woman in New Zealand told me she had been teaching the Six Hats in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (often regarded as the most primitive place on Earth). She went back a month later and they told her it had changed their lives.
    It is an extremely simple method, but very powerful. Why did it take 2,400 years to develop? Because we were so happy with the excellence of argument!

5 Language
    Language is an encyclopaedia of ignorance. A word enters a language and then becomes fixed. The word may have entered the language a long time ago at a time of relative ignorance. Once the word exists, it affects ourperception and we are forced to see the world in that way.
    If there is something very new and defined then we might create a new word, such as 'computer', but it is very difficult to change existing words to have a different meaning on purpose.
    I introduced theterm 'lateral thinking' in my first book The Use of Lateral Thinking in 1967 (the book was titled New Think in the USA). My interest in thinking had come from three sources. As a Rhodes scholar, I had studied psychology at Oxford and this gave me some interest in thinking. In the course of medical research I used computers extensively and I had become interested in the sort of thinking that computers could not do, which was creative and perceptual thinking. Continuing my medical

research at Harvard, I had worked on the complicated way in which the body regulated blood pressure and the general integration of systems in the human body. This had led to an interest in self-organising systems.
    These three strands (thinking, perceptual thinking and self-organising systems) had come together and I had already completed the manuscript of the book and called it The Other Sort of Thinking. Then, in an interview with a journalist, I said that, for thinking that was not linear, sequential and logical, 'You needed to move laterally instead of going straight ahead.' I realised the value of the term – it was the word I needed – and I put in into the book instead of the other phrase.
    On a more technical level lateral thinking means moving 'laterally' across patterns rather than just moving along them. The term Lateral Thinking is now very widely in use and has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
    It was necessary to create the term – 'lateral thinking' – for two reasons. There was a need to describe idea creativity and to distinguish it from artistic creativity. The word also indicates the logical basis for creativity by describing movement across asymmetric patterns in a self-organising information system (the human brain). On a more general level, 'lateral thinking' also implies that you cannot dig a hole in a different place just by digging the same hole deeper. It may be necessary to change the perceptions, concepts and approach rather than work

harder with the existing perceptions, concepts and approach.
    There was an absolute need to create the new word'po'. This signals that aprovocation is to follow. Saying things like: 'cars should have square wheels' or 'planes should land upside down' would make no sense at all unless they were seen as provocations (from which interesting ideas arise using the operation of 'movement'). Self-organising systems, like the