Thinking Strategies: Frameworks for Thinking
There is a fundamental question that we rarely answer: ‘Are intelligent people capable of better thinking?’ The assumed answer is ‘yes’, because that is part of our definition of intelligence.
Thinking Strategies: Frameworks for Thinking
by Edward de Bono
There is a fundamental question that we rarely answer: ‘Are intelligent people capable of better thinking?’ The assumed answer is ‘yes’, because that is part of our definition of intelligence. An intelligent person is someone who seems more capable of decision making and thinking than other people.
Yet in my experience across a very wide range of people (from Down’s Syndrome youngsters to Nobel prize laureates; from four-year-olds to ninety-year olds; from illiterate miners in South Africa to senior executives in the world’s largest companies, etc.) the obvious answer is not true.
There is analysis. This is the ability to understand things. Certainly intelligence, understanding and analysis do seem to go together. Yet somebody may be very good at analysis and yet poor at design thinking or operational thinking. This is the thinking involved in making things happen.
DESIGN
With ‘design’ you put things together to deliver a desired value. Excellence at analysis does not mean excellence in design. Some countries teach philosophy as part of the school curriculum. The intention is very good because the plan is to teach thinking. But philosophy teaches analysis; it does not teach design thinking.
There is information. Intelligent people understand and absorb information more readily. So they tend to have more information to play with. Often the right information is a substitute for thinking.
Intelligent people working in a field pick up the idiom of that field and become capable of juggling information in that field. The result can be a powerful new idea. But take that same mind and apply it to a totally new field, and the generalised skill of thinking is not there.
DRIVING A CAR
Intelligence is like the horsepower of a car. This also includes all the other engineering. So intelligence is a ‘potential’ (which may be determined by the speed of transmission along the neurones in the brain).
Thinking is like the skill with which the car is driven. The driver of the fast car may, in time, acquire the skill needed to drive the fast car. But that is not the same as ‘driving skill’ in its broad sense of reacting to conditions and other road users.
Thinking and intelligence do overlap in the area of understanding, but can diverge in other areas. For example, an intelligent person may take up a view on a subject. This view may be determined by personal experience, emotions and even prejudice. The intelligence is then used to defend this view.
This is not good thinking. Good thinking would involve exploration of the subject, the generation of alternative views, listening to the views of others, considering the context and purpose of the thinking – and then designing a way forward. Defence of a point of view, no matter how brilliant, is not enough.
INTENTIONS AND FRAMEWORKS
There are general habits and intentions which good thinkers are supposed to have. These might include considering all factors, generating alternatives, listening to others, defining the objective. While these may exist as intentions, they are not necessarily used by thinkers.
I once asked a group of 250 top women managers if it would be a good idea to pay women 15% more than men for doing exactly the same job. 86% thought it an excellent idea (and about time too!) I then asked the group to do a C&S.
This is one of the simple ‘attention-directing’ tools we use in primary schools. It means directing attention to immediate consequences and eventually long-term consequences. In small groups the executives ‘did a C&S’. As a result those in favour of the idea dropped from 86% to 15%. Yet each of those people would have claimed that as a senior executive she looked at consequences all the time.
ARTIFICIALITY
Paradoxically, it is the artificiality of the C&S tool that gives it power. In a platinum mine in South Africa there had been 210 fights every month between the seven tribes working there. Susan Mackie and colleagues taught thinking to these illiterate miners, who had never been to school for even one day in their lives.
As a result, the fights dropped from 210 to just four. The attention-directing tool of ‘OVP’ (Other People’s Views) forced workers to make an effort to understand the thinking of the other party. Fights simply dissolved.
Attitudes and intentions are very weak. Specific operating tools – even if they seem artificial – are much stronger. A task is defined and then carried out. The thinker carries out the task and then reacts to the improved perception.
According to David Perkins of Harvard, 90% of the errors of thinking are errors of perception. According to Goedel’s theorem, you can never logically prove the starting point of your logic. The starting point is arbitrary perception. That is why perception is so important. That is why ‘attention-directing tools’ are so powerful.
ARGUMENT
For 2,400 years we have been unhappy with argument as a way of exploring a subject. We use argument in government, in the courts of law and in business discussions. It is a crude, primitive and inefficient way of exploring a subject.
Argument is about case-making and not about exploring a subject. In argument you have to start with a position. In exploration you end with a position.
Argument does not design a way forward. Argument is about winning and losing and rampant egos. That is why many years ago I designed the ‘parallel thinking’ of the Six Thinking Hats.
The Six Hats method is now widely used. It can reduce meeting times from 30 days to two. One company saved $20 million in the first year of use. Juries in the US are starting to use the system and reaching unanimous decisions very quickly.
NOBEL HATS
Some months ago I was told by a Nobel prize winner in economics that the week before he was attending a top economics meeting in Washington – and they were using the ‘Hats’. Last week in New Zealand a woman told me that she had been teaching the Hats in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (the most undeveloped region). They told her the method had changed their lives.
SUMMARY
There is a huge amount that can be done to improve human thinking. Intelligence, information and analysis are not enough.
Edward De Bono’s Message
Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.
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