Edward de Bono Obituary

I stumbled on "The Five Day Course in Thinking" (https://www.amazon.com/5-Day-Course-Thinking-Edward-Bono/dp/...) when I was a UCLA undergrad in the late 1960s. The subsequent days were among the most exciting of my life up to then, as I pushed myself as hard as I've ever done to solve each day's problem.

Amazon review:

"This book actually contains three 5-day courses, each dealing with a different style of thinking. The focus of the book is directed less towards the solving of the problems, than at helping you understand your approach, and through this awareness, improve your thinking abilities.

"Each course sets a practical hands-on problem that requires no specialist knowledge or maths. Throughout the five days it builds what begins as a tricky challenge into one more difficult than you would have imagined being able to solve. En route, De Bono offers insights into the problem solving process and pointers to areas you might explore to illuminate your own thought processes.

"The three courses look at insight, sequential, and strategic thinking. De Bono succeeds in creating an entertaining learning environment. Readers will enjoy the challenges set and will gain valuable insights from their thinking about their thinking.

"Sample Problem As a taster, this is the first puzzle of the book.

"Place three bottles upright on the floor to form a triangle where the distance between the bases of the bottles is slightly larger than the length of a knife. Use three identical knives to form a platform on top of the bottles to support a full glass of water. No part of any knife may touch the floor."

Great stuff. R.I.P.

I found his book Water Logic intriguing. It encouraged setting out problems as a series of nodes, or factors in the problem, which you'd then connect with one-way arrows. So, this affects that, and that affects the other. The idea was that you'd end up with a sort of flow chart where some nodes/factors had multiple arrows pointing at them - and these were blocking points. A surprisingly useful tool on some occasions; certainly helped discussions about dependencies etc. But it must have been a minor work because I can't find anything worthwhile online atm about it.

For me, though, de Bono's best contribution to my life was the L game. I still play it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_game

I liked "Lateral Thinking"; it kind of opened a new space in my mind. Especially a lesson that solution always exists and that there are no bad ideas. As even the worst ideas can budge people to solve real problems, they could not see otherwise. Which subsequently taught me not to judge people when they say something that looks very dumb. I still remember his example of Boeing engineers asked, "what if airplanes had square wheels?"

An ego the size of the planet. Brilliant communications about frankly not very much. Had some lunatic ideas (read Wikipedia for his zinc/peace story) and shopped a metaphor to death.

He was oversold in the 70s. You couldn't move for stories about him.

Professional "geniuses" need the quotes. Pinker, Kurzweil.. all of them are much-in-little.

(He was, unquestionably, bloody smart. Far smarter than the average Joe, far far smarter than me. He wasted his talents. Consider Robert McNamara. Don't agree with a lot he did, (Vietnam!) but I suspect he was a similar calibre to De Bono)

I went thru a course on lateral thinking (and other things) at my work, years ago based on the books by de Bono. My natural mindset apriori is this kind of stuff is bunk, but i must say, i found the process to be pretty useful. The main premise is that to find breakthrough aha ideas, you associate two things that are not at all related to one another, and see what the natural questions and consequences of such a pairing produces. You get all kinds of wild ideas, most are just silly, but occasionally you get really good ideas that perhaps you would never have thought of.

An example might be, if you want to improve cars, work through what it would mean if dogs were the primary drivers of cars. What would you change about cars to make this easier? Then once found, are there any of these that would make sense for human drivers?

A few years ago I tried to formalize my thoughts on why some people/teams create good software while others don't. I narrowed the problem down to couple of things. The biggest one was people not considering alternative solutions and getting mentally anchored to the very first idea they have. The second one was lack of meta-awareness (e.g. redefining hard problems to be easier or designing your own tools when existing tools don't fit the job).

Couple month ago I bought Lateral Thinking and was somewhat surprised and somewhat encouraged to see that de Bono's observations overlapped my own. Except his book was written in 1970 and didn't deal with IT. Moreover, his analysis was comprehensive and systematic. I wish I learned about his work earlier.

> During a 1999 lecture to Foreign Office officials, the originator of the term lateral thinking argued that the yeast extract, though proverbially socially divisive, could do what politicians and diplomats had failed for years to achieve. The problem, as he saw it, was that people in the Middle East eat unleavened bread and so lack zinc, which makes them irritable and belligerent. Feeding them Marmite, therefore, would help create peace.

Is this meant to be funny? I don't get it.

I read a bunch of books by Mr De Bono as a teenager, including "Six Thinking Hats" and "Lateral Thinking". As math and science nerd interested in creativity, it really gave me a different way to think.

Po: people should use the word po

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po_(lateral_thinking)

i have read the pebble example 5 times now and i just don’t get it. if she drops it they see it fall and either see the color of the pebble and act according to what color she picked or repeat the process with fresh pebbles. never in that situation would someone just give her the other pebble and act as if she picket that one first. can someone explain this?

I almost cited him the other day on HN (the Thinking Hats, as a tool for creative brainstorming sessions).