Edward De Bono

Could this outsourced creativity idea create a new type of consultant?

It’s a form of consultancy, except consultancy is usually, we’ve got a problem, how do we solve it? And again consultants often work by listening to people in the organisation and feeding the ideas back to management where management hasn’t listened before. So it’s consultancy in a sense that someone from outside is offering some thinking, yes.

A new business idea that someone will use, I am sure. Is that another problem with creative thinking that we tend to do it when we’ve got a problem?

That’s absolutely a problem and I’ll tell you a parallel. The philanthropists in the world, the Bill Gates and all these people and where do they put their money? They put money into problem areas, HIV AIDS and so on and so on. It doesn’t occur to them to put money into areas which are not problems at all but which could be greatly improved. So we do have this notion that thinking is for problem solving and that is one use of thinking to be sure. But there are other uses of thinking which are, yes we do it this way, it works pretty well, is there a better way we can do it or a simpler way or a cheaper way? So we don’t think enough about things which are not problems – just as philanthropists don’t give money to things which are not problems.

If you were to walk into a business tomorrow and try and get them started on the track of creative thinking, what are some of the initial steps they could take?

Well the first thing is to understand it, so they’d have to pay a lot of money for me to give them a seminar and then they’d understand what creativity is about because there’s no mystery about it. It’s not some magic thing that dropped from the sky, it’s a way of thinking which takes into account that the brain forms patterns and patterns are asymmetric, which means you can go from A to B, you can go from C to A but not from A to C. The ways of cutting across, that’s what lateral thinking means.

For instance, some of my biggest supporters are mathematicians. Indeed the biggest physicists, the top Nobel Prize physicists in the world, who got his Nobel Prize for discovering the quark, has always been a big fan of mine and says “what you say makes perfect sense, even things like provocation which logicians and philosophers say that’s rubbish”.

If you’ve got a bad idea, how you can go forward to a useful one? And mathematicians say no, you’re absolutely right. Self-organising systems which are stable, local equilibrium and you know we’re going to get the global equilibrium unless you use provocation. So the interesting thing is that as I said mathematicians, physicists can see what I’m talking about whereas philosophers and logicians can’t.

I know you’ve spending a bit of time recently looking at the political process around the world, but have you had a look at the situation that Australia’s currently in?

I think you’ve got a wonderful opportunity in Australia to change democracy around a bit. Because the usual system is that one party gets two or three more seats than the other, so half the country is being ruled by someone with a two or three seats difference.

What I would do is something like put both parties together, each party suggests 20 of their top people. Put them together, that’s 40 and then by chance you pick out 20 of those and form the government. Now the Venetians used to do this and it worked for 1,000 years very well. They’d elect a group of people and then they would pick out a number by chance, they’d form another group and they’d choose some others and so on. And they used that to avoid bribery, corruptions, factions and so on.

But I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to get away from government and opposition model, where the opposition does nothing except attack. We say “look there are brilliant people on each side, let’s somehow use the constructive thinking on each side effectively”. And I think it’s a wonderful opportunity here in Australia to try something of the sort.

Do you think we’ll make the most of it?

I don’t think so, no. But it’s a great opportunity if things happened that way in an election, it’s a wonderful opportunity. Another alternative is some years ago I wrote a book on Why I Want To Be King Of Australia and that would be a good alternative too.

Yes, we’ll, we’ve got a Queen.

No, no the Queen would be fully in favour. I sent a copy of my book to Prince Philip and he said I’m delighted that somebody wants to be king of Australia.

Edward De Bono will join 35 leading speakers and thinkers at the Creative Innovation 2010 event, to be held on September 8-10  at the Melbourne Recital Centre. For more information visit www.ci2010.com.au.