Edward de Bono (1933–2021,) fully Edward Francis Charles Publius de Bono, was a British psychologist and writer. A leading teacher of critical thinking, he is famous for coining the phrase “lateral thinking,” in which thought becomes a deliberate—rather than an instinctive or reactive—action.
Born in Malta, de Bono was a graduate of medicine from Malta University. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Christ Church-Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in psychology and physiology and then a DPhil in medicine. From 1976–83, he was a lecturer in medicine at Cambridge, and he is involved with several organizations to promote the skills of modern critical thinking, including the Cognitive Research Trust, Cambridge.
With the boom in the self-help book market in the 1970s, de Bono turned his attention to the more lucrative field of popular psychology. He published such popular books on problem-solving as The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967,) I Am Right and You Are Wrong: From Rock Logic to Water Logic (1992,) and Six Thinking Hats (1999.)
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We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday
People should realize we’re jerks just like them.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Fame
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday
Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Humor
Some people drift along like a cork on a river, feeling that they cannot do anything except drift, moment to moment. This is an attitude of mind. Everyone can be constructive even in tiny ways.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Goals
Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Ideas
Thinking is often regarded as an extension of the ego. Clever children in school base their egos on being clever and on being right all the time. They dislike group work because they cannot then show the rest of the class where the good idea originated. When the ego and thinking are treated as the same thing there is a reluctance to be wrong and a need to defend a point of view rather than to explore the situation. A person should be able to treat his thinking much as a tennis player treats his strokes: he should be able to walk off the court complaining that his backhand was not working very well on that occasion or that it required more practice.
This new meta-system is very much in favour of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Ego
In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Future
If you never change your mind, why have one?
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Mind, The Mind
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Thinking
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Memories, Memory
Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Ideas
I must say, I don’t feel very qualified to be a pop star. I feel very awkward at times in the role.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Fame
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Mistakes, Thinking
An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Judgement, Attention, Decision
One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity…
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Motivation
Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement.
—Edward de Bono
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Attention
One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: The Mind
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Ideas, Action
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: To Be Born Everyday, Creativity
Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Ideas
Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Attention
It is well known that “problem avoidance” is an important part of problem solving. Instead of solving the problem you go upstream and alter the system so that the problem does not occur in the first place.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Problem-solving
If you wait for opportunities to occur, you will be one of the crowd.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Opportunity
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Words
A memory is anything that happens and does not completely unhappen. The result is some trace which is left. The trace may last for a long time or it may last only for a short time. Information that comes into the brain leaves a trace in the altered behaviour of the nerve cells that form the memory surface.
A landscape is a memory surface. The contours of the surface offer an accumulated memory trace of the water that has fallen upon it. The rainfall forms little rivulets which combine into streams and then into rivers. Once the pattern of drainage has been formed then it tends to become more permanent since the rain is collected into the drainage channels and tends to make them deeper. It is the rainfall that is doing the sculpting and yet it is the response of the surface to the rainfall that is organising how the rainfall will do the sculpting.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Memory
Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Problem-solving
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