Authors: Edward de Bono
Danger of
possibility
Beware. Some information together with a possibility can quickly condense into a certainty. Consider what happened with vampires.
A certain Elizabeth Bartolo was told that if she had a bath in the blood of virgins she would live for ever. So she had her servants find virgins and exsanguinate them. They then dumped the bloodless bodies around the area. What was the possibility?
There is a blood disease called porphyria which has several effects. One of them is severe skin rashes caused by exposure to sunlight. So such people stayed indoors and only appeared in the evening. Their skin was unusually white as a result. Another effect of porphyria is bleeding gums. So white-faced people with bleeding gums only appeared during the evening or night.
Then there were the bloodless corpses found around the area. The result was a belief in vampires.
Vampires were supposed to be allergic to garlic. By chance, two people I know with porphyria are also allergic to garlic! A possibility becomes more and more certain.
Possibilities with a good story can quickly become fact and belief. So we are right to be wary of possibility. At the
same time we have to accept the huge importance of possibility in thinking.
It took me about 20 years to find a way of attaching my napkin so that my tie was not dirtied during a meal. I tried all sorts of clips and pins but invariably lost them by leaving them on the table. The final solution is incredibly simple. If I remember to describe it later in this book, you can use it immediately instead of waiting 20 years like I had to. That is the power of knowledge. So knowledge is essential – but so are possibilities.
If you have invented logic, there is much more fun in showing someone to be wrong than in proving a point. Those who do not yet understand logic will not appreciate your proof but they will appreciate your attack. Furthermore, as you seek to teach your logic to others, you will spend most of the time pointing out their errors.
So
argument was invented, perfected and disseminated by the GG3. Socrates in particular was very interested in dialectic or argument.
Argument became such a central method that, amazingly, we have been content to use it for 2,400 years in all sorts of areas. We use it in parliament and in government. We use it in the courts of law. We use it in business negotiations. We use it in family disagreements
and discussions. It works very well. There was, and is, a real need for a method of showing incorrect ideas and positions to be wrong. Without that there would be chaos.
Yet it is a crude, primitive and very inefficient way of exploring ideas. Argument works best when we are seeking to destroy a position, statement or assumption. It works well when we are trying to decide between two different positions.
Argument does not work well at all when we are seeking to explore a subject. It is negative. It has no generative qualities. Argument is a very good way of establishing the truth but useless for exploration. Exploration means exploring and discovering new aspects of the subject. Argument can only be concerned with 'know' aspects. You can argue about which road to take on a road map, but argument cannot create the road map.
Unfortunately, we use argument to explore a subject because we have no alternative method.
Faults of argument
The following faults of argument apply to the use of argument to explore a subject:
It is only fair to say that argument was never designed to explore a subject.
Is there any alternative to argument for exploring a subject? There is now – for the first time in 2,400 years – one example of which is given in the next section.
Why has it taken so long to come up with such a simple and powerful method? Because our intellectual culture and education was determined by the Church in the Middle Ages and argument was what the Church needed to prove heretics wrong.
Parallel thinking
Imagine a rather ornate building of a square shape. There are four people, each of whom is facing one aspect of this building. Through a mobile phone or walkie-talkie, each person is insisting and arguing that he or she is facing the most beautiful aspect of the building.
Parallel thinking means that they change how they go about this argument. All four people move around to the south side of the building together. Then all of them move on to the west side. Then the north and finally the east side. So all of them, in parallel, are looking at the same side of the building at any one moment.
Instead of argument, where A is adversarially attacking B, we have a system where A and B are both looking and thinking in the same direction – but the directions change as they move around. That is parallel thinking.
In our lives we need a symbol to indicate the direction of thinking at any one moment to ensure we are thinking in the same direction.
A zebra is grazing and hears a rustle in the grass. A chemical is released in the brain, which sensitises all the circuits concerned with danger. As soon as the lion appears, the zebra is prepared to flee. The reverse happens in the lion's brain. As soon as the lion sees the zebra, the chemicals alert the lion's brain to positive action.
For such reasons we need to separate out the modes of thinking because there is confusion if we try and do everything at once. We end up just operating in a negative mode.
The purpose of the Six Hats is to separate the modes of thinking and to ensure that everyone is thinking in parallel in the same mode at any one moment. We use the symbol of the Thinking Hat.
The Six Thinking Hats
I designed this method in 1984. It is now very widely used by four-year-olds in school and by top executives in the world's largest corporations.
The hats
There is no fixed order of use. You can choose the sequence you want. In training, some of the more useful sequences will be suggested.
Blue Hat:
This is the organising or control hat. It is rather like the conductor of an orchestra. It is used right at the beginning of a discussion to decide the focus and what sequence of hats to use. During the meeting the chairperson or facilitator metaphorically wears the Blue Hat in a disciplinary way. People are reminded of the hat in use if they stray from that mode. The Blue Hat is used at
the end for the outcome, summary and next steps. The Blue Hat is like a bookend: one at the beginning and one at the end.
White Hat:
Think of white and paper and printout. The White Hat is concerned with information. What information do we have? What information is missing? What information do we need – and how are we going to get it? Questions can be asked under the White Hat. If conflicting information is put forward, there is no argument. Both versions are put down in parallel and then discussed when that information needs to be used.
Red Hat:
Think of red and fire and warmth. The Red Hat is to do with feelings, emotions, intuition. Under the Red Hat all participants are invited to put forward their feelings. In a normal discussion you can only put forward these things if they are disguised as logic. Here there is no need to justify or explain them. They exist and can therefore be put forward. The Red Hat period is very brief and simply allows these things to be put forward.
Black Hat:
Think of the black of a judge's robes. The Black Hat is for critical thinking. What is wrong with the idea? What are its weaknesses? The Black Hat looks at the down side, why something will not work, the risks and dangers. All the negative comments that might be made during a meeting are concentrated under the Black
Hat. The Black Hat is very useful, possibly the most useful of all the hats, but it has its defined place.
Yellow Hat:
Think of sunshine and optimism, dawn and a new day. This focuses on the positive. What are the benefits? The
values? How could it be done? Education is mostly about critical thinking. We never really develop 'value sensitivity'. This means the ability to find value in anything – even things we do not like and will not use. Nevertheless we should, honestly and objectively, find value in such things. Without value sensitivity, creativity can be a waste of time. I have sat in on meetings where good ideas have been generated but no one has been able to see the value of the ideas.
Green Hat:
Think of vegetation, growth and branches. This is directly concerned with creativity. When the Green Hat is in use, participants are expected to make a creative effort or keep quiet. They do not like keeping quiet so they make that effort. This means looking for new ideas. It means considering alternatives, both the obvious ones and new ones. It means generating possibilities. It means modifying and changing a suggested idea, possibly through the deliberate use of lateral thinking tools.
That is all there is. Six Hats that allow us to think in parallel to explore a subject in a constructive and not adversarial way. This Six Hats method of parallel thinking
challenges all those at the meeting to use their minds fully and not just in the adversarial mode. Someone who is against the idea being discussed is expected honestly and objectively to be able to see the values in the idea.
The framework of the Six Hats might seem at first to complicate discussions and make them much longer. In fact, use of the Hats reduces meeting time to a quarter or even a tenth. Proper training in the method is recommended, but years of experience across a wide range of cultures, levels and sectors have shown that it works very well.
Showing off
One of the attractions of argument is that you can show your superiority by proving someone else wrong. You cannot do that with the Six Hats. If you want to show off, you can only do it by performing better under each hat.
Under the White Hat you think of more information or better questions than anyone else. Under the Black Hat you think of more dangers and risks. Under the Yellow Hat you show more values. Under the Green Hat you put forward more ideas and possibilities.
This is the showing off of performance – not of attack.
As with so many other concepts in this book, I want to make it clear that argument is an excellent method when
used in the right place. But it is not 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).
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!
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 our
perception 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 the
term '
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 a
provocation 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 brain, reach a stable state or a local equilibrium. Mathematicians know that provocation is needed in order to move towards a more global equilibrium. So there is an absolute need for a provocative operation in
language. This did not exist, so it was necessary to create one.
Language is a judgement system. Things we perceive are put into boxes with a label on them. We see something that we recognise or judge to be a car.
Immediately we see it as a car, the whole 'pattern' or file is opened and we have access to all we know about cars. The label or word is the connection between the external world and our stored knowledge. We probably could operate without words but it would be far less efficient.
The word 'is' indicates a definite judgement – not a
possibility. We do not have a practical word to indicate that something is possible. We really need a word to indicate that something is just possible or quite probable. We could do that with a whole sentence, as I have done here, or we could use the phrase 'may be'. A simple word would allow us to see the world in a more
complex and subtle way.
We have a word for 'friend' and a word for 'enemy'. Some people can be fitted into one of those two boxes. We do not really have a neutral word for someone who is neither a friend nor an enemy but with whom we have to deal. We could use the word 'acquaintance', but you would not call your tax inspector or your car mechanic an acquaintance. We certainly do not have a word for someone who is half friend and half enemy (or different proportions). There are many people who are friends but who, under difficult circumstances, or when placed under pressure, can become enemies.
Language is even more inadequate when dealing with complex situations. Such situations can usually be described in a sentence or even a paragraph. Such descriptions may be adequate but they do not place that situation in our perception range – it is difficult to recognise such a situation without a single word.
Consider the following negotiating situation: 'Unless the benefits are laid out more clearly and unless you are prepared to give up on some of your fixed demands, we shall not make much progress. I would like you to lay out clearly what you see as the benefits for my side.'
Such a description may adequately describe the situation but is cumbersome and even awkward to use.
We do have a word like 'supermarket' to describe a quite complex operation in a succinct way. We do not, however, have a word for a conflict that cannot be solved because the leaders on each side do not want to solve the conflict (because they would instantly lose their importance).
There is an absolute need for a new sort of
language that allows us to perceive, recognise and communicate complex situations instantly. Our actions and behaviour would be greatly improved. We would no longer be forced into the very limited boxes offered by traditional language.
So, while language is immensely valuable for thinking, there is also a downside. Language freezes perceptions into concepts and words. These words then determine our perceptions for ever into the future. Think how, as I mentioned, the word 'enemy' determines our perception of someone with whom we disagree. We do not have a word that indicates someone who is half good and half
bad. The crudeness of language has a negative effect on perception and then on thinking.
Some sort of 'coding' is inevitable in human progress. To overcome this language situation I have invented a coding system that allows us to describe complex situations instantly and launched it on the Internet. Of course, being a code, it cuts across all languages and can be used to communicate with someone speaking a different language.
Some of the codes are arbitrary fixed codes. For example, we might say, 'We have a code 53 here.' That conveys the whole meaning given above. Others can be constructed from a basic matrix of nine key concepts. (See www.debonocode.org for the codes.)
Language is an extremely valuable device and we could never have progressed far without it. But language is by no means as perfect or as complete as we may believe. A lot of further development is needed and this will not happen by chance.
The
code system mentioned above is necessary. Such a system also allows for international communication. You can use English to find the code but then people can understand your code in Chinese, Russian, German, Telugu or any language at all – provided there is a simple version of the code in that language.