qualityview

An Interview With
Dr. Edward de Bono


by Bernie Perry

Creativity will be one of the key needs of the future.
It is becoming more and more central.

Edward de Bono is regarded as the leading international authority in the field of conceptual thinking and also the teaching of thinking as a skill. He is the originator of the term lateral thinking, which is now officially recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Born in Malta, de Bono earned a degree in medicine before studying psychology as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He has held faculty positions at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard.

De Bono has written more than 50 books, including Lateral Thinking, Six Thinking Hats and Serious Creativity.

QD: Your work takes you to many different countries. What's your perception of the status of the quality movement throughout the world?

de Bono: Certainly people are aware of quality. But it's difficult to really know how effectively they're using it in their organizations. In many countries, particularly Southeast Asia and Japan, the emphasis is more on developing new markets. Clearly there must be some quality; what they sell or produce obviously must be acceptable. But the focus is more on growth and increasing sales rather than expecting quality alone to rescue the organization.

QD: Have you noticed any particular differences between the way different countries approach quality?

de Bono: It's pretty uniform in the sense that the people involved in the quality movement all go to the same sources. In terms of quality being implemented, in many countries, like Japan, once something becomes part of the corporate culture, people really are expected to do it, and they do it. They don't need to be persuaded all the time. Once the decision has been made to make it part of the culture, then they all try hard to do it.

QD: You were one of the people featured in the March 1995 Quality Digest article about the new leaders of the quality revolution. I think most people would identify you as an expert on creativity. How do these two areas tie together?

de Bono: Clearly, quality is an underlying need. Whatever you're doing, you must have a quality product, quality service, customer satisfaction and so on. And you can get an initial payoff from giving quality some special attention. But then you come to some dead ends; the yields become less and less. At that point, unless you put in creativity, the quality program runs out of steam. There's nowhere it can go. There comes a point where just doing the same thing with better quality may not be the answer. You may need to change what you're doing, reconceptualize it, do it differently or stop doing it altogether.

So actually, creativity is an extension of quality. It should be included either from the beginning, alongside the other processes, or certainly at the point where the high initial yields start to become less. Fortunately, when it comes to the quality movement, there are people in place, there are structures, there are organizations, there are frameworks. If you can feed creativity into that, then your quality program will be more successful, first in what you do and second in how you do it.

I often mention another key point about quality and creativity. We generally talk about quality of products and services. But the one area where we really don't pay much attention to quality is the most important area of all: the quality of management thinking. Do you know of anyone who has done a quality survey on management thinking? Yet it's the key thing that drives the business. And clearly we don't have quality of management thinking if we have no understanding or skill of creativity.

QD: You once said that you see our lack of creativity as a stumbling block to improved quality. Is that basically what you're saying here?

de Bono: Yes. You can get so much yield without creativity and then you come to a point where to go farther, you need creativity. Just improving quality does not itself change concepts. You need creativity to help you change concepts.

QD: Can you give an example?

de Bono: Imagine a public service station where you've got people waiting in lines. Now, you can do all sorts of operational research analysis on how many people you need, service expectations, waiting time, delay and so forth. But no amount of analysis will give you the idea of opening another window where people can pay $5 or $10 to get immediate service. It's a different concept; it's a concept change. That won't come from improving quality in the existing system. And the danger of too much emphasis on quality is that it often takes up all our time, all our resources and all our attention. As a result, there really isn't enough mental effort being given to creating new concepts.

QD: Why haven't managers in the United States and other Western countries fully embraced the need for formal creative thinking methods?

de Bono: There are three key reasons. First, a manager's performance is usually assessed on a very short-term basis. An obvious strategy is to cut costs; then your bottom line looks good immediately. Creativity may have a longer payoff, so perhaps that's one reason managers are reluctant to adopt it.

Second, because creativity has been around longer in the United States, in some ways it's gotten a bad name. Managers see it as peripheral. They think it's only for advertisers and package designers, but not for engineers, accountants or people in charge.

Finally, most people's exposure to creativity has given them the impression that it's very flaky. Unfortunately, many practitioners in the field present it as such. They say they're going to inspire you, charge you up and do something wonderful for you. When nothing of value comes from it, people don't take it seriously.

QD: Can you envision anything that will shock managers into paying more attention to this creativity issue?

de Bono: Most managers are now in their positions because they have been successful at running cost-cutting programs. They've done their job and obviously been promoted on that basis. It's somewhat unlikely they're going to say: "Okay, we did our cost-cutting bit; now we need to do more on creativity." That's not where they're coming from. I've had very senior managers in major companies tell me, "At the moment we're very much involved with cost-cutting; creativity can wait." It's extraordinary!

Look at it this way. Many companies try to compete on one of two bases: low cost or value. It's going to be increasingly difficult to compete on low cost with other places like China, Indonesia and Eastern Europe. In the Ukraine, you can get a fully qualified engineer for $5 a month. Granted, the exchange rate is rather haywire, but on cost you're not going to be able to compete.

So you decide to compete on value. What does that mean? It can mean competing on the quality of the product, but that is easily transportable. For example, Malaysia decided to have a car industry. Within seven years, they were judged by consumer magazines and J.D. Powers to have made an excellent car. In fact, it's rated by J.D. Powers in Europe ahead of BMW. So just producing quality products won't be enough. Value will come from concepts, from creativity. So to compete in the world, you need to become very creative.

QD: You've often suggested that the time may come when conformists are more creative than rebels. What do you mean?

de Bono: Well, if we look at creativity as just being rebellious, just not wanting to do things the way they are normally done, then those who have that type of motivation will be the creative people, simply because they have the motivation. But once we know the game of creativity-what happens in the brain and how it works as a patterning system-then that is a process which we can understand and learn.

Conformists are better at learning games. If they learn this game, they're likely to play it better than the rebels. But they must have the motivation. They must decide that creativity matters, learn the game and then use it. If they do, they can turn out to be more creative than the rebels, who don't want to learn the game.

It seems to be a paradox, but it really isn't. It's exactly what the Japanese did with quality. They decided that this is the game they were going to play, and they played it well.

QD: When we interviewed you three years ago, you were just beginning to establish a network of people certified to train others in your Six Thinking Hats method. What's the status of that project now?

de Bono: About 240 are certified worldwide. Some of them are more active than others, but it's something that is spreading quite widely. The total number of people trained to use the method is about 20,000.

QD: I think some people tend to view the Six Hats method as kind of a gimmick. How do you respond to that?

de Bono: Although it seems to be such a simple process, people who have introduced it in an organization find that it does change the whole culture of meetings. People become much more constructive and creative. They think in parallel instead of arguing against each other. People who think it's a gimmick either just don't know much about it or, if they know anything about it, they know the wrong things. Whatever the case, I'd say they're just plain foolish.

Six Hats is being taken up by those organizations that really care about the quality of their thinking. That's a key point; a lot of thinking takes place at meetings, and the Six Hats is a powerful way of holding much better, much quicker and much more constructive meetings.

QD: Can you give some examples of how Six Hat Thinking has been used in a serious way?

de Bono: I was talking to someone from Statoil, the big Norwegian oil company. They introduced the Six Hats at their very senior-level strategy meetings and reduced the time of the meetings by 66 percent. That's a huge reduction. A few years ago, people from one of the top IBM labs told me they reduced their meeting times by 75 percent. That's a big, big change achieved just by introducing a simple technique.

A fellow in Australia did some deliberate research on Six Hats. He was using it with a team that had to come up with ideas for safety at work. That team had three times as much output as those not using Six Hats.

I met a fellow who runs a large company in the United States with annual sales of about $2 billion. He said: "You know, the way I used to run my company was to sit in at meetings, and when anyone said something with which I disagreed, I would jump on that person. I would attack the person. That's how I ran my company. Now, with the Six Hats method, that's all changed. I've got to think along with everyone else. Just sitting and attacking is no longer an option."

QD: I understand you've also certified some people in your lateral thinking techniques.

de Bono: Lateral thinking has been a more recent certification process, and organizations are taking it up. I think Motorola had 22 of their people trained in lateral thinking certification at one site alone. People are beginning to realize that improving our creative thinking skills is very important. It's not just a matter of exhortation. The fundamental way we think, our habit of thinking, has not changed or even been thought about for 2,500 years.

The brain has two strikes against it. First, the brain itself is designed to make sense of the world around it based on the presumption that the world will always be the same. And so it forms patterns or routines. Second, our thinking systems, derived from the Greek gang of three (Plato, Socrates and Aristotle), do the same. We create concepts, categories, laws and principles based on the past and then hope they apply to the future.

So if the world is exactly the same as it was, we can find our way around. But if the world is changing, that thinking system will be inadequate, not only for coping with change, but also for building opportunities out of change.

QD: Would you like to add anything else?

de Bono: I expect we'll face some real difficulties in the future. As computers take over more and more of the information processing, the need for executives will actually become less and less. An executive's only function is to make those jumps between information that computers cannot. The main roles of people in the future will involve perception-what you feed into the computer-and value creation-what you get out. Both of those need a lot of creativity.

Many existing skills will simply be inadequate in the future. They won't be worth paying someone for because you'll be able to get a computer to accomplish the same things. A computer doesn't get tired, it doesn't need health benefits and so on. So a lot of the thinking that people do today will simply be taken over by computers.

Creativity will be one of the key needs of the future. And creativity is a very fundamental thinking skill; it's not just a direction or strategy. It's as fundamental as analysis; it's as fundamental as judgment. I see it becoming more and more central.

But the generation of managers in positions today have not gotten there through that realization. They got there through the days when it was enough to grow, then it was enough to cut costs, and then it was enough to compete on the basis of trying to match what someone else was doing. Those reasons are the reasons people got to be where they are. They will be insufficient in the future.

About the author . . .

Bernie Perry is president of Perry Training and Development. He is one of a few Master Trainers authorized to certify others on de Bono's behalf. Perry can be reached at (502) 456-1459 or through the Internet at 70647.1312@compuserve.com.