s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

main track.
In the pun type of humour the double meaning of a word is used as the
pattern-switching device to force us along the side track.
Consider the following puns:
 Bob Hope had a bad Christmas. He was only given three golf clubs.
What is worse only two of them had swimming pools.
 Two healthy young ladies went for a tramp in the woods, but the tramp
got away.
The other mechanism of humour is shown in the next drawing. In this
mechanism we are taken to an apparently unreasonable point and
suddenly see our way back. For example:
 The ticket inspector came into the train compartment. The young man
began to search frantically for his ticket: top pockets, trouser pockets,
back pocket, coat on the rack, briefcase and everywhere. After a while the
inspector took pity on him and extracted the ticket from the young man s
mouth where it had been all along.
PERCEPTION AND PATTERNS
We need to be very much aware that the repertoire of patterns which
we have in our minds will determine our recognition, our abstraction, our
classifications, our analysis and all our thinking.
Art
One of the purposes of art is to help us stock our mind with farther
patterns. Art crystallizes patterns of experience so that we can absorb
them without having had to live through and learn them by a slow process
of induction. Art can also give us a range of experience we would never
otherwise have had. In a sense art is an accelerated life machine.
Exercise
It is a useful habit to stand back and then to try to pick out the patterns
that seem to be in use in certain situations. For instance, in much
psychotherapy the pattern is still Freudian: dig deep and find what
unconscious explanations there are for feelings and behaviour. In
education the pattern is that it is enough to provide information and then
allow the mind to acquire thinking habits as it deals with that information.
In politics it is the adversary system in which opposing parties claim the
rightness of their ideologies and seek electoral permission to impose that
ideology on everyone.
As an exercise, try to pick out the basic patterns that prevail in the
following areas:
1 TV advertising.
2 Industrial relations.
3 Newspapers.
4 Holiday travel.
5 House purchase.
6 Wearing jeans.
LATERAL THINKING
I first thought of the term  lateral thinking during an interview in
1967- The word has now become part of the English language and is in
wide use. This is because there was a real need to have a way of
describing the sort of thinking that was concerned with changing
perceptions and concepts. The word  creativity is much too broad and
much too vague. It covers artistic expression and all sorts of things which
have little to do with changing perceptions and concepts. Lateral thinking
can also be a deliberate and formal process for which there are tools.
There are two types of progress. One is fast, the other is very slow.
The first type of progress is illustrated below. We are going along and
a technical input or an idea allows us to move faster. Another input
accelerates our progress even further - and so on. There are people alive
today who were born before the first aeroplane flew. Some time ago, on a
journey across the Atlantic, I reflected that the spoonful of mashed potato
I was about to put into my mouth was actually travelling faster than a rifle
bullet. So were the other passengers on Concorde. Extraordinary progress
in a very short time.
Today at a cost of about $500 we can have on our desks a computer that
is more powerful than the first computer which cost about $5 million (in
today s terms) and filled three rooms.
In fact we can have a pretty powerful personal computer for as little as
$250. That also is amazing progress.
LATERAL THINKING
When the inspector had left, another passenger asked the young man if he
felt foolish.   Not at all, said the young man, "I was chewing the date off
the ticket . _
Hindsight and insight
The pattern switching that we observe in humour is exactly the same
process that occurs in hindsight and insight. We switch to a new pattern
and suddenly see that something is reasonable and obvious. In hindsight
any creative idea must be logical - otherwise we could never accept it as
having value. The mistake we make is to assume that since it is logical in
hindsight then the better exercise of logic could have got us there in the
first place. This mistake is only made by people who do not understand
the nature of patterning systems. Patterning systems are necessarily
asymmetric
- otherwise they would be quite useless. In the figure below the route
from A to B is very different from the route from B to A.
The purpose of lateral thinking is to provide a more deliberate means for
pattern-switching than relying on mistake or accident.
Lateral thinking seeks to achieve the pattern-switching that occurs in
insight.
The reason we have not paid serious attention to creativity is ________________
given by this  hindsight logic . Since every valued creative idea 53
DE BONO S THINKING COURSE
must always be logical in hindsight - otherwise we should never be able to
appreciate the value - we have then claimed that superior logic in the first
place should have achieved the idea and so there is never a need for creativity.
This is totally and absolutely wrong in a patterning system, though perfectly
correct in a passive  externally organized information system. Since we have
always been looking at passive systems we have never really seen the
mathematical necessity for creativity that there is in any self-organizing
information system.
Creativity and lateral thinking
I am often asked why it was necessary to invent the term  lateral thinking
when the word  creativity seemed quite adequate. The answer is that the
word  creativity is far from adequate and does not describe what I mean by
lateral thinking. That may be why the term  lateral thinking is now included in
the Oxford English Dictionary.
A creative person may have a way of looking at the world which is different
from the way other people see the world, as illustrated below.
Cs
->
-»
If that person is successful in expressing and communicating his own special
perception, then we call him or her creative and value the contribution that
takes some of us to see the world through a new perspective. We
acknowledge the creativity. But that person may be locked into that special
perception: unable to change perception or see the world in any other way.
Thus many creative people are actually  rigid at the same time. This does not
at all diminish their value to society and their ability to create within their
special perception. But in  lateral thinking I am interested in the ability to
change perception and to keep on changing perception. Clearly such people [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]