Edward de Bono's weekly message: We Need to Add...

Complacent, adequate, sufficient all imply that something is not wrong or bad. Our normal language and thinking behaviour does not have a convenient way of saying: "That is excellent but not enough." Or we might need to say, "That is excellent, but that is only part of the picture." When I talk about the need for better thinking, I sometimes assume that I am attacking existing thinking as being wrong. It is not wrong. It is only wrong when it assumes that it is sufficient. We need to add perceptual thinking, creative thinking, design thinking and exploratory thinking.

Edward de Bono
25th November 2009

EACI's Creativity Walk of Fame

Edward de Bono was just awarded the inaugural membership of the Creativity Walk of Fame by the European Association of Creativity and Innovation. Congratulations, Edward!

Edward de Bono's weekly message: No natural limit

There is no natural limit to traffic - which is increasing everywhere. There is no natural limit to communication which is also increasing rapidly. The excellence of the communications channels does not ensure that what goes through those channels is of high value. Perhaps we need some simple code for communication. This might distinguish five areas: reply; vital; important; useful; fun.

Edward de Bono
30th October 2009

Edward de Bono's weekly message: Rush to Design

In conflict situations we rush to judgement. In courts of law we rush to judgement. We never seek to design a way forward.

Design is putting together what you have in order to deliver the value you want.

Design is every bit as important in real life as analysis, yet design is nowhere in education outside graphic design, etc.

Design should be a key part of education from the youngest age upwards. I used to run a design competition for youngsters. The range of concepts used by them was very impressive. One day I should write a book ‘Design for education’ to be used in all classes.

Learn Blue Ocean Strategy in London

The Blue Ocean Strategy Simulation, October 13-14 in London, will teach you the principles, methodologies, and tools of the bestselling strategy book.

In a rich, interactive simulation, teams will manage a company facing vicious competition in a declining industry. Using Blue Ocean thinking, you will re-define the industry, launch innovative new products, and learn to make the competition irrelevant.

Learn to apply Blue Ocean thinking to your own business. Get more info and register online for the Blue Ocean Strategy Simulation.

Is Google Losing Its Vaunted Culture of Innovation?

Google is frequently lauded as amongst the most creative companies in the world. This week's Economist describes how Google, like every large organization, has struggled to retain its culture of innovation during its exponential growth from a startup to a hegemon.

Scenius

Kevin Kelly has a nice overview of Brian Eno's concept of "scenius", or collaborative genius. I imagine that Dr. de Bono would approve of Eno's pithy turn of phrase. He would certainly agree with Eno's observation that collaboration enhances innovation. The best new ideas come from groups of individuals who interact and respond to each other, rather than from a solitary genius working in isolation.

Women - Small and Mid-Sized Businesses - Multimedia

Edward de Bono will open next month's "Women - Small and Mid-Sized Businesses - Multimedia" conference in Warsaw, Poland.

The conference's goal is "to present to the SMB sector, especially to women managing their own companies the ways of introducing new (creative) solutions for organisation, management, offered services or products or for the applied technologies, to show methods for project team-building and for applying lateral thinking." The conference is part of the EU's Year of Creativity and Innovation program.

Edward de Bono's weekly message: Design in the curriculum!

Schools are all about knowledge and analysis. So are universities. Most human thinking is based on analysis which allows us to identify standard situations and then we can apply the standard behaviour or solution. This is like a doctor in a clinic diagnosing the disease and then prescribing the standard treatment.

This behaviour is excellent and most useful. But it is ebne. Design is equally important. Yet design does not figure on the curriculum in schools and universities.

I used to run a design competition in an education magazine. There was a very good response even from youngsters as young as four years old.

Edward de Bono
5th August 2009

Edward de Bono's weekly message: New book

My latest book (published July 2nd) is called 'THINK: before it is too late'. In it I suggest that the biggest problem facing humanity is not climate change but inadequate thinking. We are very complacent and even proud of our thinking. We can land men on the moon. WE can tap atomic energy. We have the internet, WE have supersonic flight etc. We have done very well in the area of science and technology because we have developed 'thinking for finding the truth'.

I have suggested the new word 'ebne' which means excellent but not enough. Our existing thinking is ebne but not enough. We have never developed 'thinking for creating value'.

In conflicts we rush to judge who is wrong and seek to punish that party. We do not try to design a way forward.

Edward de Bono
20th July 2009

Coke Freestyle

Coca-Cola is rolling out what looks to be a groundbreaking new drinks dispenser: Coke Freestyle. Your standard fountain machine at any fast-food joint has six or eight different types of fizzy drinks - Coke, Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Sprite, etc. Instead of trifling 6-8 options, the Coke Freestyle machines will give consumers more than a hundred flavors.

At first blush, this might seem like a new version of the cable TV problem: "Five hundred channels and nothing on." But Coke Freestyle is actually a terrifically innovative development.

First, it offers huge scope for new product development. It is expensive and time-consuming to develop new drinks, pilot them in various test markets, and (maybe) roll them out nationally. Freestyle bypasses this entire process, allowing Coca-Cola to test hundreds - even thousands - of new products simultaneously. The cost of a new drink is minimal - just slap a different bag of syrup in the machine, update the machine's software with the new recipe, and that's it. And because each machine via the Internet to Coca-Cola's IT systems, the results of these experiments are available to managers in real-time.

Second, Freestyle enables regional differentiation. Maybe Peach Coke will be popular in Georgia but a flop everywhere else. Similarly, whilst the nation as a whole might shun Java Coke, it could be a huge hit with Seattlites.

Third, Coca-Cola can observe how tastes change throughout the day. For example, Freestyle has led Coke's managers to discover a surprising, mid-afternoon increase in sales of caffeine-free and sugar-free drinks. This valuable insight will drive some of their marketing decisions, enabling them to better target consumers in the post-lunch lull.

Finally, Coke Freestyle facilitates better inventory management. The dispensers monitor their own inventory levels, signalling store managers when a bag of syrup starts to run dry. In other words, Coca-Cola is applying the just-in-time management philosophy to its drinks machines, which allows the company to tie up less capital.

In short, the new dispenser is a huge advance for the fizzy drinks industry.

Edward de Bono's New Book

Edward de Bono's latest book is now available: Think! Before It's Too Late: 23 Reasons Why World Thinking Is So Poor.

At present, it's available only in the UK. So far, there's no word on a US release.

Innovation in Public Transportation

Could a secret weapon against climate change be hiding in the mountains of South America? According to the New York Times, maybe so.

Yesterday's edition includes a fascinating article about public transportation in Bogota. The Colombian capital - a city of some 9 million people - has implemented a high-speed bus network called TransMilenio ("TransMillenium"), which has simultaneously slashed passengers' commute times and reduced the city's fuel use by 60%.

How? In a sense, the network is a bus-subway hybrid. In other words, the city has taken the speed and efficiency of subways and the low costs of buses, combining them to create a completely new model.

TransMilenio operates with dedicated lanes; it doesn't share pavement with cars, trucks, or motorcycles. It is also designed to transfer large numbers of passengers very quickly (as opposed to traditional buses, where passengers board individually). Finally, the stations are large and centrally located (unlike traditional buses, which stop for passengers every 2-3 blocks). As such, TransMilenio moves large numbers of people very quickly through the city, and it doesn't get gridlocked during rush-hour traffic. A bus system is also significantly cheaper to build and operate than a subway system.

It's a terrifically innovative solution to a universal problem, and cities around the world are studying and adopting the TransMilenio model. If rapid-transit bus networks become commonplace, the decreased fossil fuel consumption could make a sizable dent in the climate change problem.

Des Moines Innovation Summit

de Bono Consulting CEO and President, Barbara Stennes, is gearing up for the Innovation Summit for Business Leaders in Des Moines on July 23.

The interactive and engaging event will explore the skills needed to become more innovative, and how to engage your workforce in strategic innovation during challenging times. Attendees will also participate in the Medici Game, led by simulations expert, Dan Topf.

Learn more about the Innovation Summit.

Register for the Innovation Summit.

Airline Innovation

Ryanair, Europe's leading discount airline, has an innovative idea for air travel: standing room only.

I'm pretty sure that the Onion had this idea years ago, but I can't find in their archives.

Edward de Bono's weekly message: Perception

It is not possible to pay attention to everything at once. In a market there are different stalls so that you need only pay attention to one thing - once you have chosen that thing. The CoRT programme so widely used in schools provides frameworks for directing attention. It is incredible that education has never realised that attention and perception are a much more important part of thinking than logic. Yet such things are completely absent in education. Many years ago, David Perkins at Harvard showed that ninety per cent of errors of thinking were errors of perception. Goedel's theorem shows how from within a system you can never logically prove the starting points - which remain arbitrary perceptions.

Again it may be that the Church influence on thinking neglected perception because in Church thinking matters of faith replaced actual perception.

Edward de Bono
20th June 2009

Cement Your Reputation as a Leader of Innovative Thinking

To celebrate the European Year of Creativity & Innovation Edward de Bono, currently European Ambassador for Thinking 2009, has launched an online competition to find his greatest students.

All creative thinkers who use de Bono methods are invited to submit their success stories in a very creative way—by blogging on one of Edward de Bono’s newest websites. Find out more at http://www.debonosociety.com/profiles/blogs/edward-de-bono-launches-online.

Note: de Bono Consulting will be happy to help any client or trainer in our U.S. network write your story. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Call 515-278-1292 to arrange an interview time.
2. Spend 15 to 30 minutes on the scheduled phone interview with our writer, Kathy Myers, co-founder of de Bono Thinking Systems
3. We’ll develop your story and send it back to you for your editing/approval.
4. Then follow the directions at the website above to post the story as a blog.

Can't think of a success story? The contest is open until the end of December, 2009. Call us to talk about designing an application of the tools, executing, and documenting the results this fall. We'll support you each step of the way!

For examples of de Bono success stories, order my book, Innovation Case by Case. The book includes 20 accounts of situations where de Bono thinkers applied the tools and achieved notable results.

-Barbara Stennes, de Bono Consulting

Training Magazine Top 125 Contest

Training magazine is now accepting applications for it's Top 125 contest. Visit http://www.trainingmag.com/msg/training/top125/index.jsp for details and to apply.

Inhalable Chocolate

Here's an innovative new product: inhalable chocolate.

Innovation and the Economic Crisis

The OECD has released a new report, Policy Responses to the Economic Crisis: Investing in Innovation for Long Term Growth, which documents the relationship between innovation and economic growth. Specifically, the OECD asks how the recession is likely to affect those factors that are most important for long-term economic growth and development, such as innovation and entrepreneurship.

Not surprisingly, they find that companies are cutting their investments in innovation, such as R&D. Other metrics of innovation, such as venture capital investment, show similar trends. This is in line with historical trends, as innovation expenditure generally tracks GDP growth. The problem, of course, is that innovation is precisely one of the drivers of economic recovery. As more firms slash their budgets for innovation, the more difficult it will be to claw our way out of the recession.

But the picture is not entirely bleak. If history is any guide, economic crisis also spurs innovation, in the sense that inefficient companies go bankrupt and scrappy startups pioneer new business models. It's likely that the seeds of tomorrow's Fortune 500 companies are being planted right now.

The report describes other mechanisms by which the crisis is affecting innovation, such as world trade, human capital, and clean technology. Furthermore, it analyzes the policy responses of individual OECD member countries to the crisis, in terms of the size and focus of their various stimulus packages.

It's an excellent report. Do have a read.