Dr. Edward de Bono Interview – Written By Victoria Carver
EdB clearly lies when he says he “invented Six Hats in one afternoon”!
Dr. Edward de Bono Interview – Written by Victoria Carver
Victoria Carver: Your Six Thinking Hats method for individual and collaborative thinking has had a profound impact on the way meetings are held, decisions reached, products designed and evaluated, and crises resolved in large and small corporations, governments, and families around the world. It’s deceptively simple, yet powerful. How did you come up with the Six Thinking Hats?
Edward de Bono: Six Hats was actually just written up one afternoon. I had to write an article for something. I tried to imagine a situation for creative thinking, but if the environment was such that the greatest motivation of everyone around was to fuel their ego by saying, “That won’t work,” and “That’s wrong,” “That’s not going to happen,” and so on and so on – until we could move them through that, it wasn’t going to happen. To move out of such an entrenched negative mode of thinking by saying, “Don’t do it,” doesn’t make sense. But to say, “There is a time and place where that sort of critical thinking is perfectly correct, but other times where it’s not,” might work.
So it started out as a reaction to the negativity. That’s why, in fact, in my first Six Hats edition, I was probably a little too harsh on the Black Hat – because it was so overused. And then I changed that in the more recent edition to explain that it’s a very valuable Hat, but it’s just overused.
VC: So in writing the article you had to come up with a way to corral the critical thinking into one space – under the Black Hat. But how did you come up with the other hats?
EdB: Well, you see, if you say there is a time and place for the Black Hat, but not all the time, then what happens at the other times? If, for example, you then mix up the feelings, which I labeled the Red Hat, with other kinds of thinking, then you never know when you’re getting feelings and when you’re getting something else. So you separate the Red Hat and express the feelings intentionally in their own time and place. Following the same procedure with the remaining kinds of thinking, you end up getting everyone’s best thinking from every angle on the topic and removing the ego-driven argument. (NOTE: DOES NOT ANSWER QUESTION!)
Podcast 69. Edward de Bono: Criticisms and controversies
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/education-bookcast/69-edward-de-bono-criticisms-jEcqGixdNZS/
“About this Episode
I’ve spent a total of seven episodes up till now on Edward de Bono’s work on creativity, lateral thinking, and the workings of the mind. While reading his books, a number of criticisms arose in my mind which I never felt I had the chance to fully express.
In the name of balance, I also looked for any criticisms of de Bono online, and I found some quite damning allegations. My criticisms from his books and these allegations are topics I would like to spend one episode talking about.
The main problems with de Bono’s books are two: (1) they are too repetitive (they all seem to say the same thing, with occasional novelties); and (2) they provide no references (ever! in 67 books by an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated author with a PhD!!).
Each of these is concerning for different reasons. If de Bono kept “writing the same book” 67 times, why did he feel the need to publish so many books? And if he’s supposed to be an authority on creativity, why couldn’t he have come up with new ideas to fill those 67 books with?
The problem of references appears even more concerning after reading allegations from de Bono’s former associates that his work is practically all plagiarised.
This would certainly explain his unwillingness to write references, since he would be trying to claim all those other people’s work as his own.”
“was Edward de Bono, who has died at 88, a genius or just a master of gibberish?”
But while his books flew off the shelves and his profile and bank balance soared — his property portfolio included the Bahamas, Ireland, New York, Venice, Sydney, London, Norfolk and Malta — not everyone was convinced.
Some called him the master of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’, or the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. Others felt he traded on gullibility with his endless psychobabble.
‘De Bono has the great salesman’s gift of being fluent in the international language of gibberish,’ commented the Daily Mail’s Craig Brown, adding that ‘if the life and career of Edward de Bono can teach us anything, it is that no one ever lost money blowing his own trumpet’.
Daphne Caruana Galizia (dec.)
Edward de Bono found shelter under the skirts of Robert Maxwell’s legal team in his effort to cling on to the Six Hats concept that he filched.
Robert Maxwell – of the Mirror Group pension scam – who later committed suicide.
Labour gerontocracy update
