Our habits of thinking are too much judgement based and not enough design based. This arises from the origin with the GG3 (Greek Gang of Three). When this thinking came into Europe at the Renaissance, the Church ran schools, universities and thinking in general. What the Church needed was truth, logic and argument to prove heretics wrong. So we developed an excellent thinking system for ‘finding the truth’ but we never developed thinking ‘for creating value (design)’.
Our language also forces us to use judgement. We need to judge whether something is a ‘chair’ before we can us the word ‘chair’. We cannot easily say ‘a sort of thing for sitting on’. So everything ends up in sharp edged boxes. To these we can then apply the logic of Aristotle.
Sooner or later I am going to develop a very different sort of logic.
Edward de Bono, 6th June 2009
Interested in Thinking Differently? Learn the thinking tools that have revolutionised many public and private sector companies, helping them to innovate on demand. Attend a Dr Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking & Serious Creativity workshop across the UK – Go to www.indigobusiness.co.uk/calendar
