Edward de Bono

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Edward de Bono
British Malta
Died9 June 2021(2021-06-09) (aged 88)
Known forLateral thinking
Spouse
Josephine Hall-White
(m. 1971, divorced)
Children3 sons, 1 daughter
Websitewww.debono.com

Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono (19 May 1933 – 9 June 2021)[1] was a Maltese physician and commentator. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote many books on thinking including Six Thinking Hats.[2]

Life and career

Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born in Malta on 19 May 1933.[3] He was the son of Josephine Burns de Bono.

Educated at

MA in psychology and physiology. He represented Oxford in polo and set two canoeing records. He then gained a PhD degree in medicine from Trinity College, Cambridge
.

De Bono held faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge (where he helped to establish the university's medical school), London and Harvard.

University of Central England (now called Birmingham City University) and Dublin City University. De Bono held the Da Vinci Professor of Thinking chair at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona, US.[6] He was one of the 27 Ambassadors for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009.[7]

The originator of the term 'Lateral Thinking', de Bono wrote 85 books with translations into 46 languages.[5] He taught his thinking methods to government agencies, corporate clients, organizations and individuals, privately or publicly in group sessions. He promoted the World Center for New Thinking (2004–2011), based in Malta, which applied Thinking Tools to solution and policy design on the geopolitical level.

In 1976, de Bono took part in a radio debate for the BBC with British philosopher A. J. Ayer, on the subject of effective democracy.[8]

Starting on Wednesday 8 September 1982, the BBC ran a series of 10 weekly programmes entitled de Bono's Thinking Course.[9] In the shows, he explained how thinking skills could be improved by attention and practice. The series was repeated the following year. A book with the same title accompanied the series. In May 1994, he gave a half-hour Opinions lecture televised on Channel 4 and subsequently published in The Independent as "Thinking Hats On".[10] In 1995, he created a futuristic documentary film, 2040: Possibilities by Edward de Bono, depicting a lecture to an audience of viewers released from a cryogenic freeze for contemporary society in the year 2040.[5]

Convinced that a key way forward for humanity is a better language, he published The Edward de Bono Code Book in 2000. In this book, he proposed a suite of new words based on numbers, where each number combination represents a useful idea or situation that currently does not have a single-word representation. For example, de Bono code 6/2 means "Give me my point of view and I will give you your point of view." Such a code might be used in situations where one or both of the two parties in a dispute are making insufficient effort to understand the other's perspective.[11]

Other ideas

De Bono invented the L game, which he introduced in his book The Five-Day Course in Thinking.

In 2000, de Bono advised a UK

Foreign Office committee that the Arab–Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread (e.g. pita flatbread). De Bono argued that low zinc levels leads to heightened aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.[12][13]

Edward de Bono argued that companies could raise money just as governments now do – by printing it. He put forward the idea of private currency as a claim on products or services produced by the issuer.[14]

Critiques

In the Handbook of Creativity, Robert J. Sternberg writes,

Equally damaging to the scientific study of creativity, in our view, has been the takeover of the field, in the popular mind, by those who follow what might be referred to as a pragmatic approach. Those taking this approach have been concerned primarily with developing creativity, secondarily with understanding it, but almost not at all with testing the validity of their ideas about it. [...] Perhaps the foremost proponent of this approach is Edward De Bono, whose work on lateral thinking and other aspects of creativity has had what appears to be considerable commercial success.[15]

Frameworks For Thinking is an evaluation of 42 popular thinking frameworks conducted by a team of researchers. Regarding Edward de Bono they write,

[he] is more interested in the usefulness of developing ideas than proving the reliability or efficacy of his approach. There is sparse research evidence to show that generalised improvements in thinking performance can be attributed to training in the use of CoRT [Cognitive Research Trust] or Thinking Hats tools. An early evaluation of CoRT reported significant benefits for Special Educational Needs (SEN) pupils... However, in a more recent study with Australian aboriginal children (Ritchie and Edwards, 1996), little evidence of generalisation was found other than in the area of creative thinking.[16]

Summarising de Bono's 1985 work in Conflicts: A Better Way to Resolve Them, M. Afzalur Rahim, distinguished professor of management at Western Kentucky University with a particular focus on conflict management in organizations, gives his view that, as pertains to Rahim's own field of research, "De Bono's approach to total elimination of conflict is no different from the approaches of the classicists. This approach to dealing with conflict is completely out of tune with modern thinking and, therefore, unsatisfactory."[17]

Personal life

In 1971 he married Josephine Hall-White. They had two sons, Caspar and Charlie, and later divorced.[18] His will, published after his death, named two more children, another son, Francis Edward de Bono, also known as Edward de Bono, the son of Magdalena Szekely, and a daughter, Juliana Pars.[19]

He has honorary degrees from the

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,[20] and the University of Dundee.[21]

Asteroid

2541 Edebono discovered by Luboš Kohoutek is named after him.[22]

Published works

De Bono on Channel 4 lecture programme Opinions, produced by Open Media in 1994

A partial list of books by de Bono includes:

De Bono also wrote numerous articles published in refereed and other journals, including The Lancet and Clinical Science.

See also

Research on Edward de Bono's methods

  1. Can Simple Ideation Techniques Enhance Idea Generation? Belski, I., Hourani, A., Valentine, A., & Belski, A. In A. Bainbridge-Smith, Z. T. Qi, & G.S. Gupta (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (pp. 1-9). Wellington, New Zealand. 2014
  2. Can simple ideation techniques influence idea generation: comparing results from Australia, Czech Republic, Finland and Russian Federation. Belski, I., Belski, A., Berdonosov, V., Busov, B., Bartlova, M. Malashevskaya, E., ...Tervonen, N. In A. Oo, A. Patel, T.Hilditch, & S. Chandran (Ed.s), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (pp. 474-873). Geelong, Australia: School of Engineering, Deakin University. 2015
  3. Eight Fields of MATCEMIB help students to generate more ideas.Belski, I., Livotov, P., & Mayer, O. Procedia CIRP, 39, 85-90 2016
  4. Engineering Creativity: The Influence of General Knowledge and Thinking Heuristics Belski, I., Skiadopoulos, A., Aranda-Mena, G., Cascini, G., Russo, D. Advances in Systematic Creativity pp 245-263 2019
  5. ‘E’ posibile migliorare la creattivita’ e’ la riflessivita’ dei ragazzi’ (Can we improve thinking and creativity in school children?) Tidona, G. DIALOGO – mensile regionale di cultura, politica e attualita’, n. 7, anno XXVI, October 2001
  6. Reflexivity and creativity at school, Tidona, G. 2002
  7. "The effects of the six thinking hats and speed on creativity in brainstorming". Göçmen, O., Coşkun H., 2019
  8. The effects of the CoRT 1 thinking skills program on students. Edwards, J., & Baldauf, R. B. (Jr.). The effects of the CoRT 1 thinking skills programme on students. In D. N. Perkins, J. Lochhead, & J. Bishop (Eds.),Thinking: The second international conference (pp. 453–473). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1987
  9. Measuring the effects of the direct teaching of thinking skills. Edwards, J. Human Intelligence Newsletter , 9 (30), pp.9-10;1988
  10. The direct teaching of thinking skills Edwards, J. G. Evans, Learning and Teaching Cognitive Skills , Melbourne, Australian Council for Educational Research, 1991, pp. 87-106; 1991
  11. Research work on the CoRT method. Edwards, J. In S. Maclure & P. Davies (Eds.), Learning to think: Thinking to learn (pp. 19–30). Oxford, UK: Pergamon. 1991
  12. The Teaching of Thinking Edwards, J. Paper presented at the Joint AARE/NZARE Conference, Geelong. 1992
  13. Thinking, education and human potential: International Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Melbourne: Hawker Brownlow, 6-15. 1994
  14. Thinking and change. Edwards, J. In S. Dingli (Ed.), Creative thinking: A multi-faceted approach (pp. 16–29). Msida: Malta University Press. 1994
  15. Teaching thinking in schools: An overview. Edwards, J. Teaching thinking in schools, Unicorn, 21(1), 27-36. 1995
  16. The direct teaching of thinking in education and in business. Edwards, J. In S. Dingli (Ed.), Creative thinking: New perspectives (pp. 82–95). Msida: Malta University Press. 1996
  17. Learning, Thinking and Assessment Edwards, J. Personal paper summarising work 1999

References

  1. ^ Jeffries, Stuart (10 June 2021). "Edward de Bono obituary". the Guardian. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
  2. ^ "Guest post: When anyone can be a money issuer". FT Alphaville. 28 May 2014. Archived from the original on 30 May 2014.
  3. ^ "Birthday's today". The Telegraph. 19 May 2011. Archived from the original on 20 May 2011. Retrieved 16 May 2014. Dr Edward de Bono, lateral thinker, 78
  4. ^ "Edward de Bono entry on Rhodes Trust database". Archived from the original on 1 July 2022. Retrieved 24 April 2022.
  5. ^ a b c "Bio at Penguin books". Archived from the original on 19 June 2013. Retrieved 18 January 2013.
  6. ^ "About Edward de Bono". Edward de Bono's Personal Web Site. 5 May 2008. Archived from the original on 12 April 2008. Retrieved 5 May 2008.
  7. ^ "European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 – Europa". Archived from the original on 20 February 2009. Retrieved 14 May 2009.
  8. ^ "BBC Radio 4 - Head to Head, Series 2, AJ Ayer and Edward de Bono". BBC. Retrieved 25 December 2022.
  9. ^ a b "Broadcast – BBC Programme Index". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
  10. ^ "Thinking hats on, please: In the first of three essays this week on". The Independent. 2 May 1994.
  11. ^ de Bono, Edward (2000). The de Bono Code Book. p. 52.
  12. ^ Lloyd, John; Mitchinson, John (2006). The Book of General Ignorance. Faber & Faber.
  13. ^ Jury, Louise (19 December 1999). "De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast". The Independent. Retrieved 3 January 2022.
  14. ^ "WIRED 2.05: DIY Cash". yoz.com.
  15. ISBN 9780521572859. Retrieved 3 January 2022. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help
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  16. .
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  18. ^ Jeffries, Stuart (10 June 2021). "Edward de Bono obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  19. ^ Thorpe, Vanessa (24 April 2022). "The father of lateral thinking pulls posthumous tricks out of his hat". the Guardian. Retrieved 28 December 2022.
  20. ^ "Honorary Degree Recipients". RMIT University. Retrieved 23 December 2017.
  21. ^ "Honorary Degrees : Academic & Corporate Governance". University of Dundee. Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
  22. .

Further reading

External links