When Edward de Bono died two years ago, the obituaries carried in the British press exemplified the ambivalence with which, for the last two decades years of his life, he was held.
On the one hand, the number of notices and assessments reflected the cultural and commercial cachet he still had. In contrast, another bestselling, globetrotting writer about mind skills, Tony Buzan, who died shortly before de Bono, had no obituary in a major newspaper.
On the other hand, several of the obituaries seemed keen to deflate the reputation of the guru of creative thinking. There were inches about his money, his ego, and whether what he said was ‘bleeding obvious’. But you’d have had a poor idea about what, over a productive period of circa 40 years (his first book was published in 1967), had made him so popular internationally with schoolchildren and executives and governments from Latin America to Asia.
The criticism has been so poor that, today, on the eve of what would have been his 90th birthday, it’s worth setting out why his intellectual legacy deserves to be properly understood and built on.
First, we need to remove the dross. He did have a robust ego and used his earnings as a metric of his success. He did sometimes give flippant advice (as when he advised the UK Foreign Office to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by shipping crates of Marmite).
But all this is a sideshow. He hyped himself because, as a consultant, he was his own best product in a cutthroat market. The Marmite example (dating from 1999) keeps being repeated because, over a 40-year period in the limelight, there’s at most a handful of such instances. It illustrates how few howlers he uttered.
He did repeat himself. Outside training seminars, the only form of packaging he had for his ideas was the book. Each had to be a stand-alone. The book form was a poor package for some of his ideas, such as his work on simplicity and the De Bono Code, which are better transmitted in apps and bullet journal accessories.
But all this is a distraction from a central truth: he was a prolific inventor of techniques that taught skills of focus, attention and creative discussion.
Buzan built an entire career and product range around his idea of ‘mind maps’, a jazzed-up version of an ordinary spider diagram. De Bono’s flowscape notation, which is capable of telling you what you didn’t know, is buried in one of his lesser known books. In my estimate, it’s one of his greatest inventions but has been crowded out by others.
The French cognitive psychologist Jean-Philippe Lachaux has built his popular reputation by promoting a single technique of focused attention, to which he’s devoted an entire book. His attention tool, PIM, is genuinely useful and can be taught to children, while backed up by current neuroscience.
But de Bono invented a dozen such attention tools decades earlier. Meanwhile, his book, Serious Creativity, is a compendium of creative thinking tools, some of which he hardly ever referred to. I’ve tested them; they work and formal research has found that his techniques increase the creativity of schoolchildren.
What the Sophists did for persuasion, in charting the various turns of speech, De Bono did for turns of perception with his attention tools- Ranier Fsadni
His books often include long sections that spell out the obvious. So do manuals of good writing, which all tell you to start with an outline, to split arguments into sections and so on. We’d be criticising them if they didn’t.
Spelling out the obvious is still the publisher’s advice for works of popular psychology. The distinguished Daniel Kahneman, the world expert on the brain’s biases, advises anyone who does not wish to be trapped by prejudice to think about only one topic at a time, to break each topic into dimensions and score each one separately…
Obvious? Yes, when it’s pointed out. But it’s a gateway to a more detailed understanding of how the mind jumps to conclusions.
By the 1970s, de Bono had stopped thinking about the brain as a researcher and dedicated himself to inventing techniques. It’s as an inventor that he should be judged.
But it’s striking how many of his instincts now have a mass of evidence to back them. He was one of the first popular writers to speak of the brain as designed for ‘stupidity’ (as he provocatively put it). That’s to say, it evolved to help us jump to conclusions quickly in dangerous environments.
Early on, he also spoke of the ‘intelligence trap’, how being skilled at critical thinking might actually trap us into complacency or worse. Research now shows how critical thinking helps us rationalise mistakes as much as it helps us reason. It explains why highly educated people can be as gullible and impervious to evidence as less educated ones.
De Bono’s emphasis on creativity was not a repudiation of critical thinking. He was simply pointing out that the rational pursuit of goals might not be worth much if the goals themselves were not chosen perceptively.
Having decided to focus on inventing techniques and teaching them, he moved away from looking for a detailed systemic explanation of how human creativity works. He sometimes missed how his tools and methods fitted into the repertoire of human thinking skills. For publicity purposes, he overhyped his break with Aristotle’s work. In fact, his work fits seamlessly with Aristotle’s emphasis on the link between thought and action.
Aristotle called the skill of using analogies to be the hallmark of genius but didn’t explore how the skill could be taught. De Bono devised ways of learning how to find fruitful analogies.
What the Sophists did for persuasion, in charting the various turns of speech, de Bono did for turns of perception with his attention tools. He shifted perception and insight from the instinctual system of the brain to the deliberative system.
And, for all his personal flamboyant self-confidence, his tools, properly understood, promote a growth mindset that our identity-fetishising polarised society badly needs.
It’s there in the books, now supported by science: don’t define your identity by your beliefs; define it by your willingness to learn and rethink.