Edward de Bono tribute - founder of lateral thinking

This is being posted in Self Improvement because I think the quotes serves that purpose.

Edward de Bono died on the 9th. He was the person who coined the phrase lateral thinking, which was developed quite systematically rather than the general idea of "thinking outside the box" that most people probably think of. I'm not as sad about his death as I am at the fact that most will probably never pay much attention to his work, because his work does survive - whether people will take advantage of it is another story. A few quotes:

That one makes me think of Kevin Kellys observation that the internet is basically a big copy machine, and of course capturing peoples attention is a way of leading them by the nose. Here's a better one though:

And one system is simply the ego.

This one sums it up very succinctly:

 

A lot of his work is really about design and creative thinking. New ideas is not about right and wrong or knowing per se, but whether something works. Someone can know all the mechanisms of a system but never think of a novel application given the set of mechanisms involved.

You may find de Bonos parallel thinking concept interesting. He calls the classic thesis/antithesis process "adversarial thinking" as it is a process of elimination, whereas parallel thinking (one might think parallel processing) considers several perspectives without prejudice and is employed in a group process where people all consider the objective, factual perspective at a given time, but then another period is set aside for subjective intuition and feeling for example, and there's the understanding that is a time for entertaining gut feelings and the like without fighting intuition and feeling with objectivity which are two different perspectives. Certainly some people are more by the facts and others are more feeling oriented, but in this view neither is viewed as "wrong" or to be eliminated by the other.

It's like this picture (unfortunately I can't find it rn) where a brain and a heart are on a couch with a box of tissue and one crumpled up, and there's an eyeball in the therapists chair doing couples counseling. It's a matter of integration within ourselves rather than division and bias.