The United Nations should set up a formal Office of Creativity, according to the creator of the term “”lateral thinking”, Edward de Bono.
Dr de Bono said in an interview from London that the special UN office was needed “”to think about the problems which the UN hasn’t got the faintest idea how to deal with. Somalia, Bosnia and so on.”
His new book, Parallel Thinking, will be published tomorrow. In it he says, “”Western thinking is failing because its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure”.
He argues that many of the social and political problems of the world are approached on the basis that if you remove the cause the problem will be solved. This might work 60 per cent of the time, but in the other 40 the cause might not be able to be found, or it might be immovable (because it is human nature), he said. So different thinking was required to move forward.
Western thinking tended to judge, classify, put things in boxes, analyse and criticise.
This sort of thinking was no longer enough to solve the urgent problems of the world.
“”Because criticism is so very easy, it has become a dominating habit of even intelligent people,” he writes. “”There is a ridiculous belief that it is enough to get rid of the “bad things’ and what will be left are good things. Today’s experience all over the world shows that getting rid of the bad things only results in chaos. There may no longer be any person or party to blame, but that is the only gain.
“”The elevation of “critical intelligence’ to the highest level of human endeavour has probably been he single greatest mistake of Western intellectual development. Yet it is still the basis of our culture and our universities. That is danger indeed. Think of all that wasted intellectual talent which might have been harnessed to creative and constructive effort.”
Dr de Bono said western thinking lacked creative, constructive and design energy. It was intent on discovering the truth of the past or the present or proving a point, rather than designing a way forward.
By design he meant not only physical design, but also design of solutions to social and political problems.
He accepted that politics required a “”pantomime” level, but thought the constructive committee work that goes on behind the scenes needed to be more visible. The “”I’m right; you’re wrong” politics were not conducive to solving the problems of the world, he said.
Western thinking required the testing of every proposition as you went along.
“”Argument freezes people into positions, and then they are imprisoned by those positions,” he said.
It was better to lay down all the viewpoints, ideas, contradictions and values in parallel without judging them and then designing a way forward.
A United Nations Office of Creativity could bring together people to think like that to creative and design solutions to what were otherwise intractable problems.
“”Without design we can only deal with standard situations in standard ways,” he wrote. “”Analysis is an attempt to turn new situations into the standard situations with which we can deal. That is why, on the whole, we are so very ineffective in dealing with new situations _ like the conflicts that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Empire.”
He also thought that constructive and design thinking as well as critical thinking should be taught in the schools.
Dr de Bono will be in Australia later this month.