Edward de Bono | |
|---|---|
 De Bono in 2009 | |
| Born | 19 May 1933 |
| Died | 9 June 2021 (aged 88) |
| Known for | Lateral thinking |
| Spouse |
Josephine Hall-White
(m. 1971, divorced) |
| Children | 3 sons, 1 daughter |
| Website | www |
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]
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 St. Edward's College, Malta, he then gained a medical degree from the University of Malta. Following this, he proceeded as a Rhodes Scholar in 1955 to Christ Church, Oxford,[4] where he gained an 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.[5] He was a professor at the University of Malta, the University of Pretoria, the 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]
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]
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]
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]
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.
