EdSight

Edward de Bono was a Maltese physician, psychologist, and prolific author whose work over more than five decades made “thinking” a teachable subject in its own right and introduced two of the most widely used vocabularies in twentieth-century cognitive practice: *lateral thinking* and *parallel thinking*. Born in Malta in 1933, de Bono came from a family in which, by his own account, two strands converged: a strong medical orientation from his father, a professor of medicine, and a certain journalistic cheek from his mother. He trained in medicine and held appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Harvard, and it was the convergence of three interests — the self-organizing systems of medicine (glands, kidneys, respiration, circulation), the study of perception within psychology, and the limits of computer modeling of creative thought — that led him to his foundational 1969 book *The Mechanism of Mind*. Working largely outside conventional academic institutions, de Bono became an unusual kind of public intellectual: he built himself into his own brand, wrote more than sixty books, lectured in dozens of countries, consulted for corporations and governments, and established a thinking institute in Malta. He coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967, and his *Six Thinking Hats* (1985) became one of the most widely used structured-thinking tools in business, government, and education worldwide. He died in 2021, after a career shaped throughout by the conviction that teaching the world to think — especially children — was the most important work any educator could undertake.

De Bono's best-known contribution is the concept of lateral thinking, introduced in 1967 as a deliberate complement to the step-by-step vertical thinking that has dominated Western education since antiquity. Where vertical thinking moves forward by sequential logical steps, each of which must be justified, lateral thinking aims at a transformative switch into a new perceptual track — the kind of insight rearrangement that produces genuinely new ideas rather than refinements of old ones. De Bono described lateral thinking as closely related to insight, creativity, and humor, arguing that the discontinuity characteristic of humor (saying something “obviously wrong or at best unlikely”) is itself a cognitive resource that makes it possible to push past the “concept prisons of old ideas.” Lateral thinking is not a substitute for vertical thinking but its complement: lateral thinking is generative, vertical thinking is selective; both are required. To support the perceptual switch, de Bono introduced the “Po” technique — a provocative operator that licenses forward movement without commitment, allowing propositions to be tried out for the sake of where they might lead rather than for their immediate truth value.

• de Bono, E. (1977). Lateral thinking: A textbook of creativity. Penguin. (Original work published 1970)
• de Bono, E. (1976). Practical thinking. Penguin. (Original work published 1971)
• de Bono, E. (1969). The mechanism of mind. Jonathan Cape.
• Moseley, D., Baumfield, V., Elliott, J., Gregson, M., Higgins, S., Miller, J., & Newton, D. (2005). De Bono's lateral and parallel thinking tools. In Frameworks for thinking: A handbook for teaching and learning (pp. 133–139). Cambridge University Press.

Parallel thinking, developed as an extension of lateral thinking and articulated most fully in *Parallel Thinking: From Socratic to de Bono Thinking* (1994), was de Bono's alternative to the adversarial, dialectical tradition that runs from Socratic dialogue through academic debate to courtroom litigation. In parallel thinking, participants lay ideas down alongside one another rather than setting them against one another: there is no initial clash, no dispute, no true/false judgment at the outset, but a genuine exploration of the topic from which conclusions and decisions are then derived through a design process. When two people disagree, traditional thinking produces an argument in which each tries to prove the other wrong; parallel thinking puts both views, however contradictory, down in parallel, and then designs a way forward that may incorporate both. “Possibility,” de Bono wrote, “is at the heart of parallel thinking.” The approach requires strict discipline — information must be presented in parallel, participants must stay within their tracks, and the aim at any moment is looking in a defined direction rather than reaching a conclusion.

• de Bono, E. (1995). Parallel thinking: From Socratic to de Bono thinking. Penguin. (Original work published 1994)
• de Bono, E. (2000). Six thinking hats (Rev. ed.). Penguin Life. (Original work published 1985)
• de Bono, E. (1986). Conflicts: A better way to solve them. Penguin. (Original work published 1985)

The best-known operational tool associated with parallel thinking is the Six Thinking Hats, written, de Bono recalled, in a single afternoon to address the problem that in most creative-thinking sessions the environment rewards ego-driven negativity (“That won't work,” “That's wrong”) over exploration. The tool assigns each of six colored hats to a distinct mode of thinking, and asks participants to wear one hat at a time so that the group examines the topic from six different conceptual perspectives in sequence rather than in rivalry. De Bono advised that the Blue Hat begins and ends the session, and that the sequence can vary with the needs of the group.

1. White Hat (Information): facts, figures, data, and what is known or needed.

2. Red Hat (Emotion): feelings, hunches, and intuitions, expressed intentionally rather than disguised as analysis.

3. Black Hat (Realistic negativity): risks, weaknesses, and why something might fail.

4. Yellow Hat (Optimism): benefits, value, and why something might succeed.

5. Green Hat (Creativity): new ideas, alternatives, and lateral moves.

6. Blue Hat (Management): process, agenda, and meta-level control of the thinking itself.

• de Bono, E. (2000). Six thinking hats (Rev. ed.). Penguin Life. (Original work published 1985)
• Carver, V. (2020, April 10). Dr. Edward de Bono interview. de Bono Group.
• Moseley et al. (2005). De Bono's lateral and parallel thinking tools. In Frameworks for thinking. Cambridge University Press.

De Bono's educational intervention rested on a sharp critique: most schools, he argued, do not teach thinking at all, and those that do tend to teach only the limited information-sorting and analytic skills that serve standard examinations. Lip service is given to “teaching pupils to think for themselves,” but this aim is rarely matched by any practical attempt to teach thinking as a skill. He faulted traditional education on two counts in particular: its exclusive focus on reactive, logical thinking (how you respond to what is placed before you) at the expense of active, generative thinking (getting out and making things happen); and its “cult of being right,” in which the teacher's tick and cross produce a well-educated terror of being wrong that blocks exploration and possibility. He insisted that textbook problems — close-ended, with a known solution and all required information given — bear little resemblance to real-life problems, which are open-ended and partially specified, and that teaching thinking requires pupils to look objectively at their own thinking rather than reflexively seek the approved answer. Through his CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) thinking lessons, adopted in schools in dozens of countries, he sought to install thinking as an explicit subject of instruction.

• de Bono, E. (1978). Teaching thinking. Penguin. (Original work published 1976)
• de Bono, E. (1993). Teach your child how to think: Help them survive and thrive. Penguin. (Original work published 1992)
• de Bono, E. (1984). Tactics: The art and science of success. Little, Brown.
• Milnes, A. (2020, April 10). How I got there: An interview with Dr. Edward de Bono. de Bono Group.

In *Teach Your Child How to Think* (1993), de Bono articulated twelve thinking principles that distill his broader program: always be constructive; think slowly and keep things simple; detach ego from thinking; ask what you are trying to do; switch gears between logic, creativity, and information-seeking; check the outcome and why it should work; use feelings after exploration rather than before; seek alternatives and new perceptions; move between broad and detailed thinking; distinguish “maybe” from “must be”; accept that different views may be soundly based on different perceptions; and recognize that actions have consequences for values, people, and the world around us. Underlying the list is de Bono's recurring claim that Western thinking has overemphasized analysis and judgment while neglecting design and creativity, and that the most consequential educational priority at every level is to pay much more attention to the “design” side of thinking — to “what can be” rather than just “what is.”

• de Bono, E. (1993). Teach your child how to think. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (1995). Parallel thinking. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (2003). Why so stupid? How the human race has never really learned to think. Blackhall.
• de Bono, E. (2018). Future positive: Change your mindset for a positive future. Vermilion.

• de Bono, E. (1969). The mechanism of mind. Jonathan Cape.
• de Bono, E. (1970). Lateral thinking: A textbook of creativity. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (1971). Practical thinking. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (1976). Teaching thinking. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (1984). Tactics: The art and science of success. Little, Brown.
• de Bono, E. (1985). Conflicts: A better way to solve them. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (1985). Six thinking hats. Little, Brown.
• de Bono, E. (1992). Teach your child how to think. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (1994). Parallel thinking: From Socratic to de Bono thinking. Penguin.
• de Bono, E. (2003). Why so stupid? How the human race has never really learned to think. Blackhall.
• de Bono, E. (2018). Future positive: Change your mindset for a positive future. Vermilion.
• Carver, V. (2020, April 10). Dr. Edward de Bono interview. https://www.debonogroup.com/blog/dr-edward-de-bono-interview-written-by-victoria-carver/
• Milnes, A. (2020, April 10). How I got there: An interview with Dr. Edward de Bono. https://www.debonogroup.com/blog/how-i-got-there-an-interview-with-dr-edward-de-bono-written-by-anthea-milnes/
• Moseley, D., Baumfield, V., Elliott, J., Gregson, M., Higgins, S., Miller, J., & Newton, D. (2005). De Bono's lateral and parallel thinking tools. In Frameworks for thinking: A handbook for teaching and learning (pp. 133–139). Cambridge University Press.
• Dudgeon, P. (2002). Breaking out of the box: The biography of Edward de Bono. Headline.
• Austin, C. (2015). Design thinking: Expanding the frame of reference — A study of concepts, ideas and thinking tools developed by Edward de Bono [Doctoral dissertation, Swinburne University of Technology]. Swinburne Research Bank.