De Bono - Think!: Before Its Too Late

WHY DO WE NEED THIS BOOK?

This is not a nice book. It is not intended to be a nice book. You cannot shift complacency with niceness. We are completely complacent about the quality of our human thinking. We believe it to be wonderful for various reasons that I shall discuss later. We have done nothing about human thinking, outside of mathematics, for roughly 2,400 years, since the great Greek philosophers. I do not believe we should be so complacent. This book is about why human thinking is so poor. It also suggests what we can do about it. So it is a positive book even if the need for such a book is negative.

I come from the island of Malta, which is officially the oldest civilisation in the world. The earliest man-made structure on earth is a substantial Stone Age temple in Gozo (the sister island of Malta). So perhaps I have a mission to save the world from its complacency.

Think grey not green

It has become very fashionable to 'think green', and I am fully in favour of this. Climate change is a legitimate political theme, and any politician can express his or her concern with this matter and get votes as a result. This is excellent.

But there is a bigger and more urgent danger than climate change. That danger is the poor quality of human thinking. This requires even more urgent attention. Perhaps there should be an even more important slogan 'think grey'. The grey refers to our grey matter, or brains. Most of the problems, conflicts and fights in the world are caused by poor thinking. An improvement in human thinking would help solve such issues. If we get our thinking right then it becomes easier to solve not only environmental problems, but other problems too.

Consider the Israel / Palestine problem. Here we have some of the most intelligent people on the surface of the earth. For over 60 years they have been unable to solve their problem, and yet they know full well that it has to be solved some time. That is poor thinking.

Nothing is more fundamental or more important than human thinking. What about values? The purpose of thinking is to enable us to deliver and enjoy our values. Values without thinking are highly dangerous and have been responsible for the wars, pogroms, persecutions and appalling behaviour of the past. Thinking without values is pointless for thinking then has no purpose.

Yet, amazingly, we have paid no attention to thinking for 2,400 years.

Emotion vs. thought

What about emotions? What about human behaviour? What about human nature?

There is a belief that thinking is academic and abstract and that what really drives action is human emotions and human behaviour. This is unfortunate nonsense that arises directly and correctly from our traditional methods of thinking, which have very little practical impact in conflict situations.

In the Karee platinum mine in South Africa there were seven tribes represented among the workers: Xhosa, Zulu, Sutu, and so on. As a consequence of the traditional hostilities between these tribes, developed over centuries, there were 210 fights every month between members of the various tribes. Susan Mackie and Donalda Dawson taught my perceptual thinking to these totally illiterate miners who had never been to school for even one day in their lives. They encouraged them to consider other people's points of view. The result was that the fights dropped from 210 a month to just four! Why had better thinking made this huge difference? Because this new thinking was concerned with perception not logic.

Logic will never change emotions and behaviour. Trying to persuade people logically to change emotions is useless in practice, and most people have experienced this. It isperceptions that control emotions and emotions control behaviour. Changes in perception will change emotions and therefore behaviour. If your perception changes, you have no choice: your emotions and behaviour change too.