Edward de Bono - Six Frames: For Thinking About Information

The big enemy of good thinking is confusion.

Unfortunately, the more active the mind, thegreater the risk of confusion. The aim of all goodthinking is clarity. But clarity is no good if it is atthe expense of comprehensiveness. To be very clearabout a tiny part of the situation is no good at all and even dangerous. There is a need to obtainclarity and comprehensiveness at the same time.

The main cause of confusion is trying to do everythingat once. When the mind tries to doeverything at once, the mind ends up doing onething thoroughly and other things hardly at all.

That is why my Six Thinking Hats is sucha powerful framework. In a discussion, if we try todo everything at once we end up in the negativeand critical mode because this is the easiest modeand the one we use most often. The Six Hats is nowvery widely used, even at top economic meetings,because it ensures a thorough exploration of thesubject and a discussion that is constructive.

We live in an information age. We are bombardedby information and we have easy access to as muchinformation as we need in fact much more thanwe need. How do we react to that information?

If you have a very specific need for information anda very specific question that needs an answer, thenyou go to the right place and get the answer. If youneed to find a flight from London to Paris thatleaves London as soon as possible after six in theevening, you go to an airline timetable or ask yourtravel agent. There is still some thinking to be doneregarding your choice of airport and airline. Thetraffic on the road to Heathrow is likely to be veryheavy at that time.

If we only dealt with information that we reallyneeded, life would be simpler but very limited andvery dull. We also need to react to the informationthat we come across on television and radio and innewspapers, magazines and other people's conversations.How do we react to that information?

There are many important aspects of information,such as accuracy, bias, interest, relevance, value, etc.We could seek to assess these different aspects all atonce. We could also separate them out to avoidconfusion and to make sure that we cover all thedifferent ways of looking at the information.

That is what Six Frames For Thinking aboutInformation seeks to do. We look through one frameat a time. How accurate is this information? Whatbias is there in the information? The Six Frames arelaid out in this book.

You can get into the habit of using the framesyourself. You can deliberately direct your attentionto one or other frame. You can ask someone else touse a particular frame: 'Try the Square Frame onthis. What do you see?' The frames can also be usedin a discussion where everyone adopts the sameframe at a given moment.

If you ask someone to go out into the garden andlook at all the colours, that person is likely to noticethe dominant colours red in roses, yellow indaffodils, etc. but may not notice colours that areless obvious. If you asked the same person to go outand look for the colour blue, and then the colourred and then the colour yellow, the attention scanwould be much more comprehensive.