THE TEACHING OF CREATIVE THINKING

The merchant had borrowed money from the moneylender to equip his trading venture. The merchant's ship had not returned on time, and it was presumed lost. The moneylender came to demand payment of the debt. The merchant was pleading for more time. The moneylender was insisting on immediate payment; otherwise, he would have the merchant thrown into the debtor's prison. They were arguing the point in the merchant's garden.

At this point the moneylender noticed the merchant's beautiful daughter. He told the merchant that in exchange for the daughter's hand in marriage, the debt would be canceled. The merchant rejected the offer.

"You do not have much choice," replied the moneylender," but I am a fair man. I am going to pick up two stones from this path on which we are standing, a black stone and a white stone. I shall put both of the stones into this leather bag. Your daughter will put in her hand and bring forth one of the stones-without looking. If she picks the white stone, the debt is canceled and your daughter stays with you. If she picks the black stone, your daughter agrees to marry me and the debt is canceled. In all other cases, you pay the debt or go to debtor's prison."

Seeing that they would be no worse off and might even have a chance of escape, the daughter suggested they agree to the terms. She then watched the moneylender carefully and noted that he actually put two black stones into the bag. What was she to do? She could expose the moneylender as a cheat. She could take a black stone and then accept her fate or refuse to marry the fellow anyway. It was at this point that she used some lateral thinking.

She put her hand into the bag and drew out one of the stones. The she immediately fumbled and dropped the stone onto the path. Once the stone had come to rest on the path, there was no way of telling which of the many stones on the path had been the one in the bag.
"Oh, I am so sorry," said the girl.
"It was a black stone you picked," said the moneylender.
"Nonsense," said the merchant. "There was not enough time to see the stone."
"Then we must start over again," replied the moneylender.
"That will not be necessary," suggested the girl. "All we have to do is to open the bag and see the color of the stone that remains behind. In That way we can surely tell the color of the stone that was taken by me." She took the bag and handed it to her father.

The merchant opened the bag so that all could see the contents. At the bottom of the bag rested a black stone. "See," exclaimed the girl, "a black stone remains in the bag. So I must surely have taken the white one."

So the debt was cancelled. The girl remained with her father, and almost everyone was happy.

This is the story with which I opened my first book New Think (B1) which was published in 1967. This story illustrates so well the nature of "lateral thinking."

In hindsight the girl's action is both logical and effective-but few people in the same situation would have thought of it.

LOGICAL IN HINDSIGHT

Add up all the numbers from 1 to 10. This is a simple task which anyone can do. Now add up the numbers from 1 to 100. There is nothing difficult about the task, but it is tedious, takes a long time and leaves plenty of room for mistakes.

Now write out the numbers in the usual way: 1 2 3 . . . . . 98 99 100

And then write them backwards under the first numbers to give: 1 2 3 . . . . 98 99 100
100 99 98 . . . 3 2 1

If you add up each pair, you will always get 101. This is obvious because the top row increases by one and the bottom row decreases by one, so the total must remain the same at 101. So we have 100 X 101. But this is twice as many as we need because we have added up two lots of numbers from 1 to 100. So we divide by 2 to get 50 X 101 which gives the answer of 5,050. Not only is this process very quick indeed, but the chance of making a mistake is totally eliminated.

Once again this process is completely logical in hindsight. Why then is it so difficult to see in the first place?

We now know that there is an absolute mathematical necessity for creative thinking in the human brain, Yet in our intellectual culture, we have never paid serious attention to creative thinking. We have acknowledged the value of creativity but treated it as a special gift which some people might have and other can only envy. But this view of creativity has applied mainly to artistic work. In all other areas we have felt-and continue to do so today-that logic is enough.

The reason for this blindness is both simple and logical. Any valuable "creative idea" must always be logical in hindsight (after it has been seen). If the idea were not logical in hindsight, then we would never be able to see the value of the idea. Ideas that are not logical in hindsight remain as "mad" ideas. They may be mad forever or only until we catch up with the paradigm change. We would have no way of distinguishing between the two types of madness. So if every valuable creative idea is logical in hindsight, then we claim that the idea could have been reached by "good" logic in the first place. So we need to teach better logic and not creativity. This rubbish is still believed today in perhaps 95 percent of academic establishment. But there is a good reason why it is still believed by sensible, logical people.

On one occasion I was discussing river pollution with some people concerned with this matter. Using one of the provocative techniques of lateral thinking and the word I invented many years ago to signal a provocation, I said: "Po, any factory is downstream of itself." This seems an absurdity. How could a factory be in two places at the same time?

But from this deliberate provocation comes a simple idea. We would legislate that any factory built on a river must have its inlet (taking in water) downstream of its own outlet (putting out effluent). In this way the factory would always be the first to get its own pollution and would have to be more careful about cleaning up the effluent. This simple idea has now become legislation in some countries. Again, this idea is totally logical in hindsight.

The key work is perception. Our whole intellectual tradition has been concerned with processing methods such as logic and mathematics. We have not dealt with perception for the very simple reason that until about twenty years ago we had no idea how perception worked.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMOR

In my book I am Right, You are Wrong (B2), I claim that humor is by far the most significant behavior of the human brain. I mean this very seriously indeed and I am not just being provocative. Humor is by far the best indicator of the type of information system that is operating in the brain - at least in perception.

In 1969 I wrote a book called The Mechanism of Mind (B3) in which I described how nerve networks in the brain allow incoming information to organize itself into patterns and sequences. These ideas of self-organizing information systems were rather ahead of their time. In 1979 John Hopfield of the California Institute of Technology took up the idea of neural networks, and today there is a whole field concerned with these matters. Professor Murray Gell-Mann, who received his Nobel Prize for discovering the quark, once told me that the ideas in the book The Mechanism of Mind were about eight years ahead of the world of mathematicians in these areas. The later work on chaos theory is related to these matters of nonlinear interactive systems. In fact the book I am Right, You are Wrong has introductions by three Nobel Prize physicists.

Humor clearly indicates a self-organizing information system in which information arranges itself into patterns, sequences or "tracks." The very excellence of the brain is its ability to allow experience to organize itself in this way. Without such a system, life would be so slow as to be impossible. The brain forms these tracks so that we recognize a situation by processing along the track that has been triggered by what we see around us. This is the nature of perception. For reasons that are very simple, the tracks have wide "catchment" areas just as rivers have wide catchment areas. This means that even if the external signal is not exactly the same as the usual one, we will still recognize the situation. There is no mystery at all about these processes, which are explained in the book I am Right, You are Wrong as the direct behavior of simple nerve connections.

The general effect is shown in Figure 1, which illustrates a pattern with a wide catchment area. Because of the way the nerves interact with each other in the brain, the dominant track will suppress any alternative track for the moment. This gives rise to the situation illustrated in Figure 2. We proceed along the main track. Access to the side track is actually impossible. If somehow we eventually manage to get across to the side track, thin in hindsight the connection back to the starting point is easy and obvious as shown in Figure 3.

It is precisely this asymmetry of patterns tat gives rise to both humor and creativity. In a joke the teller suddenly takes the audience to the end of the side track, and immediately they see the connection with the starting point. Creativity is exactly the same process. We move "laterally" from the main track to the side track. Once there, we see that the idea is perfectly logical in hindsight.

But how do we make the lateral move? That is where the deliberate techniques of lateral thinking come into use.

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Our whole intellectual traditions are based on the notion of passive information systems. Here the recorded information lies passively on a passive information surface. An external "processor" then proceeds to work with this information: choosing, arranging, and organizing the information. In an active system, however, the information and the information surface are active; and as a result, the information arranges itself into sequences and patterns and tracks-as I have indicated above and (in more detail) in the books I am Right, You are Wrong and The Mechanism of Mind.

The simplest example of an active information system, what is logical in hindsight must be equally logical in foresight. But in an active (self-organizing) system, something may be logical and obvious in hindsight but inaccessible to logic in foresight. This arises from precisely the same asymmetry of patterns that is the basis of humor. In a passive information system, humor could not exist.

In any active, self-organizing information system, there is an absolute mathematical necessity for creativity and also for provocation. But because the whole of our intellectual culture is based on passive information systems, we still do not see this necessity.

But what has all this to do with the teaching of creative thinking?

"RELEASE " IS NOT ENOUGH

A prisoner is thrown, bound had and foot, into a deep pit. After an energetic struggle, the prisoner wriggles out of his bonds and shouts, "I am free! I am free!"

The traditional approach to creativity is along the same lines. We know that people are inhibited by the fear of making mistakes and the fear of looking ridiculous. We know that an education system which demands the "one right answer" makes people search for the standard way of doing things. This heavy load on inhibitions presses down and prevents people from being spontaneous and even creative.

So it must follow that if we remove the inhibitions, then people will be "creative." This is the basis of so much of traditional creative training. Set people free. Give them the courage to come up with unorthodox ideas. Remove the fear of seeming ridiculous. Surely the result must be creativity?

The prisoner at the bottom of the pit is certainly more free when he is free of restricting bonds. But the freedom is only an illusion. He is still at the bottom of the pit. What he needs to get out of the pit is not just "freedom from bonds" but some climbing skills and techniques which will enable him to climb out of the deep pit with its vertical walls.

It is traditionally assumed that the brain is naturally creative and is only inhibited by education and the fear of being wrong. Remove these inhibitions and you restore the natural creativity of the brain.

But this is a myth. The brain is not designed to be creative. The brain would be useless if it were designed to be creative. The excellence of the brain arises directly from its ability to make patterns, to use these patterns and to reject deviations from these patterns. That is a marvelous system which allows the brain to make sense of the immensely complicated world around. But it is the opposite of creativity. When this coordinated pattern-making and pattern using is disrupted, we get the madness of psychosis. If we can no longer make sense of the world around, we may indeed have some "unusual" ideas, but this is not useful creativity.

Figure 4 illustrates how inhibitions may indeed suppress our creativity below the "normal" level. So removing the inhibitions does make us mildly more creative as we return to the normal level of curiosity and exploration and playing around. But if we want to be truly creative and effectively creative, we have to go beyond the normal level. In order to do this, we have to learn some deliberate and formal techniques that are not "natural" at all.

So the notion that by being free, uninhibited and natural we are going to be more creative is only true if we are interested in a mild sort of creativity. The prisoner at the bottom of the pit who has freed himself from the bonds is certainly more "free" than before. But this is only a mild freedom of comparison (compared with the previous state). It is not true freedom, just as being "released" from inhibitions is only a mild form of creativity.

To be truly and effectively creative, we need to develop the deliberate, formal and systematic techniques of lateral thinking. For example, we need to develop the ability to set up and use provocations.

"CRAZINESS" IS NOT ENOUGH

The cause of serious creativity has been badly damaged by those who advocate that it is all a matter of "craziness" and that being "off the wall" is the same as being creative. This is a total misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of provocation.

Creativity is a logical process-but it is not the logic of passive information systems. It is the logic of self-organizing patterning systems with their asymmetric patterns. In such systems there is a logical need for provocation.

The definition of a provocation is simple: "There may not be a need for saying something until after it has been said." This is totally contrary to normal logic in which the reason for saying something must precede the statement.

The logical purpose of a provocation is to help us to move from the main track pattern across to the side track. This lateral movement is the basis for the term lateral thinking which I invented in 1967.

I also invented the new word po, which signals very clearly that the statement is being used deliberately as a provocation. So if I say, "Po, cars should have square wheels," I am not seriously advocating the use of square wheels. The purpose of the provocation is to force our minds out of the usual groove and to increase the chance of getting across to a new idea, as illustrated in Figure 5.

Traditional brainstorming often gave the impression that it was enough to be "crazy" and maybe a useful idea would turn up. This sort of scatter-gun approach might have had some validity in the advertising world where novelty can be a sufficient value, but in every other field there is a need for an idea which is not just novel but also effective. So many people have been turned off by this weak and seemingly crazy process of brainstorming.

In lateral thinking, there are formalized and systematic techniques for setting up provocations: escape, distortion, exaggeration, etc. These techniques can be learned, practiced and used. These techniques can be taught to others to use.

Twenty-five years of experience in the field have taught me that these systematic techniques work in a powerful manner.

After Montreal had sustained huge debts from its hosting of the 1976 Olympic Games, no city in the world wanted the 1984 Games. Finally, Los Angeles only agreed to host the Games because there was a "guarantee" from the organizing committee that there would be no debts. In the end, the Los Angeles Games made a surplus of $225 million and were so successful that today cities around the world compete fiercely to get the Games which no one had wanted. When Peter Ueberroth, the outstanding organizer of the Los Angeles Games, was asked in an interview in the Washington Post (September 30, 1984) how he had generated the new concepts needed to make a success of the Games, he replied that he had used lateral thinking and he mentioned the process of provocation. He had first learned his lateral thinking from a short talk I had given to a meeting of the Young Presidents' Organization in Boca Raton in 1975. This example illustrates three things:

1. That the techniques can be taught.
2. That the techniques can be used deliberately.
3. That the techniques can have a powerful effect.

Of course, the major factor in the success of the Los Angeles Games was the ability of Mr. Ueberroth as an organizer, leader and motivator of a very capable team. Nevertheless, there is a point when new concepts are needed-and that is where lateral thinking comes in.

So it is not just a matter of being "crazy" and hoping that something happens. There is a logical basis to provocation and systematic ways of setting up and using provocations. Quite often teachers of creative thinking who do not understand the logical basis (the behavior of neural networks) pick up on the provocation and believe that it simply means being "crazy".

THE USE OF PROVOCATIONS

In traditional brainstorming or the general teaching of creativity, there is much talk of "delaying judgment," "deferring judgment." Etc. This arises from the simple observation that instant criticism of an idea can kill the idea and makes creativity virtually impossible. So if judgment prevents creativity, let us delay judgment.

But delaying judgment is far too weak a process. Telling a person not to use instant judgment does not tell that person what to do. What do you do with a provocation? Do you just suspend judgment and hope that something useful will happen?

Many years ago I introduced the formal concept of "movement." This is an active mental operation. It is not just an absence of judgment any more than a car is just an absence of a bicycle.

There are formal and systematic techniques of movement (extract a principle, moment-to-moment, etc.) which can be learned, practiced and used. These techniques can also be taught directly and formally.

Judgment is based on traditional "rock logic", but movement is based on the "water logic" of perception. Rock logic is based on identity (is and is not). Water logic is based on "flow" (What does this flow to?).

All these processes can be handled in a deliberate and systematic manner. It is very different from just messing about, being "crazy" and hoping that something will happen.

GROUP OR INDIVIDUAL

Traditional brainstorming has always depended on a group format because this is an essential part of the process. The presence of other people in the group provides the stimulation to set off new ideas and new lines of thinking.

All the systematic lateral thinking techniques can be used by an individual entirely on his or her own stimulation at will. There is no need to depend on stimulation from others.

In my experience, individuals working systematically on their own produce far more ideas than when they are working together as a group. There is more thinking time and different directions can be pursued.

Groups do have their value both as a motivating setting and also to develop the ideas that have already been started. In practice I prefer to work with a combination of group and individual creative thinking whenever this is possible.

POWERFUL SIMPLICITY

My background is in psychology and in medicine where I worked on the complicated integrated systems of the body (respiration, circulation, kidneys, endocrine glands, nervous system) and had to develop an understanding of the behavior of such self-organizing systems. In the course of my medical research, I was using computers for the Fourier analysis of blood pressure waves in order to estimate the impedance in the blood vessels. I became interested in the sort of thinking computers could not do: perceptual and creative. This is where an understanding of biological information processing came in useful in order to understand how neural networks could work as self-organizing systems.

The biological background is extremely important because if you come to thinking from philosophy, psychology, mathematics, computers or logic, you will inevitably be working in passive information systems, not in active self-organizing information systems.

The biological background is extremely important because if you come to thinking from philosophy, psychology, mathematics, computers or logic, you will inevitably be working in passive information systems, not in active self-organizing systems.

From this base my concern has been to develop thinking tools that are as simple as possible. I am interested in powerful simplicity. But this simplicity has to be soundly based.

I designed the CoRT Thinking Program, which is now the most widely used program internationally for the direct teaching of thinking as a curriculum subject in schools. In several countries this program is now mandatory in all schools. Venezuela was the first country to mandate the teaching of this thinking. The program is spreading in the USA where there is the unfortunate idea that the teaching of critical thinking is enough. The thinking "tools" in the CoRT program are simple enough to be taught to nine-year-olds in the Venezuelan jungle and also to make sense to gifted education programs in the USA. The same tools ar also taught to business audiences.

The "random input" lateral thinking technique is extremely easy to use but very powerful in its effect. It is now used widely by new product groups, research departments, marketing departments and even by rock groups when writing new songs. At first sight the notion of pulling in a totally random word to open up new lines of thinking seems absurd. But the technique is soundly based on the behavior of pattering systems where the probability distribution from the periphery are very different to the distributions at the center. (Finding your way back from the periphery of a town may disclose a road you would never have taken out from the center.)

Like many other of my techniques, this simple technique has been borrowed, plagiarized and pirated by many practitioners in creativity who usually forget to acknowledge its source. What is more important than acknowledgment is that techniques borrowed in this way are too often distorted or altered in ways that make them far less effective. This is because the person "borrowing" the technique does not understand its real basis and has had no proper training in the use of the technique.

Another example of a technique that is very simple but extremely powerful is the Six Thinking Hats technique. In 1990 IBM used this technique as part of its core training for 40,000 managers worldwide. Du Pont is spreading the technique to its 140,000 employees. The president of Prudential Insurance, Ron Barbaro, uses the technique daily with his staff. In Japan, NTT, the most highly valued corporation in the world, has made it part of the corporate culture.

The six colored hats each inductee one mode of thinking (information, feeling, logical positive, logical negative, creative, process control). It is now possible to request a specific type of thinking:

"It is time we had some green hat (creative) thinking. Let's have two minutes of green hat thinking."

It is also possible to place "caution" and "critical" thinking (black hat) back in its proper place instead of having it come in at any time. Intuition and feeling (red hat) are legitimized so that it becomes possible to express feeling without having to apologize for them or even justify them:

"This is my red hat thinking on this matter."

It is the practicality and powerful simplicity of the method which has led to its wide adoption. The technique really does change thinking behavior throughout an organization.

My new book Six Action Shoes does for action what the Six Hats do for thinking. There are times when action must follow a strict routine, but there are times when creative initiative is needed. There are crisis situations and others which demand human caring. The Six Action Shoes provide a means for training people to switch from one action mode to another-as required.

In the end, thinking tools have to be practical, simple and robust-but they must be soundly based and fully understood by those who set out to teach the tools.

A robust tool is one that retains its usefulness even when it is used without a great degree of skill. For instance, the simple "PMI" (Plus, Minus, Interesting) lesson in the CoRT Thinking Program is so simple that it is even used by six-year-olds.

No matter how complicated the basis for the tool, the tool must itself be simple to use. The Six Thinking Hats is an example of a technique that can immediately be picked up and used.

The tools must be practical and easy to remember. Many training programs have complicated schedules and steps. The seem impressive at the time of teaching but are low in practicality because the student has to spend most of the time trying to remember the correct sequence of steps in the schedule. I prefer to treat tools as a carpenter treats tools. You become familiar with the tools and the use of them as appropriate. The carpenter uses a hammer when he or she feels a hammer should be used and a saw when that is appropriate.

Simplicity is the key word. Confusion and complexity are the enemies of training in thinking skills. Keep it simple, but know what you are doing and make sure it is soundly based. Far too many trainers in creativity feel that it is enough to encourage people to be uninhibited and to mess around. This is not good enough.

TALENT OR TRAINING

Many people feel that creativity is a natural talent and that nothing can be done about it. This attitude is held for two reasons:

1. It provides a very good excuse for not having to do anything about creativity.
2. The person with this view has not yet come across any serious method of improving creative skills and has been put off by the messing around and "crazy" approaches used so often.

It is often said that Beethoven, Mozart or Van Gogh did not have to learn creativity. There are two points to be made here. The first point deals with artistic creativity. The work creativity in the English language covers an extremely broad area. Many artists are not really "creative" in my sense of the word but are productive stylists producing within a style of perception and expression but not really changing that style.

I am interested in the creativity involved in the changing of perceptions and concepts, and that is why I have given the specific term lateral thinking to this process. There may be an overlap with artistic creativity and some artists (composers, etc.) do use my methods, but there are other aspects which may be quite different (emotional and spiritual resonances, etc.)

There is no reason to suppose that an artist will make a good teacher of creativity simply because the word creativity is involved in art.

The second point to be made about the "Beethoven" remark is that the purpose of creative training is not to produce super-geniuses but to give everyone a workable level of creative skill. When we teach mathematics in school, we do not pretend that every student is going to become a Poincare. We know that mathematics is useful in most activities, and we want to give students the ability to use that skill. Not every coached tennis player is going to win at Wimbledon, but most people can be taught to play a useful game of tennis.

If we do nothing at all about training creativity, then we have to fall back on natural talent because there is nothing else. But that does not mean that nothing can be done. Natural running ability can take us a certain distance at a certain speed. We could be content with that. The invention of the bicycle provides a mechanism by which the same human muscle power can take us much farther and much faster. Natural mathematical ability would not have gotten us very far without formal notations and methods. Today computers are allowing mathematicians to go even further.

In exactly the same way, formal techniques of creative thinking allow us to become much more creative. When I wrote my first books on lateral thinking, I half expected truly creative people to ignore this work and to claim that they knew all there was to show a great interest in what I was doing, and they wrote to tell me how useful they found the techniques. To this day highly creative people tell me how they still get the best ideas, not by relying on their own natural talent, but by formally going through the lateral thinking techniques step by step when they really need a new idea.

There is the very old-fashioned idea that creativity means "freedom" and therefore any techniques or method must inhibit creativity. This is nonsense.

Life is full of examples of "liberating" structures which allow us to do things we could never do without these structures: carpenter's tools, painter's brushes and paints, a ladder, a cup, mathematical notation, maps, surgical instruments, the telescope, etc. These are all structures which allow us to exert our talents more effectively.

People who are talented in creativity find that the training and formal techniques enhance their skill. People who have never considered themselves to be creative find that the formal techniques allow them to build up a useful skill of creativity-and the creative attitudes follow from the use of the tools. People who are conformist and have hitherto believed that creativity is only for "rebels" find that conformists can learn the "game" of creativity and can become even more creative than the rebels.

There is not an either/or polarization between talent and training. As with any skill, the two go together.

EVERYDAY CREATIVITY/SPECIFIC CREATIVITY

There is a level of everyday creativity that should become part of our normal thinking skills. This should apply to everyone in an organization. In an ideal society, creativity would be a part of education at all levels. Analysis of information is not enough. We need to develop the skills of design in order to make thins happen. Design needs creative skills.

In any organization there should be an attempt to train all personnel in basic creative thinking skills. This can be done most easily by providing training in some of the deliberate techniques of lateral thinking. This provides people with something to do. Just exhorting people to "be creative" is not effective.

As the simple lateral thinking tools get used, the behavior and attitudes incorporated in the tools become part of the thinking skill of that person and can be applied even if the tool itself is not formally used.

Training in creativity should be an essential pat of such programs as quality management, continuous improvement, cost-cutting and customer service. In all such programs, there is an element of analysis and information collecting. There is the application of "common sense" principles. But there is also a need to generate alternatives and new ways of doing things. The creative belief that anything can probably be done in a better way is a basic attitude that is much needed in such programs.

There are special areas where there is a continual demand for fresh thinking: research, product development, marketing, corporate strategy and even labor relations. People in such areas are often quite complacent about their creative skills, which undoubtedly exist. When they see how the formal techniques of lateral thinking can supplement those skills, they often become enthusiastic about the use of these techniques.

The specific use of creativity involves the formal definition of creative focuses and creative tasks. This can be done using the method of the Creative Hit-List and also the FAT/CAT program. Once there is a willingness to take creativity seriously and set up creative training, then it becomes possible to define targets which need new ideas and new concepts. In this way creativity becomes a corporate resource which can be used deliberately and in a focused manner. Where do we need new ideas? Now let's do something about those areas.

EXPERIENCE AND INSTRUCTION

I have been working for twenty-five years in the direct teaching of creative thinking skills and also in the teaching of general thinking skills. I have worked with different ages, levels, abilities and cultures and in 45 countries with widely different backgrounds and ideologies.

My experience has shown me that the basic skills of creative thinking can be taught and can then be used by the students on their own.

I have worked with governments and with a client list that includes the top five corporations in the world and other such well-known corporations as Citicorp, United Technology, Bell, Xerox, Kodak, NTT (Japan), Ericsson (Sweden), Total (France), Heineken (Netherlands), Ciba-Geigy (Switzerland), Monte-Edison (Italy), Vitro Fama (Mexico), BHP (Australia), etc.

As all competing organizations move to an equivalent level of "competence," there is the growing realization that only creativity will make a difference in the future. Organizations are now beginning to pay serious attention to creativity as a basic part of their resource potential rather than as an optional peripheral frill.

Recently I set up the International Creative Forum to bring together the leading corporations worldwide in each field to focus on serious creativity. At the time of writing, members include IBM, Du Pont, Prudential, Merck, Nestle, British Airways, etc.

It is also my intention to invite highly qualified trainers to become licensed associates in the use of my methods and materials such as the Six Thinking Hat method and the formal techniques of lateral thinking. In this way, these techniques will be used properly and effectively, which is not usually the case when the techniques are taught by those who have had no formal instruction from me in the use of the techniques.