Edward de Bono

When quality programs have been running for some time the fizz goes out of them and they can become boring. But that is only a minor problem compared to the more fundamental issues that I intend to cover here.

Water is necessary for soup but soup is more than water. If you are given a bowl of soup that is just pure water you do not criticize the water. If a car has a flat tire you do not criticize the three inflated tires but point out the deficiency. In exactly the same way it may be necessary at this stage to point out that quality programs are wonderful but to ask whether they are sufficient. That is no criticism of quality programs, which usually do a much needed job very well.

Three phases of Western business management

We can begin by distinguishing three phases in the evolution of Western business management

Phase one…problem solving—This phase lasted a very long time (from the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s). It was firmly based on the saying: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it." Western business had a virtual monopoly in an expanding market. Business was set on a prosperous path and ‘ maintenance’ was enough. Why waste time fixing something that was not broken? Problems were a ‘deviation’ that had to be fixed so that we could get back to the proper path.

The gang of three… This phase fitted in very well with the negative orientation of Western thinking which was derived from the infamous Greek gang of three: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. This style of thinking placed argument or confrontation as central to Western thinking culture.

Argument meant pointing out what was wrong in the other party’s view or proposal. Sadly we still put far too much emphasis on this in the teaching of critical thinking in schools instead of productive thinking.

Central to this Western thinking is the notion that if you remove the faults then all will be well. So problem solving was enough. Find the problem, define the problem, solve the problem and all will be well.

The traditional approach to ‘improvement’ was the same. We looked for faults, defects, weaknesses and bottlenecks and then set about putting these right. Far too many quality programs today still operate on that basis.

Then along came the Japanese. The most striking thing about Japanese culture is not that it has extra features but that it is without some of the major defects of Western thinking such as the negative orientation and ego problems (and short term maximization). The Japanese had not been influenced by classic Greek thinking so they did not set out to find what was wrong—they set out to make thing better. This is a totally different approach.

The Japanese do solve problems and correct faults but that is only the beginning of improvement. Then they go on to make better what already seems perfect. Awareness of this approach and loss of market share forced the West into a second phase.

Phase two…quality and continuous improvement —To compete with the Japanese, Western business was forced to move away from the problem-solving phase. You could solve all your problems but that only brought you back to where you had been. Meanwhile your competitors were making improvements at points, which were not problems and one day you woke up and found that you had been left far behind.

So the West had to set about doing what came more naturally to the Japanese who never had the negative orientation of thinking. The West had to devise and institute formal quality programs, which were concerned with continuous improvement.

This was no longer just a matter of problem solving and fixing defects but of making better what was already good. So came the notion of quality and continuous improvement.

The choice of the word quality is a good one. You can have an adequate suit which performs the functions of a suit but you can also have a quality suit. With the quality suit you are still always trying to improve the quality.

In addition to everything else the quality movement set up frameworks such as quality circles or teams which encouraged people to examine what they were doing instead of just doing it automatically. The motivation value of this was considerable even if few changes were actually made. There were now two levels of achievement. The first was doing what you were supposed to be doing. The second was attempting to improve the process itself.

The quick results trap… In traditional cost cutting or slimming down programs the big benefits come early. It is not too difficult to get rid of the fat and inefficiencies that have built up over the good years when there was no pressure on costs. But as costs are cut and efficiency is increased then it becomes more and more difficult to get results.

The same thing happens with quality programs. The best results come early and the more successful the programs the more difficult it becomes to get big results alter. This is when quality programs can become boring. At this point there is a need to shift to the third phase of business which is just beginning.

Phase three…creativity or quality plus—The German economy has thrived to the point where it became the world’s largest exporter. This is in spite of very high wage rates and much longer holidays than in other industrial countries (five weeks vacation a year). The success of the German economy was based on excellence and high quality particularly in the field of engineering.

This high quality was based on two things. The first thing was a very highly skilled work force, which comes from a unique apprenticeship system in which workers learn their skills through early on-the-job training. The second thing was a conscious decision to put quality before creativity.

The quality, first and only trap… Putting quality before creativity makes a lot of sense. Creativity without quality is not worth much—as USS and British industry found when competing with the Germans and the Japanese. Quality without creativity does have a high value so long as your competitors cannot also offer quality, then you have to go further.

That is why German industry may be in bad trouble in the near future because they have not yet realized that others are catching up on quality. For example Germany has fallen far behind I the electronics area and is seeking to catch up through joint ventures with the Japanese.

The limit to quality alone—Water is necessary for soup but soup is more than water. Flavor without water does not make soup. Creativity without quality is of little value but quality alone is also not enough.

The word quality is a good word and implies doing what you are doing better. This is very important and very valid. But making better fountain pens when you should have been switching over to ball-points may not be the vest thing to do. There will always be a niche for high quality expensive fountain pens but that is a small specialist market. At this point we come to the chief limitation of the notion of quality.

Should we expand quality’s definition? I see a very considerable danger in expanding the notion of quality to include everything good that can be done. There is danger in expanding the notion of quality to include their creative change of concept as well.

The danger is that when we seek to expand a word beyond its true meaning we only end up confusing people and also losing the power of the original meaning. There is exactly the same danger in the teaching of ‘critical thinking’ in schools. The proponents of critical thinking claim that it covers all thinking—which is clearly nonsense.

The word ‘critical’ comes from the Greek kritikos which means judgment. Indeed, judgment is an important part of thinking but there is also the need for generative and productive thinking. In the same way we must not lose the value of the word quality by pretending that it includes all that needs doing. We end up by de-valuing that word and not doing all that needs doing.

So we need to acknowledge the great value of quality and the continuing need for it. And then we need to add the concept of creativity as well. This is in no sense a criticism of quality or an attack on quality. Recall, if you will, that to pint out that flatness of one tire does not attack the full inflation of the other tires.

Organization wide quality and creativity

Many large organizations are slowly coming to realize the importance of adding creativity to their quality programs. A few months ago, I set up the International Creative Forum which has as its members the leading corporations worldwide in each field.

Members include IBM as the leading computer maker; Prudential as the world’s largest insurance group; DuPont as the leading chemicals corporation: Nestle as the world’s largest foodmaker: Merck, Sharp and Dohme as the leading pharmaceuticals organization: British Airways as the largest international carrier with 25 million passengers a year. The first meeting of the Forum was held in Toronto and the second on my private island in Venice. The purpose of the Forum is to focus on the use of ‘serious’ creativity within the member organizations.

All the member organizations have had their quality programs in place for some time and have come to realize that quality is not enough. That is the basis for their growing interest in creativity.

Organization wide quality and creativity… This means creativity throughout the organizations and not just in special areas such as marketing, corporate strategy, research and development, et cetera. It is right that quality should come before creativity but eventually there comes a time when creativity needs to be added to quality.

Some organizations such as Shell have started to take about ‘re-engineering’ which introduces the concept of creativity. Instead of doing the same thing better—is there a different and better way of doing it?

Two approaches to company wide creativity

The tool-kit approach—The simplest approach is to seek to introduce creative thinking techniques into the quality programs as tools for achieving continuous improvement and even changing concepts. In this way the tools become available to everyone working within the framework of the existing quality programs.

The introduction of the tools can be done in a format and systematic manner though properly trained facilitators or trainers. The important pint is that it needs to be done seriously and should not just be a token gesture towards creativity with some weak brainstorming sessions.

The parallel approach—Over the years I have done a lot of work with DuPont at their headquarters in Wilmington. I have been very impressed by the willingness of this corporate giant with its enviable record of successes (nylon Kevlar, Staimaster carpets, et cetera) to take up creativity in a serious way. While many similar organizations feel far too complacent about their past successes and creative abilities, DuPont has a powerful continuous improvement program which has been running for some time.

They now also have a formal Creativity Center with a full time staff and headed by a very able senior executive, David Tanner, who is setting about introducing creativity throughout the corporation with its 140.000 employees. In the case of DuPont the Creativity Center exists in parallel with the continuos improvement quality program.

I feel that this is the right way to do it. In the future, creativity in all areas is going to be the key ingredient for business success. As technology becomes a commodity and all competitors reach the same level of competence, it is only creativity should not be seen just as a subset of quality or only as a tool kit for quality programs.

Creativity needs to exist in its own right in an organization with a nominated champion and, where possible, a creativity center. This creativity center can then provide the training and tool kit for the quality program.

Fixing misperceptions about creativity

There is a huge amount of nonsense and rubbish written about creativity. It is a subject which attracts a large number of operators who have loads of style but only incompetently borrowed substance. Much of the confusion arises from some basic misperceptions about creativity.

Creativity misperception number one—Artistic creativity and conceptual creativity are the same thing.

The word ‘creativity’ in the English language unfortunately includes the arts. So it is supposed that all artists are creative. This is not so. Many artists are simply productive stylists who produce within a style or perception and expression. This has nothing whatever to do with changing concepts.

We need to distinguish clearly between the creativity involved in changing concepts and artistic creativity. Being artistically inclined does not make a person creative or capable of training others in creativity.

Creativity misperception number two—Everyone is creative but has been mis-trained or inhibited by peers.

There is a tradition that everyone is really creative and that we have all been inhibited by a school system that demands the one right answer and by the fear of seeming ridiculous. The hope is that if we become liberated and freed from such inhibitions then we shall all be creative.

This is nonsense. The brain is not designed to be creative and if it were so designed then life would be impossible. The brain is designed to set up perceptual patterns and to stick to them. To be creative we have to do things which are ‘not natural’ and which go against the way the brain is designed to work. So removing inhibitions only has a mild effect.

Creativity misperception number three – We need only understand left and right brain functions, and increase right brain thinking.

The split between right and left brain had some usefulness in indicating a different sort of thinking but has since done far more harm than it offered value.

The left brain is the educated brain and has learned what things are and how to use language and symbols et cetera. The right brain is innocent. This innocence may have value in such areas as drawing and music but not much value in conceptual matters. PET scans of the brain show that when a person is being creative, both sides of the brain are in use the whole time. There is the added danger of fatalistic categorization: "I am left brain." "She is right brain," et cetera. This gives a totally false impression—for creativity can be learned by anyone.

Creativity misperception number four – Brainstorming in a group is the end all and be all of creativity.

The old idea of brainstorming has held back the development of serious creativity. Brainstorming was developed for the advertising industry where novelty is sufficient to create value. Everywhere else novelty has to be turned into something practical.

Brainstorming is a very weak technique and people trained in brainstorming are often unable to deal systematically with new concepts. Because brainstorming is now traditional, it is often felt that creativity requires only a brainstorming session. Brainstorming has also led people to believe that creativity has to be a group process. This is not true, creative thinking processes can be used by a person entirely on his or her own.

Creativity misconception number five – Creativity and structure don’t mix.

There is a feeling that creativity is a matter of intuition and inspiration and that any structural approach is a contradiction in terms. Again this is nonsense.

There are many examples of liberating structures; language is a liberating structure which allows us to do things we could not do without it. A cup is a liberating structure that allows us to drink liquids more easily. A ladder is a liberating structure which allows us to get to new places. A boat is a liberating structure et cetera. So also are the systematic tools of creativity and devices like the word ‘po’ which allow us to handle perceptions in novel ways.

Lateral Thinking

It was precisely to get away from the vagueness and confusion of the term creativity that I created the term ‘lateral thinking’ in 1967. (It is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Lateral thinking is specifically concerned with changing concepts and perceptions.

Lateral thinking is based directly on the way the mind works as a self-organizing system that sets up asymmetric patterns. There is a mathematical need to cut across these patterns and hence the term lateral thinking. In my 1969 book, The Mechanism of Mind, I described how nerve networks behave as a self-organizing system. It is only now, twenty years later, that this has become mainstream thinking among those who work on the information systems of the brain. This is why there are forewords by three Nobel Prize physicists to my forthcoming book I am Right, You are Wrong.

In lateral thinking there are deliberate tools which can be used systematically to develop new ideas. These tools include the new word ‘po’ and provocation. The logic and use of the random word method is also something I pioneered many years ago.

Case study of successful lateral thinking—No city in the world wanted the 1984 Olympic Games because the 97^th Montreal Games had lost so much money (to this day the debts are not yet paid). Yet when the site was chosen for the 100^th Olympiad there were seven cities so eager to host the game that they spent $70 million on promotional efforts to get the games.

The change in attitude was entirely due to the success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games. When the organizer of these Games, Peter Ueberroth, was interviewed in the Washington Post and asked how he had generated the new concepts that were needed, he attributed his success to his use of lateral thinking. He had first learned this from a lecture I gave to the Young Presidents Organization in 1975.

Ron Barbaro, president of Prudential Insurance, tells how he used lateral thinking to develop the hugely successful concept of ‘living benefits’ which allows immediate payout of life insurance benefits to a policy holder who contracts an illness which might be fatal.

A structured approach to creativity… In the end, specific thinking tools must be practical, simple, and powerful.

Creative thinking based on the formal and structured use of such tools does not depend on inspiration or being in the right mood. Nor is it a matter of loose brainstorming in the hope that something copes up. The mental operation of movement can be used systematically to get value from provocations. This is totally different from the weak admonition to ‘withhold judgment.’

Among the other simple but powerful thinking tools is the six Hats method which is now being widely used by many of the world’s largest corporations such as IBM, DuPont, Prudential, et cetera.

This method allows us to break away from argument and confrontational thinking. It also allows us to make specific time for creative thinking and it puts the caution of "black hat thinking’ in its proper place. My new book six Action shoes, to be published in October 1991, differentiates modes of action: the routine action needed for maintaining an aircraft engine is different from the initiative type of action needed to set up a project.

Summing Up

When quality is poor there is a need for quality improvement but as quality improves there is a need to supplement quality with creative thinking.

Four points come to mind here:

• There comes a point when we have to wonder whether doing things in a different way may not be more useful than doing things better in the same old way. This applies both to internal operations within an organization and to what the organization has to offer to its market.
• Competence will not be enough when everyone else is as competent. Water is necessary for soup but soup is more than water.
• Creativity can provide a tool kit for quality programs but creativity needs to exist in its own right within an organization.
• There is a lot of rubbish written and taught to the field of creative thinking. There is the hope that liberating the mind an