A brochure by Edward de Bono describing the ‘Six Thinking Hats Method’ promises to “harness the full potential of...thinking power” through lateral thinking. Lateral thinking produces alternative ways of looking at things. Through restructuring and liberating information into different patterns, new and better solutions may be produced.

Many highly successful individuals and organisations are convinced of the value of creative thinking. You may want to find out more about it. de Bono's books detail some mind-liberating techniques. Briefly, some of these are:

• Alternatives.
  Rather than search for a single, best solution, it may be more rewarding to generate as many different approaches as possible.

• Suspended judgement.
  “The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas.”(96) To explore new ideas, one needs to delay judgment, avoid making summary evaluation of an idea, and consider even an obviously wrong idea to see why it is wrong.

• Challenging assumptions.
  Consider the problem below which asks for the linking of the 9 dots using 4 straight lines following continuously one upon another.
  

  (solution)

  What is illustrated here is the point that what appears to be an unsolvable problem merely requires moving beyond conventional boundaries and assumptions for it to be solved.

• Fractionation.
  An established pattern is usually taken for granted. To create new patterns, it is necessary to take it apart into its smaller component parts to if see these may be re-structured.

• Reversal.
  “In the reversal method one takes things as they are and then turns them round, inside out, upside down, back to front. Then one sees what happens.” (de Bono, 125)

• Brainstorming.
  In such a group activity, anything goes. Suspended judgement and cross-stimulation often enable individuals to break out of their usual regimented vision to become highly creative.

• Analogy.
  This involves translating a problem into an analogy and then developing the analogy, and then referring back to see what might have happened to the original problem.

• Po.
  Perhaps the most interesting is de Bono's introduction of the word po, a linguistic tool to counteract one of the most powerful--and limiting--words in the English language: the word ‘no’. Po signifies neither yes or no; it is a ‘wild card’ which stands for nothing and anything. In breaking the one-to-one correlation between signifier and signified, in weakening concept divisions, it provides an escape from self-limiting negation and stock responses. Whereas rational thinking operates through the processes of elimination and closure; po works in the opposite direction. It has a holding function, and its noncommital nature allows temporary suspension of judgement which frees the mind to venture beyond known and safe barriers.

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