Edward de Bono interview

S=Substitute
C=Combine
A=Adapt
M=Magnify/Modify
P=Put to other uses
E=Eliminate
R=Rearrange/Reverse

We’ve found this technique particularly useful when looking to develop new applications, uses or extensions of an existing technology. Applying each of these actions to the current paradigm forces a shift in thinking and changes the filter through which you view your situation.

Last night I watched Cate Blanchett in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. No, you’re right. It’s not a film. It was a production of the Sydney Theatre Company. But I’m using artistic license to interpret this Thinker Tool and hoping the fresh inspiration will get me into the swing of it.

Protagonist = Me. Discuss:

“Streetcar’ was written in 1947. At the time I’m sure its protaganist, Blanche Dubois’, antics would have been considered extremely risqué. In today’s world however, a little indiscretion is almost a rite of passage. When undertaken while suffering personal tragedy, I would say almost mandatory. So the potential disgust its original audiences may have felt for Blanche’s sexual behaviour has become somewhat muted through today’s lens.

Metaphor for my business:

2) It’s not Blanche’s sexual antics that are the main issue. It’s her delusions of grandeur and pretence that so antagonise Stanley and lead to his maltreatment of her. This is also true for today’s consumers. Transparency and authenticity are key in building loyal customer relationships. Social media is forcing short, accurate sound-bites so long, waffly, literary and padded commentary are considered distasteful. Be succinct. Make sense. Be honest.

Antagonist = My competitors. Discuss:

Blanche’s antagonist, Stanley Kowalski, is a confident, swaggering 2nd generation immigrant on the rise. She describes him as “survivor of the Stone Age” and he displays uncivilized manners, demanding and forceful behavior, lack of empathy, crass selfishness, and a chauvinistic attitude towards women.

Yet, he is the ‘winner’ at the play’s denoument. As Blanche is led away to a mental institution, his wife (Blanche’s sister) and his friend (Blanche’s almost-fiance, Mitch) choose to believe his stories over hers. His boldness and cruelty are rewarded.

Metaphor for my competitors:

3) If you are a truth-sayer your indiscretions will be forgiven. We all make mistakes but if you are known for your honesty, bad behaviours will be accepted as part of your personality and perhaps even become part of your raw appeal.

Real life case studies

Take Naomi Dunford for instance. Her USP is built on ‘hating people’ and swearing. Yet she is making a fortune as a small business coach. People come back time and time again though she prides herself on being slow to return email and ignoring people. Truth is, Naomi does look after her flock. By showing ‘deliberate cruelty’ to those outside the circle, it makes customers want to join her inner ranks. Once there, they still forgive the odd latent reply as ‘forewarned is forearmed’ and yet the in reality, Naomi is generally excellent at making her loyal fans feel loved.

Closer to home, Vince Frost, has made a huge name for himself as a premium brand designer. Frost is the master of self-promotion. He has never been afraid of public speaking and talks at any and every event he can. Frost Design enters (and wins) numerous awards, endlessly spades (and so gets) press in high-end design magazines and is a prolific generator of its own self-promotional content including blogs, EDMs, Twitter and Facebook. The relentlessness of his chest-beating is paying huge dividends. And furthermore, noone sees this as gauche. Frost is considered the epitome of design success in Australia and is paid handsomely for it.

Final Takeout
You can find inspiration in everything you do. Even (perhaps especially) in sideline past-times. If you’d like to read more on that, I’ve a whole blog post on ‘When Procrastination Works Best’. In the meantime, enjoy your movie tonight then analyse it for inspiration on how you can move your business forward.

Get those thinking hats on,
Charlotte

1. “How long before religions (institutionalised voodooism) are replaced by a universal code of conduct?”
2. “When we think about INFINITY, do we ever consider NEGATIVE INFINTY?
In space, infinity is already hard to understand (dimensions and quantities get bigger infinitely, but do things get infinitely smaller too?
INFINTY of time, is time just a one way human concept? We only understand time passing, going forward.”

Both philosophers and the common man have pondered these age-old debates for centuries, but using our creative thinking techniques can Thinking Club apply fresh thinking to the conversation?

Stay tuned. We’ll add these conversations to the Thinking Club roster and let you know what comes up.

In the meantime, let’s know what you think. We’d love to hear your ideas.

Get those thinking hats on,
Charlotte

A bit of background
Suzy recently returned to Australia after building a successful holistic wellness practice in London. She is challenged with re-creating its success in a new market and asked Thinking Club to work with her on developing a brand identity and promise that will appeal to Australian clientele.

Suzy’s business is a rich offering. She is a qualified psychologist, yoga teacher and fitness instructor. Suzy combines teachings in each of these modalities to deliver a personalised wellness plan for her clients. Yoga is the vehicle for delivering this.

However, where in London people were happy to pay well for one-on-one yoga, Suzy is finding that the local market prefers group sessions. To cater for this demand, Suzy offers her individual clients the opportunity to invite up to five additional guests. This still allows for a strong degree of personalisation yet helps with cost sharing among attendees.

Suzy is also running large group classes at established gym and yoga studios in order to build her profile within the local market. These serve as a light introduction to her teaching style and showcase some of her talents to prospective private clients.

Thinking it through
Using a common creative thinking technique – Opposites. made it easier for Suzy to define how her approach differed from many traditional fitness, yoga and psychology practices.

Where fitness trainers strive for continuos improvement, Suzy coaches acceptance. Where yoga often maintains that stillness and meditation is the only true yoga and that poses are merely a way to achieve this, Suzy embraces both its physicality and mental disciplines. Where psychologists traditionally have suit-wearing clients recline on couches, Suzy feels that an active environment allows hers to move through issues more easily.

Thinking forward
We then used a Ken Hudson exercise, ‘How to Create the Perfect Customer Experience’ to develop an understanding of how Suzy’s practice could translate across the Atlantic.

Envisaging the ‘Perfect Customer Experience’ as a one to five year goal allowed Suzy to open her business to new possibilities rather than remain trapped in practices that may have worked well overseas but may not do so well here.

Suzy saw this ideal future space as a private sanctuary. One that offered freedom to explore the reality of now and make peace with one’s current situation.

Some clarity of thought
Through our workshop Suzy realised her clear point of difference. In stark contrast to many personal trainers’ goal-setting techniques Suzy sees her practice as one of letting go of outcomes and enjoying an acceptance of what is.

While many of her clients attain lofty benchmarks, such as dropping 3 dress sizes, Suzy says this is more a by-product of the happiness her clients achieve through getting in touch with their bodies and minds. The clarity her clients attain, serves to deliver positive results in all areas of their lives especially where there have been blockages.

In summary
Its clear that Suzy has a fabulous offer. Her biggest challenge is getting the message out there. Once she does, there will be no stopping the new wellness revolution.

How can we create an optimally super-abundant mind? A 24 hour day being that yields an 18 hour day (excluding human and machine external leverage)? Would we want to?

This sparked a vocal and spirited conversation among the group during which we unleashed an arsenal of Thinker Tools.

Thinker Rules
We began by insisting on a point of order – if we were to generate a worthy list of possibilities we needed to suspend any limitations on the discussion. So we dropped the exclusion of human and machine leverage and allowed any thought to exist.

We agreed that once every avenue had been explored and the list created, we could then re-insert the criteria to judge each suggestion on its merit. But during a session: Thinking Club rules clearly state, that suspension of disbelief and no judgements are pre-requisites.

The concept of time
And so we began. First an opening conversation around the concept of time. This was rounded out with input from Zimbardo and Boyd’s fascinating study, The Time Paradox, in which they present six major attitudes towards time and time perspective. Taken from cross-cultures and eons they suggest ways in which to manipulate time’s effects.

The relativity of time
We talked about time ‘relativity’ and how we frame our references of time. We discussed that simply by restating one’s idea of time – shifting our attitude toward it or ‘changing our lens’ (a Thinker Tool oft called upon) one could manipulate its effects.

Redefining our sleep patterns
This led to an exploration of time usage and an awareness of circadian rhythms and sleep management. We referenced famous success stories who live only by ‘cat-naps’ and spoke of how international pilots use the technique to manage their long-haul flights.

The point was raised that if we redefine our sleep patterns we have the possibility of creating more time in our day. This was not so much to ‘sleep less’ as one’s body reacts negatively if it is sleep deprived, but instead to approach sleep in shift patterns and boost productivity between each mini-sleep.

Mind-altering time
As we further explored the idea of altering our lens on time, other more impactful ways of mind-altering arose. We discussed how both mental illnesses and mind-altering drugs can have effects on the brain which change one’s perception of time. This could affect a feeling of productivity – but at what point does reality impact on belief systems. What if one simply felt productive but was in fact lying around ‘doing’ nothing.

Doing nothing is doing something
Conversation quickly sprung to the defense of ‘doing nothing’ and how freeing the mind from activity can sometimes allow it to become increasingly sharper, more creative and achieve significant break-throughs.

Lucid Dreaming then came up as a tool for being able to maneuver a situation into a positive outcome through having ‘practised it’ during stillness or meditation.

Such thoughts focused our thinking on physiology and training the body to continue operating at various levels of consciousness so that we never wasted one minute in ‘sleeping’. We talked of optimal ‘flow-states’ where one is in the right frame of mind to see and act upon any situation to one’s best advantage and how this would achieve extreme effectiveness. This is why super-successful people seem comparatively to achieve so much more than an average operator in their respective lifetimes.

Achieving super-success
Speaking of success turned to the ‘Four Hour a Day Working Week’. How outsourcing every menial task can buy back literally hours of one’s life and allow extreme focus on one core activity thereby gaining ultimate success. Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers, also cover this notion – that success is led by the repetition of a task for over 10000 hours and not merely by sheer natural-born talent.

Outsourcing time and relationships
We talked of how in mastering time – technology can be turned to our advantage. How automated voicemail, no face-to-face contact and standardised replies can increase productivity times over. However the group shunned the thought of becoming automotons in favour of efficiency.

So leveraging relationships became the ultimate multi-tasking opportunity. Having others do everything for you. Ultimately realising that to have total control one must completely relinquish it.

Tapping into primordial consciousness
This raised the notion of human spiritual connectivity and tapping into shared knowledge so that each individual member of society would not have to repeat the learnings of those prior. Many experts refer to the instinctual primordial brain and we saw this as an untapped resource.

Coming to a Time Vortex near you
The ideal scenario propose building a Time Vortex to which one could escape the march of time and be allowed free reign to explore while the rest of the world moved forward. The individual emerging from the Time Vortex could have experienced lifetimes yet seemingly not aged a bit.

Practical time-saving solutions
Everyone had a multitude of suggestions on what they would do with their time had they more of it. Our practical everyday solutions for wresting more of it back were to:

• create space

• allow time
• share ideas
• be selective in who/what we give our time to
• pinpoint and focus on developing select skills

In summary
Timeliness is not something we try and create, but simply allow. To increase our life and enjoy its moments, we must take the pressure off achieving.

Put simply:
Get out of life’s way and let it happen. Then, the optimal will naturally occur.

1. Solving Problems
2. Creating Growth Opportunities
3. Improving Performance
4. Enhancing Team Performance
5. Selling with Impact
6. Breakthrough Leadership

Under ‘Creating Growth Opportunities’ he recommends as Tool #2

Design the Perfect Customer Experience

Rather than following than following the traditional practice of refining based on customer feedback, Hudson suggests taking time out to ‘imagine what the perfect customer experience feels like.’

Then, he says, ‘once you have created the perfect scenario you can compare and contrast the ideal one with the current situation. Where are the gaps and how can you address these?’

Using Edward de Bono’s book, “Creativity Workout,” we applied the Thinker Tool: Random Words, and selected ‘sailor’ as our random word. 

This initiated the story of Captain James Cook’s theory on the prevention of scurvy. A terrible scourge afflicting sailors on long voyages, Cook discovered that feeding his men cabbage held scurvy at bay. They weren’t fond of it, so the only way he could get them to swallow was by leading through example and eating it himself, in front of them.

Obviously Cook wasn’t aware that Vitamin C that was the cure but he did recognise that consuming certain foods (or the lack thereof) had a direct impact on the disease’s management.

This tale spawned a series of thought trails…

First it led us to ask: Why don’t children like vegetables? We established the following list:
taste, colour, texture, association, timing, appearance

This spun off a series of solutions to these issues. 

1. Hide the vegetables:
- grated into minced meat meals ie: meat pies, sausage rolls, bolognese etc
- finely grated into rolled meat wraps where the taste and flavours drown out the stow-away 

2. Disguise the vegetables:
- Serve them in unusual ways ie: desserts (pumpkin pie), chips (any root vegetable makes a good chip)

3. Change their appearance:
- Present the vegetables in fun ways i.e. a funny face
- Make them into dips ie beetroot dip
- Juice them

4.  Serve them at unusual times
- include them in a breakfast cereal ie make a type of Cheerios/Fruit Loops whose base ingredient is vegetable
- offer them at snack times or when the kids are distracted instead of forcing them down as part of the main meal

5. Change their form
- create powder forms for drink bases to add to shakes etc
- serve as daily dose capsules ‘vitamins’
- hide the powder in jelly/jubes so they are like confectionery 

Secondly it demonstrated that a way of changing behaviour can be to lead by example. We recgonised that how the parents and family eats and their relationship with vegetables will impact on the child’s response. This led to a conversation about peer pressure and how ‘school dinners’ in the UK were chosen based on what one’s friends were eating. Of course this was influenced by what was available so in those cases it would be a matter of replacing the junk foods with healthy options.

Thirdly if one type of vegetable isn’t available, substituting with another can deliver the same benefits i.e. don’t get too hung up on a vegetable, because any vegetable will do for a start.

This spawned another idea of creating a service which would create meals based on preferences (likes and dislikes of vegetables) for the busy or unhealthy eater who needed some inspiration to gradually change their eating patterns over time. It could be created in conjunction with a supermarket chain, which would produce a list of meals for the week based on budget and taste requirements, then home deliver the appropriate ingredients. 

After an hour we could have kept going for another hour… but the rules of Thinking Club are clear, so we stopped and got on with some real work.

How about you? Can you use another Thinker Tool to generate further ways to get kids to eat more veges, or have you alreday some tried and true methods you use at home? Let us know by adding your comments.

Get your thinking caps on,
Thinking Club

de Bono suggests applying the prefix ‘Po’ to any mechanism (such as ‘Po-Cars’) to get thinkers to break out of their familiar thought patterns, and create an entirely new construct, which could either replace or extend the original. As opposed to logical thinking, which restricts responses to ‘no’ or ‘yes’, Po thinking allows us to entertain the many realms of ‘possible.’

An example

For instance: in workshopping a ‘Po-Car’ one may start by listing a normal car’s attributes and applications ie a four-wheeled form of transport for passengers and a driver.

This would kick-start a brainstorm around how each of these attributes and applications may be rethought: varied or enhanced – which could lead to phenomenal developments on the basic model.

In our workshop, a ‘Po-aeroplane’ became a mile-high disco. The activity on the second floor of a Boeing would encourage activity thereby reducing the risk of DVT. Rather than seeing flying as unavoidable and tedious, passengers would be happy to pay more for their tickets as the journey became an essential component of their party-trip.

Take your discussion statement and identify its key words. Put them in a list to the side. Alongside each key word, write its opposite. Now substitute your keyword with its opposite and see how it affects your discussion statement and the outcomes of your conversation. Often the more ridiculous the substitution seems, the better results you will generate.

Opposites in practice

Discussion Point: Our company’s mission is to encourage people to help one another.

Opposites of Keywords 

company – individual
encourage – discourage
help – hinder
another – themselves

Each (individual’s) mission is to encourage people to help one another…
This may start the idea that to really bring a mission statement to life, each individual should be personally enacting the mission. This may encourage a practice whereby each employee writes their own strategy for ‘living the company mission’ during their everyday.

Our company’s mission is to (discourage) people to help one another…
This statement would provoke a conversation around why the company’s mission may not be working to its optimum and what the company is doing which may be discouraging a helping attitude. This may reveal discontent from the workforce and how the company is treating them. It may uncover dissatisfaction from customers or encourage the idea of running a customer satisfaction survey.

Our company’s mission is to encourage people to (hinder) one another…
Such a statement would continue further discussions as above. It may encourage a review of current policies, practices and procedures which may be affecting performance and holding the company back. It could provoke a competitive analysis to see how the opposition is beating the company’s performance.

Our company’s mission is to encourage people to help (themselves)…
Through allowing this conversation to take place, management may receive feedback that this is a situation that employees would prefer. By changing the focus off ‘helping others’ staff may suggest better activities for the company to make their mission. It may throw up ideas for self-empowerment which would ultimately ‘help another’