Edward de Bono, the master of lateral thinking, challenged us all

Not everyone believed that Edward de Bono had changed thinking after more than 2000 years, but many insist he did.

Edward de Bono drew the attention of the London tabloids with his ‘Middle Yeast’ idea to send Marmite to the volatile region.

Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono
Physician, psychologist, philosopher, businessman, born Valletta, Malta, May 19, 1933. Died aged 88, June 9, 2021

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Edward de Bono pioneered the term “lateral thinking”. According to The Oxford English Dictionary lateral thinking is: “The solving of problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light.”

De Bono, thinking quite vertically, championed the phrase and the notion of this all his long life across dozens of books, thousands of lectures and television shows and radio appearances. He gained wide respect and significant wealth. But there was always a robust phalanx of disbelievers.

The idea of lateral thinking didn’t discard the notion of logic, which had ruled thinking since the days of Aristotle, it is just that de Bono believed that our brains were “excellent at being uncreative, as they make routine, stable patterns for dealing with a routine, stable world. Without that capacity, we would not be able to function”.

He would illustrate this idea by saying that there were many millions of variations on how a person might dress in their various clothes on any morning, but that the brain settled on one or the other and discarded the rest. This was intellectually efficient, but “if you never change your mind, why have one?”.

De Bono wrote about 85 books based on this theory and it was widely – sometimes wildly – accepted as the way forward for mankind. There were many converts in the years after the publication of his first book Lateral Thinking in 1967, and his fourth, The Mechanism of the Mind, two years later. Among those who sought help to retrain their employees’ brains were leading international companies Siemens, McDonalds, Qantas, DuPont, Goldman Sachs and Federal Express. It was reported that at Siemens, the time taken for product development was halved and others reported measurable improvements.

De Bono sometimes suggested that, from his mother’s side, he might be the descendant of an illegitimate son of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, but it was “hard to prove”. His father was a general practitioner while also the professor of medicine at the University of Malta; his mother was a journalist and campaigner who, in 1947, reputedly won the right for Maltese women to vote.

De Bono was a brilliant student and seamlessly skipped some years in the junior classes at school before gaining a medical degree. As a Rhodes scholar he attended Oxford, emerging with a master’s in psychology and physiology, and then earned a PhD from Cambridge. At Oxford he also excelled at sport. He taught around the world and then developed the ideas that would coalesce as lateral thinking.

At one point he was travelling non-stop across the globe, lecturing in more than 50 countries, and had a 1200-strong team of trainers, including in an office in Melbourne. His teachings were part of many school curriculums. The lifelong friend of Prince Philip was nominated for a Nobel prize in 2005 for his work in commerce and economics.

Not long before the Sydney Olympics, de Bono wrote the book Why I Want To Be King of Australia, to which he was a regular visitor, and we met several times over lunch. He joked that Australia had three choices: the Queen, a republic or de Bono: “I’d probably get the most votes,” he suggested to then Prime Minister John Howard.

He soon had a convincing qualification. Then Australian cricket team coach John Buchanan and captain Steve Waugh arranged to meet de Bono in London. “They wanted some new ideas on playing cricket … since then they have won everything – 21 one-day internationals and 17 Test matches, and beat the English by the biggest defeat in Test ­cricket”.

Others might observe that Waugh’s team included Test legends Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist and would likely have performed quite well in any case. De Bono had said to Waugh and Buchanan: “If it ain’t broke, break it.” With the shame of Sandpapergate, and the English on the horizon this coming summer, the Australians might do well to break it again.

In 1999, the British Foreign Office sought guidance on the unending, apparently intractable conflict in the Middle East. Beneath Fleet Street headlines that amusingly referred to de Bono’s “Middle Yeast” idea, it was reported that he suggested Britain send Marmite – like Vegemite, it is rich in zinc – to the region whose men consumed unleavened bread lacking in zinc and as a result were always irritable.