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Lateral Thinking for Management: A Handbook
Sáng tạo là một phần rất thiết yếu của việc quản trị đến mức ta không thể phó mặc nó cho may rủi hay cho những người nghiệp dư có năng khiếu nữa.
Tiên phong trong việc sử dụng tư duy định hướng, Edward de Bono chỉ ra cách thức ông nhận thấy tính sáng tạo và tư duy định hướng phối hợp nhau trong quá trình quản trị để phát triển sản phẩm mới hay ý tưởng mới; đồng thời để sản sinh các phương pháp mới cho việc giải quyết vấn đề, tổ chức cơ cấu và giải pháp tương lai trong việc lập kế hoạch.
Bằng cách loại trừ sự thần bí của tính sáng tạo và nghiên cứu để xem sáng tạo là quá trình rõ ràng có thể học, thực hành và áp dụng với sự hỗ trợ của các kỹ thuật cụ thể, tác giả giải thích cách thức nền giáo dục truyền thống và những phương pháp quản trị (tập trung vào các phương pháp nối tiếp mang tính logic) có thể cùng đưa đến các kết quả đáng kinh ngạc.
Tiên phong trong việc sử dụng tư duy định hướng, Edward de Bono chỉ ra cách thức ông nhận thấy tính sáng tạo và tư duy định hướng phối hợp nhau trong quá trình quản trị để phát triển sản phẩm mới hay ý tưởng mới; đồng thời để sản sinh các phương pháp mới cho việc giải quyết vấn đề, tổ chức cơ cấu và giải pháp tương lai trong việc lập kế hoạch.
Bằng cách loại trừ sự thần bí của tính sáng tạo và nghiên cứu để xem sáng tạo là quá trình rõ ràng có thể học, thực hành và áp dụng với sự hỗ trợ của các kỹ thuật cụ thể, tác giả giải thích cách thức nền giáo dục truyền thống và những phương pháp quản trị (tập trung vào các phương pháp nối tiếp mang tính logic) có thể cùng đưa đến các kết quả đáng kinh ngạc.
225 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1990
About the author
Edward de Bono
242 books1,168 followersEdward de Bono was a Maltese physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He is best known as the originator of the term lateral thinking (structured creativity) and the leading proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking in schools.
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September 13, 2012Bought second hand (one careful reader, low mileage) I've had this book for years. Possibly since I was a student, so potentially up to twenty years. I haven't been reading it for quite so long, but I certainly had a bookmark in it long before joining Goodreads.
However very helpfully the book is closed by a five page summary of the concepts discussed, followed by two pages of chapter notes. My recommendation would be to start there, maybe taking in the preface which discusses creativity and the mind, and then if the concepts work for you read the book. Ideally if this was an e-book I would design it so you could drill down from the summary to the detailed discussion.
Parts of the book don't make for easy continuous reading (unlike The Goal which uses the device of a cheesy so-bad-its-good novel to introduce the Theory of Constraints in an entertaining easy to read way) for example the transcript of a brainstorming session. However if you haven't been in or run a brainstorming session this is pretty useful to read in preparation, if you wanted to read a transcript of an ideal brainstorming session. This is a book then that lends itself to be read for the concepts. Its probably best to skim or skip the supporting material, such as examples and return to those if you are going to try the techniques out.
It strikes me as interesting that ever since Ben Franklin took a break from flying kites in lightening storms to tell unschooled humanity that "time is money", business books have ignored the implications of that. Instead of writing brief and concise books to be used, constructed as practical handbooks, there seems to be a tendency to pad them out as if length was equal to utility. The worst offender to my mind for this is the thoroughly uncontroversial The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People which could be boiled down to one page of text, maybe as many as a dozen (they could be laminated and sold in a special wallet, I've thought about this) if you really wanted to go into a lot of detail about each habit, but which is then swelled out to over three hundred pages with tales of how his wife unfailingly preferred a certain brand of white goods and the difficulties one of his sons had learning to play baseball. I suppose since Covey sold millions of copies and died a wealthy man following on from a bicycle accident he certainly understood his target audience.
There's something of the same going on de Bono's book with bullet points. I've always taken the bullet point as a thing of terrible beauty. An opportunity to abandon the narrow limitations of grammar in pursuit of almost gnomic concision in the spirit of Pascal's Pensées. Not so de Bono. For him the bullet point is a full paragraph of normal text preceded by a big black circle. Well, it would be a dull world if we all thought alike.
OK so what's it all about.
De Bono tells us that we tend to think in patterns, in particular patterns of what he calls vertical thinking or traditional logical thinking, proceeding from one rung to the next. With this approach if we can't move to the next rung - we have a problem. These can be resolved by supplementing vertical thinking with lateral thinking which by escaping logic can allow you to move round a problem in search of solutions.
The most well known of lateral thinking techniques is brainstorming. De Bono's strength that he addresses this to a 1971 audience who he assumes are unfamiliar with the idea. Therefore he provides the transcript of a session, explains that it is important just to record ideas and not (at first) evaluate them and suggests way of keeping up the flow of ideas such as introducing random words as inspiration or asking people to write down ideas for five minutes and then to ask them to write down ideas for another five minutes and so on. My only quibble here is I would have liked to have seen the data that proved that introducing random words etc worked - has this been repeatedly tested in actual working environments or is this based off an afternoon with Psychology students in a university. We are left just having to accept his word that this works.
For de Bono the central element to lateral thinking and key to its functionality is his new word PO which is meant to be used as an alternative to YES/NO situations. Its been a good forty odd years since publication and so it doesn't feel premature to judge that as new words go, this one hasn't got off the ground. I'm not convinced that a special word is needed to trigger the use of lateral thinking. An apparently insolvable problem should be invitation enough, if you are comfortable with the other techniques and open to applying them. Although your actual ability to apply them is going to depend on your organisational context. This isn't something that de Bono addresses, but implicitly the book is targeted at somebody at a point in the hierarchy of an organisation to have responsibility for resolving a problem should it arise.
De Bono starts with the patterning system of the mind before moving into lateral thinking and then into the techniques of lateral thinking. These chapters are gentle and accessible, everything is spelt out carefully. Despite Thinking Fast and Slow I can't judge if what de Bono said about the mind's patterning systems in 1971 would be held to be entirely valid today, but since the purpose of the book is to offer a supplementary way of thinking rather than to provide an explanation of how the mind actually works it isn't central to what the book has to offer.
He then proceeds to the techniques - recognising current ideas which can help you escape their influence (looking at: dominant ideas, tethering factors, polarizing tendencies, boundaries, assumptions), changing ideas by avoidance (ways of ding this include: the "why" method beloved of small children, rotation of attention, change of entry point, deliberate quotas of alternatives, concept changing, fraction or dividing a concept into parts and it's opposite bridging or bringing two concepts together).
This is followed by a discussion of judgement, evaluation and the word "no". Lateral thinking, he says, escapes these. You don't have to be correct at each stage. It is permissible, even desirable, to think about impossible things (spherical cows, stationary cars and moving roads) as a creative tool since they can lead to useful solutions or insights.
Then we have chapters on discontinuity as a means of breaking established ways of looking at a problem which takes in: changing an idea from within (reversal and distortion), changing it from outside (expose and cross-fertilisation), formats for introducing discontinuity (analogies and random words).
These chapters have plenty of short bullet points and are broken up by occasional diagrams of dubious value making for an easy text to negotiate. The level of detail is useful with some pertinent examples.
The book is rounded off by affirming that creativity can be learnt and taught, and a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of creativity including working with people of a "creative temperament".
Really if you find the terms vertical and lateral thinking alienating you can throw them aside. In a nutshell what this book is about is the thinking it took to get us into this mess is not the same thinking that is going to get us out of it. This book aims to teach how to identify the thinking and ideas that are in place and has a range of techniques for thinking up alternative approaches. And since the A-Team are no longer in business why not give it a shot?
However very helpfully the book is closed by a five page summary of the concepts discussed, followed by two pages of chapter notes. My recommendation would be to start there, maybe taking in the preface which discusses creativity and the mind, and then if the concepts work for you read the book. Ideally if this was an e-book I would design it so you could drill down from the summary to the detailed discussion.
Parts of the book don't make for easy continuous reading (unlike The Goal which uses the device of a cheesy so-bad-its-good novel to introduce the Theory of Constraints in an entertaining easy to read way) for example the transcript of a brainstorming session. However if you haven't been in or run a brainstorming session this is pretty useful to read in preparation, if you wanted to read a transcript of an ideal brainstorming session. This is a book then that lends itself to be read for the concepts. Its probably best to skim or skip the supporting material, such as examples and return to those if you are going to try the techniques out.
It strikes me as interesting that ever since Ben Franklin took a break from flying kites in lightening storms to tell unschooled humanity that "time is money", business books have ignored the implications of that. Instead of writing brief and concise books to be used, constructed as practical handbooks, there seems to be a tendency to pad them out as if length was equal to utility. The worst offender to my mind for this is the thoroughly uncontroversial The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People which could be boiled down to one page of text, maybe as many as a dozen (they could be laminated and sold in a special wallet, I've thought about this) if you really wanted to go into a lot of detail about each habit, but which is then swelled out to over three hundred pages with tales of how his wife unfailingly preferred a certain brand of white goods and the difficulties one of his sons had learning to play baseball. I suppose since Covey sold millions of copies and died a wealthy man following on from a bicycle accident he certainly understood his target audience.
There's something of the same going on de Bono's book with bullet points. I've always taken the bullet point as a thing of terrible beauty. An opportunity to abandon the narrow limitations of grammar in pursuit of almost gnomic concision in the spirit of Pascal's Pensées. Not so de Bono. For him the bullet point is a full paragraph of normal text preceded by a big black circle. Well, it would be a dull world if we all thought alike.
OK so what's it all about.
De Bono tells us that we tend to think in patterns, in particular patterns of what he calls vertical thinking or traditional logical thinking, proceeding from one rung to the next. With this approach if we can't move to the next rung - we have a problem. These can be resolved by supplementing vertical thinking with lateral thinking which by escaping logic can allow you to move round a problem in search of solutions.
The most well known of lateral thinking techniques is brainstorming. De Bono's strength that he addresses this to a 1971 audience who he assumes are unfamiliar with the idea. Therefore he provides the transcript of a session, explains that it is important just to record ideas and not (at first) evaluate them and suggests way of keeping up the flow of ideas such as introducing random words as inspiration or asking people to write down ideas for five minutes and then to ask them to write down ideas for another five minutes and so on. My only quibble here is I would have liked to have seen the data that proved that introducing random words etc worked - has this been repeatedly tested in actual working environments or is this based off an afternoon with Psychology students in a university. We are left just having to accept his word that this works.
For de Bono the central element to lateral thinking and key to its functionality is his new word PO which is meant to be used as an alternative to YES/NO situations. Its been a good forty odd years since publication and so it doesn't feel premature to judge that as new words go, this one hasn't got off the ground. I'm not convinced that a special word is needed to trigger the use of lateral thinking. An apparently insolvable problem should be invitation enough, if you are comfortable with the other techniques and open to applying them. Although your actual ability to apply them is going to depend on your organisational context. This isn't something that de Bono addresses, but implicitly the book is targeted at somebody at a point in the hierarchy of an organisation to have responsibility for resolving a problem should it arise.
De Bono starts with the patterning system of the mind before moving into lateral thinking and then into the techniques of lateral thinking. These chapters are gentle and accessible, everything is spelt out carefully. Despite Thinking Fast and Slow I can't judge if what de Bono said about the mind's patterning systems in 1971 would be held to be entirely valid today, but since the purpose of the book is to offer a supplementary way of thinking rather than to provide an explanation of how the mind actually works it isn't central to what the book has to offer.
He then proceeds to the techniques - recognising current ideas which can help you escape their influence (looking at: dominant ideas, tethering factors, polarizing tendencies, boundaries, assumptions), changing ideas by avoidance (ways of ding this include: the "why" method beloved of small children, rotation of attention, change of entry point, deliberate quotas of alternatives, concept changing, fraction or dividing a concept into parts and it's opposite bridging or bringing two concepts together).
This is followed by a discussion of judgement, evaluation and the word "no". Lateral thinking, he says, escapes these. You don't have to be correct at each stage. It is permissible, even desirable, to think about impossible things (spherical cows, stationary cars and moving roads) as a creative tool since they can lead to useful solutions or insights.
Then we have chapters on discontinuity as a means of breaking established ways of looking at a problem which takes in: changing an idea from within (reversal and distortion), changing it from outside (expose and cross-fertilisation), formats for introducing discontinuity (analogies and random words).
These chapters have plenty of short bullet points and are broken up by occasional diagrams of dubious value making for an easy text to negotiate. The level of detail is useful with some pertinent examples.
The book is rounded off by affirming that creativity can be learnt and taught, and a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of creativity including working with people of a "creative temperament".
Really if you find the terms vertical and lateral thinking alienating you can throw them aside. In a nutshell what this book is about is the thinking it took to get us into this mess is not the same thinking that is going to get us out of it. This book aims to teach how to identify the thinking and ideas that are in place and has a range of techniques for thinking up alternative approaches. And since the A-Team are no longer in business why not give it a shot?
July 4, 2017
de Bono's first law: "AN IDEA CAN NEVER BE THE BEST ARRANGEMENT OF AVAILABLE INFORMATION"
March 5, 2021
Requires a bit of effort and certainly presents an alternative view. Worth reading.
February 16, 2019
Gần như ai cũng hiểu sực mạnh của tư duy sáng tạo, nhưng làm sao để có thể sáng tạo lại không đơn giản. Mọi người thường nghĩ các quyết định, hành động bản thân là khách quan nhưng thực tế những quyết định đó bị ảnh hưởng bởi tâm thức, những trải nghiệm trong quá khứ.
Viên thuốc con nhộng, một trong những phát minh vĩ đại nhất trong ý học được hình như từ ý tưởng kỳ quái: "ăn chất lỏng".
Lateral Thinking: "Tư duy ngoại biên" hay "Tư duy tuyến tính". Sử dụng phương thức tư duy khác lối tư duy thông thường dựa vào logic để tìm ra đáp án tối ưu hơn trong mọi vấn đề. Thay vì sử dụng hệ thống Yes/No, Edward thay thế nó bằng PO. PO một hư từ dùng tạm lưu lại những ý tưởng vô lý, điên rồ nhất và phát triển những ý tưởng này hướng đến giải pháp.
Lateral Thinking For Management. Trong cuốn sách này bạn có thể tìm ra cầu trả lời cho việc làm thế nào để phát huy năng lực sáng tạo của từng thành viên trong tổ chức, công ty. Bạn cũng có thể tìm được câu trả lời khi nào cần xây dựng phòng sáng tạo riêng và khi nào nên thuê ngoài.
Đáng tiếc bản dịch khá sơ sài mang tính công nghiệp. Trong quá trình đọc cuốn sách này tôi có cảm giác như đang mắc một cuôn ruồi trong cổ họng.
Bản dịch xuất hiện một vài lỗi đánh máy. Dịch giả sử dụng nhiều từ khó hiểu, tối nghĩa khiến 1 thằng ít đọc sách như mình cảm thấy thực sự bối rối. Mình đã mất hơn 1 tháng để đọc xong cuốn này, vừa đọc vừa search google để có thể hiểu được sách nói gì.
Kết: một cuốn sách hay đáng đọc với tất cả mọi người, đặc biệt những người quản lý muốn tìm giải pháp nâng cao hiệu xuất làm việc của công ty.
Rating:
- 7.5* cho nội dung
- 3* cho bản dịch.
Viên thuốc con nhộng, một trong những phát minh vĩ đại nhất trong ý học được hình như từ ý tưởng kỳ quái: "ăn chất lỏng".
Lateral Thinking: "Tư duy ngoại biên" hay "Tư duy tuyến tính". Sử dụng phương thức tư duy khác lối tư duy thông thường dựa vào logic để tìm ra đáp án tối ưu hơn trong mọi vấn đề. Thay vì sử dụng hệ thống Yes/No, Edward thay thế nó bằng PO. PO một hư từ dùng tạm lưu lại những ý tưởng vô lý, điên rồ nhất và phát triển những ý tưởng này hướng đến giải pháp.
Lateral Thinking For Management. Trong cuốn sách này bạn có thể tìm ra cầu trả lời cho việc làm thế nào để phát huy năng lực sáng tạo của từng thành viên trong tổ chức, công ty. Bạn cũng có thể tìm được câu trả lời khi nào cần xây dựng phòng sáng tạo riêng và khi nào nên thuê ngoài.
Đáng tiếc bản dịch khá sơ sài mang tính công nghiệp. Trong quá trình đọc cuốn sách này tôi có cảm giác như đang mắc một cuôn ruồi trong cổ họng.
Bản dịch xuất hiện một vài lỗi đánh máy. Dịch giả sử dụng nhiều từ khó hiểu, tối nghĩa khiến 1 thằng ít đọc sách như mình cảm thấy thực sự bối rối. Mình đã mất hơn 1 tháng để đọc xong cuốn này, vừa đọc vừa search google để có thể hiểu được sách nói gì.
Kết: một cuốn sách hay đáng đọc với tất cả mọi người, đặc biệt những người quản lý muốn tìm giải pháp nâng cao hiệu xuất làm việc của công ty.
Rating:
- 7.5* cho nội dung
- 3* cho bản dịch.
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May 1, 2017Paperback
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