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Passages Of The Day |
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| Stepping-stone |
| The first process involves the use of a ‘stepping-stone’ or ‘intermediate impossible’. For example, if we were trying to design a safer cigarette we might say: ‘Po, instead of trying to remove particles of smoke with a filter we ought to add something to them’. At first this may seem to be going in the opposite direction. Normally we might reject such a suggestion, but in lateral thinking we see where, as a stepping-stone, it can get us. What could we add? We could add air. If you make a few pin-holes just above the filter of a cigarette then air is sucked in, diluting the smoke with every inhalation. Because smoke particles are deposited in the lung by Brownian motion which depends on the concentration, this dilution does in fact reduce tar deposition. I did some work on this principle many years ago. In fact the air dilution principle is now the basis of the cigarettes judged as least harmful in the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany. There are specific procedures for obtaining a stepping-stone: the easiest of these is to reverse whatever is happening normally. Instead of asking people to come and look at new houses, ‘po, the houses go to see the people’. This stepping-stone was deliberately used by a builder in London who built a show-house on a barge in the Thames and towed it up and down the river to places to which people could easily get. Within three months he had 26,000 visitors to the house. There are also specific ways of using stepping-stones. The main principle is to use an idea deliberately as a provocation rather than reject it because it is wrong or outrageous. Where can this idea get me? |
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Passage taken from: “The Happiness Purpose”, by Edward de Bono, ISBN 0 85117 1257 Copyright © European Music Ltd 1977
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