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How To Have Creative Ideas: 62 Exercises to Develop the Mind |
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 Book review - The Sunday Times 09th September 2007
The mind as a piano
From the earliest years of his career as a popular writer on creative thinking, Edward de Bono has shown an interest in developing games and exercises to train the mind. Some exercises focused on the development of strategic thinking, others on problem solving, yet others on how to enrich perception. Such exercises serve the same point that the practice of scales does for pianists: they hone technique until it becomes second nature. Unlike scales, one can practise them with others and they can be enjoyable in themselves.
This book focuses on the use of a particular technique of lateral thinking: the random word. Dr de Bono developed it some 40 years ago and has used it in meetings with Nobel Prize winners and with children. Its premise is that the mind sometimes needs a random input – a jolt out of the blue – to jumpstart a productive train of thought.
One picks a word at random – out of a dictionary, or a table prepared for this purpose (this book offers several such tables). Then, one juxtaposes it to the thinking task at hand – say, how to add value to a restaurant. Using certain simple processes – like extracting a common concept or value, multiplying connections, searching for contrasts or similarities – the random word generates new ideas that one was unlikely to arrive at through the usual means.
Such creativity has to do with ideas rather than art – although some exercises here ask one to come up with stories or verse. The 62 exercises, each of which can be repeated as much as one likes, aim to develop one’s ability at different aspects of creative thought.
This workbook is easy to use. During a sluggish afternoon session of a Brussels meeting addressing terrorism and the energy crisis – such discussions can be almost as deadly as the problems they address – the exercises provided soul-saving entertainment. Besides, my improvements on how to serve a ricotta pie and for the design of car key-chains made saving the planet seem worthwhile.
Since then, the technique has helped me come up with the title of a newspaper column in a few seconds. On a second occasion, I needed an organising image for a talk; again, thanks to a random word, I arrived at what only a moment before my stymied mind could not find. Although speed is not the point, speedy solutions do say something about the technique’s ability to bypass mental roadblocks.
Each exercise is well exemplified. Even if some of Dr de Bono’s own answers are not always brilliant (especially to the story and verse exercises), this is a book whose payoff depends on how the reader uses it. Used well, it can provide the pleasure of an airport novel, the satisfaction of a game of Scrabble and mental training that too few schools give you.
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