Difference between books – "Lateral Thinking" and "Serious Creativity"

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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on January 30, 2010 at 9:48

Hello Thomas

Lateral Thinking is one book of many that de Bono wrote in the 70s and 80s on the subject of the behaviour of assymetric patterning systems like the human brain/mind. 'Lateral Thinking' actually means 'Serious Creativity', so the two books are about the same subject but Serious Creativity incorporates a deepening as well as a broadening of the field of application of the techniques, plus some new ones.

Serious Creativity came out in 1995 (after the conceptualisation of the Six Thinking Hats in '84) to expand the techniques and their application, obviously now with the Hats incorporated.

By '85 de Bono was starting to talk about thinking frameworks and in '95 defined his framework as an exercise in parallel thinking (as opposed to adversarial thinking.)

To my mind his 1995 book Parallel Thinking is the one that really stirs the pot - don't neglect to read that one soon.

In some respects Edward de Bono has only ever written one book. But he has rewritten this book a great many times now and each time he does it the model of the mechanism of mind he is adopting becomes clearer and more and more obvious.

So - read them all!

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Permalink Reply by Chris Rodgers on January 30, 2010 at 19:41

Hi Thomas/Kim,

I am a big fan of the early books because these were rooted in explanations of the self-organizing, patterning nature of the brain. This provides the rationale for the lateral thinking process and the various techniques that flow from it. Without that grounding, I think that it is too easy for sceptics to dismiss the various 'tools' as superficial. A similar argument applies to de Bono's description of the dynamics of argument, clash and confrontation, which (as you say, Kim) provides the rationale for his notion of "parallel thinking".

Regards, Chris

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Permalink Reply by Franis on February 1, 2010 at 15:05

I second that observation of how much I have come to trust the conclusions of de Bono's writing. The earlier books were much more difficult to wade through because they contained so much content and were written in an academic style. Later de Bono books are rather conversational, while others contain quite a bit of meaty content, but all of them are pretty fascinating and will get you to start thinking about thinking.

Just wrote a blog post about how there are probably many more gems hidden in the de Bono's writing that will later be verified by brain science research. Fall on by and comment...

Chris Rodgers said:

Hi Thomas/Kim,

I am a big fan of the early books because these were rooted in explanations of the self-organizing, patterning nature of the brain. This provides the rationale for the lateral thinking process and the various techniques that flow from it. Without that grounding, I think that it is too easy for sceptics to dismiss the various 'tools' as superficial. A similar argument applies to de Bono's description of the dynamics of argument, clash and confrontation, which (as you say, Kim) provides the rationale for his notion of "parallel thinking".

Regards, Chris

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Permalink Reply by Bhuvaneshwar Joshi on February 23, 2010 at 6:43

You are right ideally both mean same but beginers are likely to use LT for frivoluos applications and only when they have learnt the skills would graduate to Serious Creativity.
Beejay

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