Summary: Serious Creativity

Review and Analysis of de Bono's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782511018248
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Créativité

The must-read summary of Edward de Bono’s book: “Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas”.

This complete summary of the ideas from Edward de Bono’s book “Serious Creativity” shows that creative thinking is vital for business success and that creativity is something you can learn. In his book, the author presents a rational and logical approach to creative thinking and introduces 12 tools and techniques that you can use. By learning and applying the principles, you will be able to develop the lateral thinking skills needed for innovative reasoning and ensure success.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand the key principles
• Expand your business knowledge

To learn more, read “Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas” to find out how you can develop your creativity and take your business to the next level.

Summary of Serious Creativity (Edward De Bono)

1. THE NEED FOR CREATIVE THINKING

Main Idea

Serious creativity is founded on the basis that lateral or creative thinking is a deliberate systematic technique for developing logical solutions to common business situations which have never been tried before.

Supporting Ideas

Creative thinking is a unique type of information handling. Some people have a preconception that being creative means being totally devoid of structure or social conventions, and that a creative person is out of step with the rest of society in order to generate truly creative concepts.

By contrast, serious creativity proposes that lateral thinking techniques are a valid, systematic approach to business challenges. Creative thinking can exist without the need for a mad scientist or rogue element aspect.

Much of the world can be viewed as a self organizing information system. That is, most people use the same patterns over and over. The logic of creativity is the logic of these patterning systems. The tools of creative thinking are designed to help a person be systematically creative by organizing new patterns of logic.

Lateral thinking (which is another term for creative thinking) offers opportunity, competitive advantage and benefits.

Creativity uses the concept of a hypothesis - an initial guess or speculation which must then be evaluated against available data to determine its usefulness and applicability. A hypothesis opens up possibilities, but must not be taken as the only correct pattern or the hypothesis limits other creative possibilities.

Sources of creativity include:

1. Innocence
   If someone doesn’t know the standard approach, they may come up with a fresh approach that is much better.
2. Experience
   Taking advantage of what is known to work and adding a few extra features. This source of creativity builds on and repeats past successes.
3. Motivation
   Generating creative ideas in a field in which everyone is perfectly happy with the status quo, can be a source of unexpected creativity.
4. Tuned Judgement
   A person with tuned judgement recognizes the potential of a project at a very early stage and becomes involved, adding whatever is needed to extract the maximum possible benefit from that project.
5. Chance, Accident Or By Mistake
   These events take us outside the boundaries in which we normally work, and can result in an entirely new (and often better) line of reasoning.
6. Lateral Thinking
   Using the systematic techniques and tools of lateral thinking, a logical and consistent source of new creative ideas can be tapped into.

Lateral thinking is based on cutting across established patterns in a self organizing information system. Normal lines of thought focus on what is right or wrong, whereas lateral thinking is concerned with all possibilities and potential solutions.

The practical uses of creative thinking are:

1. Improvement
   Creative thinking can be applied to existing systems with the hope of making an improvement or finding a better, more efficient way to achieve anything.
2. Problem Solving
   Creative thinking can be used to provide a solution in any area in which conventional thinking fails. Or to provide an alternative solution offering enhanced benefits over the traditional approach.
3. Adding Or Creating New Value
   Business success is heavily dependant on using core assets to add or create new business value. Efficiency provides the baseline. Additional value can then only be created by adding new products or services, or by utlizing unused assets. Creative thinking can play a part in the development of these new products and services.
4. The Future
   Creative thinking can be used to forecast futu...