67. Edward de Bono: Odds and ends

Edward de Bono has written a lot of books. Although they often contain small novelties, overall his bibliography is quite repetitive, meaning that it's not worth making an episode about every one of his books individually. In this episode, we'll look at six of his books in quick succession. It's the audio summary equivalent of "skimming" these books, which deserve little more if you're already familiar with the books of his we've considered so far on the podcast. First we look at the "six series": Six Thinking Hats, Six Action Shoes, Six Value Medals and Six Frames for Thinking about Information. The first of these we already saw in the first episode about Edward de Bono, and so there is no need to go into it again in depth, but it is clearly the ancestor of the rest. They all tend to say the same sort of thing, but in slightly different contexts. It's worth quickly skimming through this and then moving on, as there doesn't appear to be much novelty here, just the ability to produce too many sequels, like the Saw movies. Next we look at Teaching Thinking and Teach Your Child to Think. These are surprisingly underwhelming and not particularly useful. There is some "evidence" provided of the effectiveness of direct teaching of thinking which is completely unreferenced and not peer reviewed, and so, unless you consider the author unusually worthy of blind trust, you are forced to ignore this "evidence". The thinking methods taught in a typical Cognitive Research Trust class (CoRT, de Bono's organisation for teaching thinking) are presented, which is interesting, but also a bit of an anticlimax, as they don't seem to amount to anything particularly novel or special. Finally, we look at Simplicity, which is ironically more complicated a book than it need be. We can extract a long list of thinking techniques from it, with the occasional pearl, but the book as a whole is not worth diving into too deeply. Overall, this makes for an unusually fast-moving episode. This is simply because there isn't much to say per book, and I have no reason to waffle and waste your time. It should round out your knowledge of some of the rest of the author's work, and you might have a few useful takeaways here and there as well. Enjoy the episode.