Thinking Outside The Box

On the official website, you will find these excellent quotes, all of which are further defined on the De Bono website.

“You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper”

“In any self-organising system there is a need to escape from a local optimum in order to move towards a more global optimum. The techniques of lateral thinking, such as provocation, are designed to help that change.”

Edward De Bono is synonymous with the expression Lateral Thinking. Lateral thinking is often defined as the ability or skill of “thinking outside the box”. In a literal effort to get people to “think outside the box” it is popular in management to do this exercise below, where you are tasked to join all the dots using four lines only. All these lines must be joined together, so there can not be any gaps between the lines, as the first line must link into the second line, and the second line must link into the third line. Subsequently, the third line must link into the fourth line.

Have a go at the above puzzle, (without looking up the answers) and then I’ll reveal the answer in a later post.

Edward de Bono has written numerous books on the topic of lateral thinking. De Bono encourages us to use our brain, and to think. De Bono is popular within many leadership training systems and is popular within the curriculum of schools throughout the world. The official website of Edward de Bono is here:  www.edwdebono.com  To see more games now to get your brain ticking, take a look at these thinking lessons here:  http://www.edwdebono.com/mp.htm.  There is a game here called “the L game” view here.  Then there’s another game called “the Spot game” that you can view here.