Piers Dudgeon: Breaking out of the Box

By MARGIE THOMSON

From his materially privileged but emotionally deprived childhood in Malta, to his present life as a kind of international lightning rod for problem-solving and inspirational thinking, Edward de Bono has always embodied the extreme.

He went to university at 15, was a doctor by 21, became a Rhodes scholar and collected three further degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.

A deep thinker all his life, he became fascinated by the mind's mechanism, and by the kind of thinking computers cannot do.

In 1967 he published his first book, The Use of Lateral Thinking, in which he described how to break out of rigid thinking patterns. Since then, lateral thinking has become a universally recognised concept, and de Bono's ideas have influenced politicians, business people and people in their ordinary lives all over the world. His "six hats" parallel thinking structure is probably his most popular methodology.

Dudgeon provides an admiring, familiar (he talks about his subject as "Edward") yet satisfying biography, a portrait of de Bono's ideas and methodologies as much as of the man himself, in which one often feels party to personalised conversations and exchanges - a pleasant experience, and an excellent place to start if you want to catch up on a major contemporary phenomenon.

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