Six Thinking Hats

Edward de Bono was born in Malta in 1933. A precocious student, he earned a medical degree at the University of Malta and went on to study at Oxford, where he earned a Master’s in psychology and physiology in 1957 and a D. Phil. in Medicine in 1961. He later attended Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in medicine. He taught at both universities, among others.

As a practicing physician, he worked with self-organizing systems such as the glands, respiration, and circulation, and wondered if the same principles could be applied to the brain. He concluded that the mind does function as a self-organizing pattern, developing familiar routines that help individuals deal with complexity. He wasn’t alone in this conclusion. Behavioral scientist Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, studied decision-making and theorized that the mind both makes fast, automatic choices and slower, more deliberate ones, with the fast decisions often overriding the ones requiring more focus.

De Bono believed that this aspect of the mind makes it difficult to change one’s perception. He advocated countering the mind’s natural tendency to form patterns by disrupting the thought process, a process he called “lateral thinking” in his 1967 book The Use of

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