Tools for Thought

Failure is usually approached with one of two ways. It’s either not an option, or it’s permitted from time to time as the price of learning. In the first approach, no one really believes that a person can avoid making mistakes, but the idea is that adopting infallibility as a working mental set raises the [...]

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The APC thinking operation was coined in the 1980s by Edward de Bono as a compressed way to proactively search for and generate alternatives. The acronym, which stands for Alternatives, Possibilities, Choices, was designed as a handle for common usage — as in “Do an APC on reducing utility costs.” Each word in the acronym [...]

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One of the more recent practices to become popular in the art of task management is the mind sweep. Instead of simply writing down our most obvious goals our top priorities, the aim of the mind sweep is write down a complete inventory of everything that has our attention. When we capture all of our [...]

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The title says it all. LifeDev has graciously posted my guest article here. It deals with explicitly looking for the presuppositions that frame how we view a problem or project. It also contains a few examples for you to run through as a lateral thinking training exercise.

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One of the biggest stumbling blocks to idea generation and problem solving is familiarity with our own thought process. A problem, once recognized, evokes a chain of associations drawn from memory, and the strong tendency is to apply a stock solution that worked in the past for a similar situation. The existing ideas or solutions [...]

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Flowscaping is a cognitive mapping technique pioneered by Edward de Bono in the 1990s that never caught on the way some of his trademark techniques and concepts have (Six Thinking Hats, the term “Lateral Thinking”). A flowscape is designed to give the thinker a topographical view of his or her stream of consciousness around an [...]

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