Robert Potts SIMPLICITY by Edward de Bono (Viking)
Edward de Bono’s many, many books include Conflicts: A Better Way to Solve Them; Handbook for the Positive Revolution; How To Be More Interesting; and Teach Yourself to Think.
These seem to have sold extremely well, both to human beings and also to (the apparent target audience) managers; yet, proving that you can lead a horse to wisdom but you can’t make it think, few of these readers seem to have grasped De Bono’s elegant radicalism. He is right and we are wrong: yet there is still no shortage of negative, boring, dull-witted people solving conflicts in that messy, old- fashioned way.
De Bono hasn’t given up though, even if he himself seems to have gained little from How To Be More Interesting. In Simplicity, he tackles the needless complexity of modern life, and suggests a 12-step plan for us to bite the bullet and clear the decks.
Simplicity, ironically, is a big fat book, but this is because on the right-hand pages ideas are nicely spaced and slowly paced, and on the left there are massive slogans in a typeface tailor-made for the hard-of- understanding.
These boldly announce elements of a new creed, such as “To Get Simplicity You Have To Want It Enough”. This gives the reader the experience of being alternately duffed up with a blunt instrument, and soothingly spoken to like an idiot.
De Bono wants us to get back to basics, to stop adding layer after layer of complexity on to existing systems, to ask what is needed and discover the most elegant and efficient way of doing it.
And his big idea is for every country to set up a National Institute of Simplicity, “a formal body whose sole and direct business it is to focus on simplicity. There would be co- operation and liaisons with other bodies.”
I know what you’re thinking; and so does De Bono. “There would be a monitoring body to make sure the institute itself did not become too complex.” That certainly simplifies matters.
De Bono’s prose style is pompous, thrillingly unaware of its accidental humour. De Bono has had some critics – dullards, nit-pickers, and pedants all, the way he tells it – and correctly blames the pesky forefather of Western metaphysics.
“You may well find special exceptions to the comments I make – Socrates used to spend his whole time finding rare and special exceptions to anything anyone said. He must have been most irritating.”
De Bono, one suspects, would approve of the way the authorities simplified the Socratic dialogue by hemlocking one of its voices.
De Bono coined the phrase “lateral thinking”, now attributed to him (he proudly reminds us) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). He has also tried to coin the word “po”, which was to mean a “provocation”.
“Po” has not yet caught on; the OED still has it as a chamber pot, and the wider world will more happily associate it with the little red one from the Teletubbies.
The po-faced De Bono also wants to simplify “simplify” to “simp”, and spends an entertaining few paragraphs wrestling with the fact that the word “simp” is already in currency, and certainly doesn’t mean what he would like it too.
Much of the book seems a collection of homily and common sense, with the odd piece of name- dropping self-aggrandisement.
De Bono really believes people can do better, and only shoddy thinking prevents them from so doing. He has no idea that much inefficiency is deliberately caused by the power-hungry, paranoid, back-stabbing, glory-hunting, spiteful, grudge-bearing human beings who infest the world of organised work.