Edward de Bono is a leading authority on communication. So why is he so bad at conversation? Emma Brockes Edward de Bono, inventor of lateral thinking and a man who regards himself as a more powerful visionary than Plato, is outlining his plans for our interview. We are in his ground-floor flat in Albany, the millionaires’ row off London’s Piccadilly that can’t be photographed due to the number of residents at risk from assassination. De Bono, at the low-risk end of the scale, has already strayed from his programme with a preamble about the time he told Sony to invent a dictaphone that records on two tapes at once. (Sony didn’t.) “It’s the difference between value and technology,” he says. “Anyway, I’ll talk a little bit about that later. So, what I thought I would do is go through some of the things you couldn’t possibly know about and then at various points, you can …” This does not sound promising. De Bono, frowning like Nixon through the gloom, is holding a piece of paper on which he has typed a list of topics. As he talks, these clarify as a list of his achievements. It is interesting that, despite the many books he has written on how to communicate, the 67- year-old disregards the first rule of exchange: namely that it is customary to allow the other person to speak occasionally.
“Now, for instance, there’s a bunch of academics in South Africa who got together to make a CD on who had most contributed to the whole history of humanity. Anyway, I was one of the 50. Then the international astronomical union named a planet after me; again, someone suggested that they might.
“I have been told that on the Internet there are so many references to my work that if you spent two minutes on each reference and you began work at nine in the morning and stopped at five in the afternoon, and you began aged 20, you’d not be finished by the time you were 80, [if you were] doing nothing else.” It is a statement inviting pedantry: when you put De Bono’s name in one of the large search engines, it brings up 5E226 references, roughly the same number as those summoned for Michael Flatley, the star of Riverdance, and precisely half the number returned for the 1980s girl band Bananarama.
Umberto Eco, by comparison, gets 27E899 mentions, Steven Hawking 28E399, Camille Paglia 14E900. De Bono sweeps on. “These are other people’s judgements, not my judgement. In other words, if the venture capitalists say, ‘We want to hear from you,’ it’s their judgement. Now I’ll tell you about some more direct things.” This is the cue for another unprovoked, back-slapping anecdote.
“I was coming back from Australia in the arrivals lounge at British Airways and I was going to have a shower. And the shower attendant, standing there, this very humble chap, heard my name and said, ‘Are you Edward de Bono who writes the books?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Oh, I read all of them, so refreshing.’ This is an ordinary shower attendant at Heathrow, not a chief executive and so on.” And so on and so on.
The success on which De Bono’s extraordinary self-regard is based came about in 1969 with the publication of his first important book, The Mechanism of Mind, in which he explored the neurological coding thought to form the basis of human perception.
It was welcomed by physicists as a persuasive and authoritative study, based on years of high-level research. De Bono, born in Malta and a graduate in medicine from Malta University, won a Rhodes scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in psychology and physiology and then a D Phil in medicine. He retains the vestige of a foreign accent, a lilting intonation that it is tempting to read as a device to minimise the chances of interruption. “We’ll come back to that,” says De Bono, when I break his flow. “Just remember that question and I’ll talk about it all together.” With the 1970s, and the boom in the self- help book market, De Bono turned his attention to the more lucrative field of popular psychology. He coined the term “lateral thinking”, and started putting out books on problem solving and creative thinking with titles such as I Am Right, You Are Wrong, and How to Be More Interesting. In his book Six Thinking Hats, published in 1990, he suggested that business meetings might run more smoothly if members put on imaginary hats, colour coded to encourage group synergy: the black hat for negative thoughts, the yellow for optimistic and so on. In this manner, says De Bono, everyone would be “thinking in the same direction”, and “ego would be taken out of the situation”.
He refers to himself as a “thinker”, a loose term that allows him to move between disciplines. He “thinks” about politics: “I think the Northern Ireland situation could have been much better handled. I know most of the players – I know David Trimble, I know Gerry Adams and so on – and I’ve given talks on Northern Ireland; there’s a lot of interest in my work.” He thinks about economics: “I suggested something that made a lot of sense: I said that, in a democracy, if your party lost the election, you should pay 10% less tax than the other party. They have the luxury of having their choice of government. It’s very sensible.” And he thinks about foreign policy. De Bono once advised the Foreign Office that the Arab-Israeli conflict might in part be due to the low levels of zinc found in a people who eat unleavened bread, a known side effect of which is aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite.
Such is the pride De Bono takes in his work on conflict resolution (“I’m on the council in England for dispute resolutions”) that it was noted with some amusement in the press recently that he lost a dispute with the Norfolk planning authorities after trying to stop a barn conversion from going ahead next door to his 18th- century home. De Bono becomes quite agitated at the mention of this. “That again, unfortunately, is totally dishonest, because I haven’t been involved in that at all. Not at all. My wife is very much interested in architecture. I haven’t been involved at all. I’ve been away. But I’m afraid that’s a typical example of … I haven’t been involved at all. Typical dishonesty.” While he welcomes controversy as proof of the power of his work, De Bono tends to regard people who disagree with him as being either stupid or dishonest, although they leave a rather deep impression. “When my book Six Hats came out, Adam Mars- Jones of The Independent wrote a very silly little clever-clever piece. That book, we know, has saved $40-million and tens of thousands of man-hours. Now, some silly little idiot, trying to be clever, compared to the actual results, that just makes him look like a fool.” His next book is due out in September, and De Bono snaps out of his reverie and throws me a devilish look. “It will upset a lot of people,” he says triumphantly. On his website he predicts that the book “will upset those minds that are usually upset by my work. It will upset all the literary people who believe that language is wonderful and perfect. In the book I suggest that language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopaedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old- fashioned way.” This is gibberish. The De Bono Code Book, as it will be called, posits the idea that communication would be better served if we all spoke in numerical code. For example, instead of saying: “Mum, help me out, but don’t lecture me,” we might say: “Code six.” He throws in a few references to his old stamping ground, the neuro-physiological impulse, but it remains a mixture of bad syntax, pseudo-intellectualism and the bleeding obvious. It is a shame, because he has many sensible things to say, about education, about how children with hobbies develop faster than those without, about how to re- engage the long- term unemployed. To get to these, however, one must endure almost Swiftian heights of absurdity. As I’m leaving, I catch sight of a didgeridoo propped up against the door. De Bono picks it up and starts playing, badly.
“Now, the point is,” he says, “that the aborigines have been playing it wrong for 3E000 years …”