Lateral Thinking
de Bono's Lateral Thinking™ - Two Day Full Course
Introduction
Creative thinking is a skill that can be learned by anyone. Lateral Thinking™ empowers people by improving their creativity and innovation – leading to increased productivity and profit.
Today, better quality and better service are not enough to guarantee success. Creativity and innovation are the only engines that will drive lasting, global competitive advantage.
"Education and Innovation are the currency of the 21st century" - President Barack Obama - 4th June 2009 - The Cairo address.
Workshop Overview
Lateral Thinking™ teaches you to generate new concepts and ideas on demand – instead of just hoping you’ll somehow stumble on an innovative idea. It’s a systematic approach to harnessing creativity for competitive advantage.
Workshop Benefits
Lateral Thinking™ will help you:
- to solve the problems that face you that you cannot otherwise solve
- to create a more innovative and competitive organisation
- to fully utilise the assets we already have: the minds of our employees
Workshop Objectives
Dr Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking will equip you with solid practical methods for challenging current thinking.
- Find out how to harness your own creativity. Make it work for you, when you need it.
- Learn to solve problems and generate new ideas to meet the challenges of themodern business environment.
- Leave the seminar with skills that you have practised and can apply immediately on return to your workplace.
Workshop Outline
SECTION A - The Need for Creative Thinking
- The limits of logical thinking
- Why creative thinking is a learnable set of skills
SECTION B - The Lateral Thinking Techniques
- Alternatives - How to use ‘concepts’ as a breeding ground for new ideas.
- Focus - The discipline of defining your focus from the outset, and sticking to it. How to generate and use a Creative Hit List.
- Challenge - Breaking free from the limits of the accepted ways of operating.
- Random Entry - Using unconnected input to open up new lines of thinking.
- Provocation & Movement - Explores the nature of perception and how it limits our creativity. The Provocation techniques are designed to challenge these limitations. Movement is a deliberate mental operation that we can use as an alternative to judegment. It allows us to develop a provocative idea into one that is workable and realistic.
SECTION C – Applying Innovation for Commercial Advantage
- Harvesting - At the end of a Creative Thinking session we normally only take note of the specific ideas that seem practical and have obvious value. We need to make a deliberate harvesting effort to collect ideas and concepts that are less well developed.
- Treatment of Ideas - How to develop ideas and shape them towards their practical application in your business.
Who should attend?
This workshop is for executives, managers, professionals and advisors who want to make their organisation more innovative in the face of growing competition.
To better implement these skills across an organisation, we recommend companies send several managers on the course together.
Lateral Thinking lends itself effortlessly to companyspecific cases, making the course suitable for incompany adaptations.
