FESTIVAL OF THINKERS PROCEEDINGS 2007 | 111
As you know the Festival of Thinkers held now for the second time was
the brainchild of Edward de Bono, who has been teaching creative
thinking for many years has been called upon corporations all over
the world to teach creative thinking to their employees and so on and
so forth. And he has some very good ideas about creative thinking
and how to teach it. I don’t want to take advantage of his absence
today and to contradict his ideas but I have my own thoughts about
creative thinking and I thought it would be a good opportunity to
present some of them to you.
One question that arises in considering the matter is whether there
is a similarity across fields in getting creative ideas is it similar in
art, in science and in business and so forth and that is one question
we ought to take up. And I had some experience of this, starting
in 1969, when we held a little group discussion in Aspen Colorado
where I often spend part or all of the summer. We had a poet, two
painters, a theoretical biologist and a theoretical physicist I was of
course the theoretical physicist. There was one the visual artists very
famous who didn’t like the idea of listening to other peoples ideas and
went out and got drunk. But the rest of us stayed and we discussed
our experiences of getting creative ideas. And it turned out the
experiences were very much the same in all cases whether it was art
or biology or physics in each case there was a contradiction between
the established or available ways of doing things and the need to
accomplish something. In art it might be the expression of a feeling,
a thought, an insight, a mood, in theoretical science it would be the
explanation of observations of nature - that’s how science works.
And there were several stages in the process of getting the creative
idea. First each of us worked for days or weeks or months to resolve
this contradiction between the methods that were available and the
need to do something. We wou