I was recently in Hong Kong and met with two friends of mine who are teachers at one of the tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. We shared a meal together and talked about a number of things. They had a problem which was developing up a course and how to make it different so that it attracted people to come to the course. So we did some creative thinking. We developed a purpose focus for our thinking and then used green hat thinking to develop a whole range of ideas. We then applied a PMI ( plus, minus, interesting) to the ideas and then took the ideas and applied OPV ( other people’s view) to think about how they might be presented to the hierachy of the organisation. The strength of this is that it was done in a setting that was different from our usual environment, and it applied de Bono tools to a practical problem and turned the ideas into possible actions.
This set me thinking. Is it possible to do a “De Bono cafe” a combination of the work developed by David Gurteen (knowledge cafes) and that of Edward de Bono. I will think on this some more and see what emerges.