Future Positive

Predicting the future has always been a perilous occupation. Crystal balls cloud over, economists disagree with one another, weather forecasts change halfway through breakfast, and yesterday’s certainty has an irritating habit of becoming today’s amusing historical footnote. Yet Edward de Bono was never particularly interested in predicting the future. He was far more interested in asking a rather more useful question: what sort of future could we deliberately create if we learned to think differently?

In Future Positive, the celebrated pioneer of lateral thinking argues that humanity possesses an unfortunate talent for becoming trapped inside familiar patterns. We endlessly analyse problems, debate them, complain about them and occasionally hold meetings about holding further meetings. What we rarely do, according to de Bono, is generate genuinely fresh ways of approaching them. The future, he insists, is not something that simply arrives in the post; it is something shaped by the quality of our thinking long before anyone notices the results.

Rather than presenting a catalogue of futuristic gadgets or confidently forecasting flying cars parked beside every semi-detached house, de Bono explores the habits of mind that allow societies, organisations and individuals to adapt to change. His optimism is refreshingly practical. Creativity is not portrayed as a magical gift reserved for eccentric geniuses with alarming hairstyles, but as a discipline that can be cultivated, practised and applied to everything from business and education to politics and everyday decision-making.

One of the enduring pleasures of reading de Bono is his willingness to challenge assumptions that most of us barely realise we’re making. He gently dismantles the comforting belief that analysing a problem more thoroughly will automatically produce a better solution. Sometimes, he argues, the real breakthrough comes from changing the question altogether. It sounds obvious once you’ve read it, which is often the hallmark of an idea that wasn’t obvious at all.

As sold by Crappy Old Books, this 1990 Penguin Books edition remains in Good condition and offers a fascinating glimpse into the ideas of one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers on creativity and innovation. While some of the examples inevitably reflect their era, the underlying principles remain remarkably relevant in a world that continues to produce new technologies far faster than it produces new ways of thinking about them.

The greatest irony of Future Positive is that, more than three decades after its publication, many of the obstacles de Bono identified are still cheerfully thriving. We possess astonishing computing power, instant global communication and devices capable of answering almost any factual question in seconds, yet we continue to wrestle with many of the same conceptual problems. De Bono’s answer is both encouraging and mildly inconvenient: the future improves not because we wait for it to happen, but because enough people decide to think beyond the obvious. As it turns out, that remains considerably harder than buying the latest gadget—and infinitely more rewarding.

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