Father of lateral thinking, Edward de Bono, has died

Creative thinker Edward de Bono has died less than a month after celebrating his 88th birthday.

De Bono died on Wednesday morning and the news of his passing was announced by his family. 

Born in Malta, De Bono graduated as a doctor but went on to study psychology and physiology from where he developed an interest in thinking processes.

He fathered the phrase lateral thinking, which has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, and developed multiple thinking strategies, including the Six Thinking Hats method.

In a statement, his family described de Bono as a global citizen, who returned to Malta in his final years.

“This has always been his home. He lived an extraordinary life, inspiring, encouraging and enabling all of us to be better and more creative thinkers. He wrote in his book The Mechanism of Mind: ‘A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.’ May the memory of Edward live on and inspire many future generations,” the family said.

Funeral arrangements to be held in Malta followed by a memorial in the UK will be announced in the coming days. 

De Bono received his initial education at St Edward’s College and the Royal University of Malta, where he achieved a degree in medicine. Then as a Rhodes Scholar at Christchurch, Oxford, where he gained a degree in psychology and physiology and a D.Phil. in medicine.

He holds a PhD from Cambridge, a DDes from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and a LLD from Dundee. He has had faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard. 

He has written over 60 books and programmes, with translations into 43 languages, has been invited to lecture in 58 countries and has made three television series.

His ideas have been sought by governments, not for profit organisations and many of the leading corporations in the world, such as IBM, Boeing, BT, Nokia, Mondadori, Siemens, 3M, NTT, GM, Kraft, Nestle, Du Pont, Prudential, Shell, Bosch, Goldman Sachs, Ernst & Young and many others.

The global consultancy, Accenture, chose him as one of the fifty most influential business thinkers.

In a 2004 interview with MaltaToday, de Bono even proposed a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as he launched his thinking centre in Malta.

In 1994, de Bono was made an officer of the National Order of Merit by the President of Malta.