Edward de Bono thought to be one of the leading authority in the world in the field of creative thinking and direct teaching of thinking as a skill. A de Bonian thinker states, "There are highly intelligent people who are poor thinkers. Intelligent people may use their thinking to simply defend a point of view. The more skilled they are at mounting a convincing defense, the less they see a need to explore that subject, listen to others, or generate alternatives. This is poor thinking" (Wiesendanger, 1991, p. 73).
He is the originator of lateral thinking. His other main ideas or developments are The Six Thinking Hats and the Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT). Lateral (Parallel) thinking is a system of thinking which considers all possibilities resulting in innovative thinking, rather than just the traditional solutions to the problem. The Oxford English Dictionary defines lateral thinking as "a way of thinking which seeks the solution to intractable problems through unorthodox methods or elements which would normally be ignored by logical thinking." It means thinking differently: thinking not only vertically or logically, but sideways too. It means being prepared to put forward unusual ideas to arrive at a new thought. Parallel thinking is designed to help an individual solving a problem, understand all aspects of the problem it focuses more-so on constructive and co-operative and co-ordinate thinking.
De Bono's six thinking hats use this lateral thinking technique. All members of a group will focus on a single aspect of a problem at the same time, moving on to another aspect together once discussion of the current one is exhausted. For example the Black hat is for judgment, the Green hat for creativity and ...