What is a PoStorm?
Is a "brainstorm"? A storm of brains? No - a brainstorm is supposed to be a meeting where people come up with clever new ideas to solve some problem.
Too often a brainstorm turns into a meeting where someone comes up with a new idea and everyone else tells him that it's a stupid idea, and maybe he's a stupid person for having a stupid idea.
When we hear a new idea we make snap judgments. It's idea is good or bad; right or wrong. Usually it's bad and wrong. And we attack it and the person that made it.
Edward de Bono - a man who made is career out of studying thinking - looked at how brainstorms ought to work. They work best if people don't worry about whether an idea is right or wrong, but use the idea as a means to getting to another idea. A journey to the right and best idea takes you through lots of wrong and bad ideas. If you reject ideas because they aren't obviously right, or even because they are obviously wrong, you are denying yourself a step that might get you to the right answer.
de Bono invented the word "po" to mean a statement that is "between right and wrong" - an idea that is presented as input into your thinking. A po is a statement whose truth or falsehood is not asserted.
Therefore a brainstorm should a meeting that causes people to produce pos. It should therefore generate a storm of pos and should rightly be called a PoStorm.
What is a po?
Comments
Too often a brainstorm turns into a meeting where someone comes up with a new idea and everyone else tells him that it's a stupid idea, and maybe he's a stupid person for having a stupid idea.
When we hear a new idea we make snap judgments. It's idea is good or bad; right or wrong. Usually it's bad and wrong. And we attack it and the person that made it.
Edward de Bono - a man who made is career out of studying thinking - looked at how brainstorms ought to work. They work best if people don't worry about whether an idea is right or wrong, but use the idea as a means to getting to another idea. A journey to the right and best idea takes you through lots of wrong and bad ideas. If you reject ideas because they aren't obviously right, or even because they are obviously wrong, you are denying yourself a step that might get you to the right answer.
de Bono invented the word "po" to mean a statement that is "between right and wrong" - an idea that is presented as input into your thinking. A po is a statement whose truth or falsehood is not asserted.
Therefore a brainstorm should a meeting that causes people to produce pos. It should therefore generate a storm of pos and should rightly be called a PoStorm.
What is a po?
Comments