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Six Frames

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'Six Frames: For Thinking about Information' by Edward de bono

I have been an avid fan of the work of creativity guru Edward de bono for a very long time, ever since I had started to acquire & read his classics, 'Mechanism of Mind', 'The Use of Lateral Thinking' &/or 'Lateral Thinking for Management', during the early seventies.

Later, I went on to acquire & read his 'Tactics; The Art & Science of Success', 'Six Thinking Hats', 'Teach Yourself How to Think', as well as 'Opportunities: A Handbook of Business Opportunity Search' in subsequent years.

For me, I have really considered them as great work, based on what I could take away, from the maestro.

I had even acquired & read his 'Serious Creativity', which I knew was more of an intellectual amalgamation of all his earlier works up to the nineties. I thought it would be a great refresher. It did, at least to my pleasant delight.

The last two books from him which I had read not too long ago were 'How to be More Interesting' & "How to Have a Beautiful Mind'. Not bad.

As for most of his other works which I had the opportunity to read in the intervening & ensuing years, I can only say that I have been most ambivalent at best. Half of the time, he was always talking about his previous stuff.

The other half of the time, I have had to read about him moaning & groaning about other people hijacking his intellectual stuff, & yet he didn't bother to credit others before him - not at all - accordingly, let alone for all of us to get a chance to smell his bibliography.

Regrettably, 'Six Frames is another example that happens, for me, to fall into this 'ambivalent' category.

In a nut shell, 'Six Frames' is supposed to be a deliberate & disciplined framework for one to think about information, from the standpoint of purpose, accuracy, point of view, interest, value & outcome.

Tactically, I see the 'Six Frames' as perspective windows, each represented by a simple metaphoric iconographic: 'Triangle', 'Circle', 'Square', 'Heart', 'Diamond' & 'Slab' respectively.

Fundamentally, I find that the author's premise is sound & valid, because as he argues, where you choose to direct your attention & what you choose to notice, can affect your information problem solving, so to speak.

My disappointment is actually with the author's treatment, which seems to be superfluous & pompous to some extent. If only he had made concerted efforts to help the reader to "see" ideas out of the "information", that would have given more added credibility to his offering.

That is to say, to teach the reader how to "provoke insight" from the swirling information around us, to paraphrase his terminology.

Also, I find that some of the worked examples in the book pertaining to the frames seem to be too perfunctory. As a reader, I don't get the "provocative operacy", i.e. the skills of "making things happen" with the postulated frames from the author, to paraphrase once again his terminology.

From my personal perspective, thinking about information is often quite an easy task, but the action situation - putting the intent into performance, from theory to practice, so to speak - is rarely as simple as thinking. That score is, in fact, the essence of "provocative operacy".

Sad to say, I get the feeling that the author is trying to ride on the apparent success of his earlier 'Six Thinking Hats', 'Six Action Shoes', & 'Six Value Medals', by churning out this book on 'Six Frames'.

Another sore point for me from this book is this.

The book has about 140 pages. About a third of each page, at the top, is occupied by each of the 6 iconographics. The sentencing & paragraphing of the book have also been deliberately spaced out by the publisher.

In reality, you get only about 50 pages of stuff, which therefore reinforced the quick impression of a perfunctory treatment.

Over the years, most of the de bono's stuff are essentially about the productive "philosophy of thinking" or "modes of thinking". That's to say, never tool-specific; one has to read his books thoroughly & diligently to get down to the brass tacks of application.

This book is no exception.

On the other hand, could it be that the author has already ran out of steam? I really don't know.

In fairness, I certainly want to point out that the framework as expounded in 'Six Frames' does in fact provide us with a quick way to run through incoming information with a critical eye, as to accuracy, bias, interest, relevance, value, etc.

At least, it can hold your initial attention to information that really matters.

For readers who are really keen to try out much better approaches to thinking about information with tool-specific suggestions, in order to deal with the info-glut in the 21st century, I recommend:

- the 'Big Six' from Michael Eisenberg & Robert Berkowitz;
- the 'Questioning Toolkit' from Jamie MacKenzie;

They may be slanted towards education &/or research, but with a little bit of tweaking, you can access their latent power.

For readers who want to explore "ideas through information", please read 'Ideas & Information: Managing in a High Tech World', by Arnol Penzias. This book may seem dated as it was published in 1989, but its Chapter 5, page 87 to 105, is a real gem not to be missed.

Last, but not least, 'Surviving Information Overload: The Clear, Practical Guide to Help You Stay on Top of What You Need to Know', by Kevin Miller, is also worth exploring.

Six Frames for thinking about information is another DeBono book related to helping people how to think. DeBono seems like like the number six... as he already created the six thinking hats, six actions shoes and the six value medals. So what are the six frames about?

The six frames provide different way or reasons for looking at a piece of information. Every frame is symbolized by a figure that presents this particular way of thinking. This way, it helps to make your thinking more explicit and even allows to communicate about the different ways of framing information.

The six frames are: Triangle for purpose, Circle for precision, Square for perspective, Diamond for value, Heart for interest and Slab for conclusion.

Therefore, if you receive a piece of information, you might look at it from the heart frame and explicitly look for the "interesting" parts in the piece of information (and perhaps takes notes of these). This allows you to focus your mind and increases your thinking ability.

The Six Frames book is small and easy to read. It contains a simple and useful idea.. and doesn't go much further than that. It doesn't provide much concrete advise on how to actually use it and doesn't provide too much example of how people have used it in their daily lives. From that perspective, the book is fairly limited.

Do I recommend to read the book? Perhaps. I always enjoy DeBonos work and, even though I do not use tools such as these explicitly, it does help me to think about thinking. So did this enjoy the book, and if you like DeBonos earlier work, then you'll probably enjoy this little book. If you are looking for a different perspective or a groundbreaking idea, then this book is probably not for you. It is simple, powerful, but probably not groundbreaking and shockingly new.

All in all, the book did what I expected it to do. I found it worth my time.

I'm puzzled by this book. Its author Edward De Bono has an international reputation as a creative thinker on the subject of creativity. He is for example credited with encapsulating the idea of lateral thinking.

At the heart of the book is the idea that we have to create time to think about information.
It begins with the observation that our attention is drawn towards the unusual, and asks the question `How much attention do we pay to the usual?'

The six frames are a method of looking at information in six specific ways. The idea is to raise our awareness of what we are observing, to see, not simply look at, the usual. De Bono quotes research at Harvard that says that 90% of errors of thinking were errors of perception.

The idea of the six frames seems simple and sound, my problem lies with the book. For a start there's not much to it. Few pages, widely spaced text with approximately one third of each page taken up with a line drawing of the frame shape being discussed. Of course the small quantity of material is of itself neither good or bad. However on reading it feels that there isn't much that is said that couldn't have been more effectively done with a short pamphlet.

The six frames invite you to examine Purpose, Accuracy, Point of View, Interest, Value, Outcome, and as I read the book I began to apply these perspectives to the book. For a while I imagined the concluding pages of the book would be a test of my perception, allowing me to assess my performance. For example:- What point of view had De Bono taken? How accurate was his information? What value had the book? I'd then be able to gauge what I'd gained from the ideas as I'd read.

I was disappointed to find no such assessment section, as this would have given a purpose to a book that otherwise seems to lack one. Of course De Bono may be having the last laugh, pointing out that by reviewing the book I'm doing precisely what he suggests I should with information I read.

I remain somewhat unconvinced. Overall the book has the feel of an idea first sketched on a napkin that has been stretched beyond its breaking point by the desire to create a book. Those who warm to the idea would have got it from a pamphlet, and those who wouldn't warm to the idea, I suggest are unlikely to have the time or inclination to read a book that invites them to focus more attention on thinking.

I'm left feeling that De Bono should apply the tools he describes to what he has created. Perhaps his ideas warrant a book, but sadly I don't think it's this one.