“Few people think no more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week”.

I laughed at this George Bernard Shaw quote the first time I read it.

Lately, however, I have begun to believe it is true.

I know De Bono has been talking about thinking for years and everyone keeps talking about a creative drain but I think it goes much deeper - I believe what we have is a thinking and imagination drain!

Sadly it has found its way into academia too. In April I attended a (depressing) lecture on “Humanity Near Tipping Point” by Lord May. After taking the packed audience to the brink of life on earth (sooner rather than later) there was question time. When a woman “how to convert this information in personal and general action?” To paraphrase Lord May’s response “my skill is in analysis…I can paint a fairly clear and accurate view of what the situation is…if you want imagination you’ll have to look elsewhere…”

With all due respect, an 8 year old could have done a better job!

Thus, I found it somewhat comforting that in his blog post today Dave Pollard discussed this “lack of serious thinking” and imagination.

“…today we are … convinced that understanding and sharing and coming up with great ideas and thinking seriously about them is a largely useless activity. And why would we want to invest a lot of precious time to study and understand something merely interesting?”

Yet it is precisely such dialogue - a sharing of thoughts and ideas - that has and will allow us to come to our greatest inspiration, discoveries…and a meeting of minds!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 17th, 2005 at 11:49 am and is filed under imagination, musings, questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.