Why parallel thinkingلماذا التفكير المتوازي

Why good teams have bad meetings

Put capable people in a room with an important question and they often spend hours arguing. Each person defends a position, attacks other views and waits for a chance to speak. The best ideas may never be said.

In this course you will follow Hanan, planning manager at Sumer Water, a bottled water company in Basra. Management has been arguing for months about whether to replace single-use plastic bottles for offices with returnable glass bottles. Every meeting ends the same way: long, tense and without a decision.

Where the time goes

Hanan sat in on one meeting and noted what people were doing every few minutes. Seventy per cent of the time went to defending and attacking positions. New ideas got five per cent.

Adversarial and parallel thinking

In parallel thinking, the group does not split into "for" and "against". Everyone looks at the subject from the same angle at the same time: first all the facts, then all the benefits, then all the risks, and so on.

Six perspectives

Each perspective is a mode of thinking, not a type of person. The person who usually sees risks is asked to find benefits too, and the optimist is asked to look for risks.

Where the idea comes from

The idea that groups think better when they look in one direction at a time was popularised by Edward de Bono, the author of many books on thinking, through his well-known "Six Thinking Hats" method. This course teaches the underlying principle of parallel thinking with its own practical framework of six perspectives.

Exercise: your meetings

1. Think of a recent meeting that went badly. How was the time spent?
2. Who spoke most? Who hardly spoke?
3. Which of the six perspectives was missing or rushed?
4. Choose an issue your team keeps arguing about, to use in the exercises in this course.