Parallel Thinking¶
Definition¶
Parallel thinking means that at any given moment, everyone in a discussion is looking in the same direction — considering facts, or emotions, or caution, or benefits — instead of each person defending a fixed position against the others. Contradictory views are laid down side by side rather than fought out, and a choice between them is made later, only if a choice is actually needed. It replaces "who is right" with "what can be built."
In the Book¶
De Bono contrasts parallel thinking with the argument tradition he traces to the Greek "Gang of Three": Socrates's dialectic (which, he notes, reached no constructive outcome in 80 percent of Plato's recorded dialogues), Plato's cave allegory of partial, shadow-like truth, and Aristotle's inclusion/exclusion logic of boxes and categories. He illustrates the alternative with a country house viewed from four sides by four people arguing over an intercom about whose view is "correct" — parallel thinking has them all walk around together, looking at the front, then the sides, then the back, so the house is explored fully without anyone needing to be wrong. He extends this with the story of a man who painted half his car black and half white so that witnesses to his accidents would contradict each other in court — a joke about how often both sides of an argument are each looking at a real, different part of the same situation. The chapter also reports outcomes: ABB cut a thirty-day multinational project discussion to two days, and Statoil resolved a $100,000-a-day oil rig problem in twelve minutes once a trainer introduced the method.
Why It Matters¶
Argument is built to win, so useful information that would help the other side gets deliberately withheld — the opposite of what a group trying to solve a shared problem needs. Parallel thinking lets a group put the full intelligence, experience, and information of every participant onto the table in a given direction, rather than losing half of it to strategic concealment, and it removes the ego stake in being right, since no one is required to defend one fixed position throughout. This reframes any group decision process — a design review, a negotiation, a courtroom, a policy debate — as a sequence of shared explorations rather than a contest, and it is the reason a change of process alone (no new facts, no new participants) can compress a multi-hour or multi-day disagreement into minutes.