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tony 's review for:
Six Frames: For Thinking About Information
by Edward de Bono
De Bono largely phoned this one in. The central premise is that we pay insufficient attention to attention, generally letting lots of things grab it, rather than deliberately choosing where to direct it. This is certainly a valuable point, and one in keeping with his usual “thinking about thinking” motif, but his prescription for dealing with this is rather shallow. Operating primarily within a business context, he suggests focussing attention deliberately in six directions:
△ — for Purpose
◯ — for Accuracy
▢ — for Point of View
♡ — for Interest
♢ — for Value
▭ — for Outcome
These all have some merit, but I was unconvinced that this selection is either necessary or sufficient for his specific goal; they seem to have been chosen largely to parallel his [b:Six Thinking Hats|97030|Six Thinking Hats|Edward De Bono|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344356509s/97030.jpg|751152], [b:Six Action Shoes|1263181|Six Action Shoes|Edward De Bono|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387740855s/1263181.jpg|1252047], [b:Six Value Medals|193150|The Six Value Medals The Essential Tool for Success in the 21st Century|Edward De Bono|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320419062s/193150.jpg|186788], etc. And, like several of his other business-focussed books, he presents his ideas in a rather “all or nothing” way, requiring that people make significant changes to how they run meetings, without either really presenting a particularly strong case for doing so — or, for those who do already use some of his other approaches, discussing how this might combine with those. (He also suggests, seemingly without irony, that having meetings full of statements like “Circle frame that point, will you”, or “you may need to polish your diamond frame” would be a good thing.)
Like most of his books, there are lots of little nuggets lying around. I particularly liked his discussion on how people will remember more readily things that grab their interest, and that even if they’re no immediately obvious value, the fact that they’re more likely to remember them at a later point may be of great value then. I’m also intrigued by his idea that when taking notes on what you read, you should explicitly make different notes of things you find interesting vs. things you find valuable. And I’d love to see some research on his comment that, when needing to judge the neutrality of news reporting, a useful rule of thumb for bias is to simply count the adjectives, as they’re the simplest way to slip into opinion. But the interestingness-density of this book was disappointingly low for me compared to his others.
△ — for Purpose
◯ — for Accuracy
▢ — for Point of View
♡ — for Interest
♢ — for Value
▭ — for Outcome
These all have some merit, but I was unconvinced that this selection is either necessary or sufficient for his specific goal; they seem to have been chosen largely to parallel his [b:Six Thinking Hats|97030|Six Thinking Hats|Edward De Bono|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344356509s/97030.jpg|751152], [b:Six Action Shoes|1263181|Six Action Shoes|Edward De Bono|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387740855s/1263181.jpg|1252047], [b:Six Value Medals|193150|The Six Value Medals The Essential Tool for Success in the 21st Century|Edward De Bono|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320419062s/193150.jpg|186788], etc. And, like several of his other business-focussed books, he presents his ideas in a rather “all or nothing” way, requiring that people make significant changes to how they run meetings, without either really presenting a particularly strong case for doing so — or, for those who do already use some of his other approaches, discussing how this might combine with those. (He also suggests, seemingly without irony, that having meetings full of statements like “Circle frame that point, will you”, or “you may need to polish your diamond frame” would be a good thing.)
Like most of his books, there are lots of little nuggets lying around. I particularly liked his discussion on how people will remember more readily things that grab their interest, and that even if they’re no immediately obvious value, the fact that they’re more likely to remember them at a later point may be of great value then. I’m also intrigued by his idea that when taking notes on what you read, you should explicitly make different notes of things you find interesting vs. things you find valuable. And I’d love to see some research on his comment that, when needing to judge the neutrality of news reporting, a useful rule of thumb for bias is to simply count the adjectives, as they’re the simplest way to slip into opinion. But the interestingness-density of this book was disappointingly low for me compared to his others.