•Hello and welcome to Walk the Talk at the NIIT campus in Gurgaon, and my guest today is a very special personality. In fact, it would be more apt to call him a legend -- Dr Edward de Bono, whose thinking is shaping the way we should be thinking, all over the world, from the boardrooms in Manhattan to the classrooms in Cambodia. Dr de Bono, so wonderful to have you on Walk the Talk. Welcome to India. You talk about lateral thinking, and this, in some ways, is a land of circular thinking.

(Laughs) Well, interestingly, today people talk about big problems in our climate and all that. What I'm talking about is a much bigger problem, which is the poor state of world thinking: that our thinking is not very good. And we have essentially done nothing about thinking outside mathematics for 2,400 years, since the gang of three -- the Greek gang of three (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato) -- designed 'software' for thinking, which we've used ever since.

•With Buddha somewhere around the same time, as well.

Okay. And it is very much based on judgment. Now in a conflict situation, we judge who's right, who's wrong. What we don't use enough is design -- how to design the way forward. Also, another factor, perception is by far the most important factor in thinking, and research by cognitive psychologists has shown that in thinking, 90 per cent of the errors are errors of perception, not of logic. And if your perception is wrong . . . your logic can be erroneous.

... contd.