Book Review: Six Frames for Thinking About Information

Who Should Read This Book

If you are in the team-building business and looking for a topic for your next workshop, this might be the book for you.

Synopsis

Eduard de Bono is perhaps most famously known for his ideas on Lateral Thinking and the decision-making framework better known as The Six Thinking Hats.

He has published many original ideas in short, concise books such as this one, where he proposes a set of methods or frameworks for dealing with common problems in business management.

In this book, he tries to equip the reader with six frames of mind that would allow us, human beings, to better process information in a day and age where information is abundant, but our limited capacity for processing it has not changed.

As with every one of his works, his main aim is to provide the reader with practical ideas that are easy to assimilate.

This is where, in my opinion, the usefulness of his books comes to light.

These works are designed to help you solve a specific problem, more like a crash course or quick guide rather than a thorough and complete topic description.

The book discusses Six Frames for Thinking About Information:

1. The Triangle Frame: Purpose
2. The Circle Frame: Accuracy
3. The Square Frame: Point of View
4. The Diamond Frame: Value
5. The Heart Frame: Interest
6. The Slab Frame: Outcome

You can fall in love with the author’s methods for problem resolution when you look at how such a complex topic as optimizing our information processing capabilities can be broken down into smaller, manageable pieces with measurable outcomes.

This is one of the deepest insights I gleaned from this book: no matter how complex a problem is, you can always engineer a framework that can deal with it.

Themes