Creativity guru Edward de Bono—who coined the concept of “lateral thinking”—says that people welcome change only when the status quo is clearly unacceptable, and that most people are extremely reluctant to change things which are not patently wrong. The reason for this may be that humans tend to keep compiling information which buttresses their present point of view, whatever that happens to be. It saves them from thinking. “We live in a society which believes that if you collect more and more information, that will do the thinking for you. There’s a new illness which I am diagnosing in business called SKIDS, or Sufficient Knowledge Idea Deficit Syndrome.” A person afflicted with SKIDS thinks he knows something, because everything he collects seems to confirm what he already knows. Wrong.
“Most people are very reluctant to change things which are not wrong… However, the fact that something is satisfactory should not stop us thinking about it. In this way, value is added to already existing methods or concepts.”