Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.
- Edward de Bono
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The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
- Edward de Bono
Edward. Read his book on Lateral Thinking in ca 1973. I believe he was the first to re-formalize brain-storming as a valid problem solving methodology by introducing lateral thinking principles. Bit of a tough read IIRC, he tried very hard to use language in a conservatively-acceptable fashion but was talking about something that was in fact emerging from the drug+TM culture of the time (reaching back to the early 1960's).
This is a nice quote of his that relates well to a technique I use myself (probably as a result of digesting his works): one does not "solve problems", rather one iteratively re-states what is initially perceived as "the problem" until one either arrives at a description of what is wanted, or the hole in which what one wants resides is clearly revealed.