Edward de Bono  is regarded by many to be the leading authority in the world in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.

He has written 62 books with translations into 37 languages and has been invited to lecture in 54 countries.

He is the originator of lateral thinking which treats creativity as the behaviour of information in a self- organising information system - such as the neural networks in the brain. From such a consideration arise the deliberate and formal tools of lateral thinking, parallel thinking etc.

The CoRT lessons (the 'CoRT' acronym stands for Cognitive Research Trust - the educational research organisation within which they were elaborated in Cambridge, U.K.). were created by Dr. Edward de Bono in the early 1970s as a teaching method to develop thinking and creativity in pupils. They can be used with students of several ages and skills. They should be taught weekly for one hour or one hour and a half by a qualified teacher.

The lessons offer students, as de Bono says, some tools to broaden perception, since most thinking is done at the input stage: normally the acquisition of information is restricted or narrowed down to certain areas, so that thinking is implicitly conditioned by these.

Early in the 1980s Dr. de Bono invented the Six Thinking Hats method. The method is a framework for thinking and can incorporate lateral thinking. Valuable judgmental thinking has its place in the system but is not allowed to dominate as in normal thinking. Dr. de Bono organized a network of authorized trainers to introduce the Six Thinking Hats.

Organizations such as Prudential Insurance, IBM, Federal Express, British Airways, Polaroid, Pepsico, DuPont, and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, possibly the world's largest company, use Six Thinking Hats.