de Bono China aims to transform the power of thinking into action by providing simple and practical de Bono thinking tools to make change happen.

On April 20th, 2021, Shanghai, a large scale Lateral Thinking workshop was held at the annual sales convention of the premier cosmetic company, Sephora. With 1.5 hour instruction and 1 hour facilitation process, over 1,600 creative ideas were produced. The CEO of the company was amazed by the power of Edward's creative tools.

The outcomes

This has been one of the largest Lateral Thinking workshop for de Bono China so far with 410 participants, in 20 groups, applying two Lateral Thinking tools of Concept Extraction and Random Entry. In the morning session, after the keynote speech from the CEO, the Master Trainer Joanna Wang gave a brief instruction on two Lateral Thinking tools. In the afternoon, the 20 teams began their idea generation on the same focus: How to hit the sales goal.

The de Bono team of three facilitators (Joanna Wang, Phil Law, and Tony Guo) and five internal trainers from the client’s team, provided spontaneous observation and inspiration, using Concept Triangle and Concept Fan to generate ideas. After 25 minutes of discussion with the first tool, we collected many ideas and then directed the participants to apply the second tool of Random Entry to boost bold and new ideas. We deliberately asked the group members to escape from their normal way of thinking and to expand perception with the random stimulus to generate novel ideas.

Next we harvested the ideas. With mini presentations from four sales regions to begin, eventually four finalists emerged for the final pitch. Seven judges used the Lateral Thinking evaluation sheet and selected the Champion.

In the closing remark, the CEO of the company highly commended Dr. de Bono’s creative thinking tools and encouraged the winning teams and all the cohorts to implement the ideas that they had created into actions.

The entire convention was a huge success and the value created was highly visible. The morale and the confidence of the entire team was record high.

The actions

Sephora China has committed to implementing at least two ideas from the convention each month. For example, they have honored their store managers to be the key opinion leader as net celebrities to train and teach customers about beauty lessons.

They have invited an avant-guard artist to create a program displaying colors of flowers with AR and VR technology and illustrating how the essence of flowers goes into cosmetics. This is displayed as an exhibition of the brand and eye-opening tour for customers.

The de Bono China team is very grateful for the customer's confidence and trust, and is looking forward to more of such opportunities!