Education Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono’s jab lands because it punctures a comforting modern faith: that spreadsheets are not just evidence, but engines of originality. He aims squarely at the managerial class that confuses “rigor” with “imagination,” and at the institutional pipeline that trains people to optimize what already exists. The provocation isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-complacency. Data can validate, de-risk, and refine, but it rarely invents the questions it answers.

The subtext is about perceptual inertia. “The mind can only see what it is prepared to see” reads like a warning label for every dashboard-driven organization: you don’t discover reality, you select it. Your models, KPIs, and categories act like blinders as much as they act like lenses. De Bono is calling out the quiet circularity of analysis: you hunt for patterns you’ve already decided count as patterns, then congratulate yourself for finding them.

Context matters: de Bono made his reputation arguing for “lateral thinking,” a deliberate counter-program to linear problem-solving. In the late 20th century, as corporations professionalized decision-making and business schools codified managerial rationality, he saw creativity being outsourced to metrics and method. His line anticipates today’s culture of A/B tests and machine learning: astonishing at prediction, weak at meaning. The sentence is designed to sting because it implies the real bottleneck isn’t information scarcity; it’s intellectual readiness, the willingness to entertain an unasked question before you can measure it.