Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono’s stage-coach is a trap disguised as common sense: the comforting belief that enough incremental fixes will eventually add up to a breakthrough. The image is deliberately old-fashioned, almost quaint, because that’s the point. A stage-coach can be optimized to gleaming perfection and still remain, structurally, a stage-coach. The motor car doesn’t arrive by polishing leather seats or shaving ounces off the axle; it arrives when someone stops treating “better transport” as a refinement problem and starts treating it as a redesign of the whole idea.

The intent here is polemical in the quiet way de Bono often practiced: a compact argument for lateral thinking. He’s pushing against a culture of improvement that confuses rigor with imagination. In organizations, “remove faults” is a management creed: audit, streamline, standardize, iterate. De Bono’s subtext is that these habits can become a kind of procedural superstition. They reduce risk, but they also narrow the field of what’s thinkable. The perfect stage-coach is the best-case outcome of a mindset that never questions the frame.

Context matters: de Bono wrote in the postwar era when psychology, business, and education were newly obsessed with “problem-solving” as a formal method. His provocation lands hardest in innovation talk that treats creativity as an add-on to efficiency. The line doesn’t dismiss craftsmanship or continuous improvement; it demotes them. Optimization is how you win inside an existing game. Invention is how you change the game’s rules, then drive away before the committee finishes approving the new wheels.