WORK
The CoRT Program
De Bono's Cognitive Research Trust curriculum — a systematic program teaching lateral thinking as a core school subject, deployed in Venezuela, Malaysia, Singapore, and schools in over forty countries.
The CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) program is de Bono's practical answer to his own theoretical claim: if creativity is a skill rather than a gift, it must be teachable, and if it is teachable, it belongs in schools alongside mathematics and reading. Developed in the 1970s and deployed at scale through the 1980s and 1990s, the program teaches specific lateral thinking operations — PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting), CAF (Consider All Factors), APC (Alternatives, Possibilities, Choices), OPV (Other People's Views), and dozens of others — through structured exercises applied to real problems. The program's premise is that thinking itself is a skill subject to deliberate practice and measurable improvement.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The PMI tool is the program's foundational exercise. Before evaluating any idea, the thinker lists what is Plus about it, what is Minus, and — critically — what is simply Interesting. The Interesting category is the one conventional education omits. The conventional response to an idea is