Generalizing the the thought patterns De Bono suggests, where you take a thing to be considered, and have a list of "lenses" through which to consider that thin

Generalizing the the thought patterns De Bono suggests, where you take a thing to be considered, and have a list of "lenses" through which to consider that thing, seems to be very valuable. The same methodology applied to businesses is described in e.g. Gareth Morgan's _Images of Organization_. The principle flaw of using that technique for decision making is that the n-dimensional consideration space has to be mapped into a single dimension, which can be problematic or impossible. Many intractable debates are the result of inability for two parties to agree on how to map the thought-space (roughly, where each separate aspect of the question is its own dimension) into a simpler (linear) space which facilitates making a decision. Knowing whether a dinosaur can see into, or get into, your 2nd story bedroom may help for some lines of inquiry, but whenever you instantiate a concept as a less abstract thing, what you gain in intuition, you often lose by introducing artifacts that hold true for the more concrete example but not for the concept itself. This happens all the time in mathematics where a theorem seems to be true when considered in a less abstract simplification, but counterexamples can be found when a more accurate but less intuitive and more abstract conceptual model is used.