We are all drowning in complexity. Hardly anyone uses more than a tenth of the features on our video-recorders. Legislation constantly introduces qualifications and amendments which keep lawyers in business at everybody else's expense. And an old woman in Holland recently spent a week in a shopping mall -- she just couldn't find the way out. Yet although we all yearn for more simplicity, it seems astonishingly difficult to simplify our lives. Here, with characteristic directness, Edward de Bono domonstrates how it can be done.

Historical review, for example, reduces complexity by asking whether the original rationale for something still applies (do we really need to retain the vents in men's jackets which date from the days of riding?). The bulk and exception technique allows us to deal separately with majority and extreme cases, as when clothes shops decide to concentrate either on standard sizes or on the specialist 'outside' market. Reframing can make us realize we are seeking solutions to a non-problem: space scientists spent a fortune trying to invent a pen which writes upside-down in conditions of zero gravity; then someone suggested they could use pencils...

De Bono explores these and other methods, such as with shedding,slimming, cutting, chunking, wishful thinking, energy shifts and provocative amputation. All help us try new options, reject received wisdom and escape the tyranny of self-appointed experts.

The book takes up this crucial challenge, concluding with a list of golden rules and plans for an ambitious National Simplicity Campaign.

Simplicity before you understand the subject is dangerous.Simplicity after you understand the subject is immensely powerful.

Edward de Bono is widely acknowledged as a leading figure in thinking about thinking. He is the originator of lateral thinking, which is now part of everyday language. He has written fifty-eight books which have been translated into thirty-four languages, and has been invited to lecture in fifty-eight countries. There are more than four million references to his work on the Internet. There is also a minor planet named after him.

Edward de Bono was the first to show how the self-organizing nature of the human brain gives rise to humour and demands creativity. He has insisted that the traditional western thinking idioms designed by the Gang of Three (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) are insufficient in a changing world where judgement alone is not enough. We need the skills of constructive thinking, creative thinking and design thinking.

Edward de Bono was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and has heldappointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard.