Graduation 2022

On Thursday (17/11), School of Thinking celebrated our 43rd Birthday. During lockdown the school has been transformed. Having completed its 40-year public mission – to offer basic lateral thinking lessons worldwide – the school is now focused on a limited number of private corporate clients and on providing them with deep dive brain training in lateral/x10 thinking to advanced degree level. The kind of thinking required to get things done.

Because the human brain changes by the millisecond, daily brain training gets much better results in life, career and play. Across an enterprise it lifts employee morale and raises productivity, as measured by any of the business metrics like revenues and costs etc.

NOTE: This advanced level of specialised training in lateral thinking is not yet available at any other school or university in the world.

In 2023, SOT will admit only 10 private clients of 1000+ employees. The focus will be on enterprise DBT – Daily Brain Training – and on training employees to advanced degree level in Lateral Thinking/x10 Thinking.

19/11/2022: Thank you Michael – that’s fabulous!! I really enjoyed your sessions and all of the work we have done with our teams, and am looking forward to seeing you at the showcase. – Jane Banovac | Acting Chief Operating Officer, AgriBio.

For example, yesterday, School of Thinking awarded its latest (100% online) class of degrees to 78 graduates of private client AgriBio. These awards achieved were: 49 Masters of Lateral Thinking MLTh(SOT), 12 Diplomas of Lateral Thinking and 17 Advanced Certificates of Lateral Thinking.

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In a three-year x10 Thinking project (2020-2022), School of Thinking was sought by the Department of Agriculture to help design a growing range of innovative startup science-business assets for the Victorian State Government.

Specifically, the project – called AVR x10 – created the science-business incubation hub at AgriBio which has designed nine proposed startups to accelerate commercialisation pathways of their IP assets.

The first is Smartsense AgTech, a new business with technology that asks, “What if farms in Victoria were ten times smarter?” It will offer commercial solutions to that question including camera drones for use in photographing soil, earth, water, plants, crops, and agricultural products. It will focus on rapidly improving digital sensing technologies used across a range of agricultural sectors including dairy, horticulture and grains. There will be more AVR x10 start-ups to follow.

Minister Thomas announced the State Government is providing $7.5 million funding towards the x10 start-ups that will support “a major development for Victoria’s agtech industry”.

Working in collaboration with Professor German Spangenberg, Head of AVR at AgriBio, Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson of School of Thinking led a brain-training program of three 10-week semesters – including 180-minute zoom masterclasses every Wednesday afternoon 2pm-5pm – of x10 Thinking for the senior scientists and commercial managers that led to a range of innovative outcomes including the creation of the science-business incubation hub at AgriBio.

We congratulate this 2022 class of graduates.

Professor Spangenberg has summarised in his letter to Dr Hewitt-Gleeson: “Thanks for all your amazing work in delivering a fantastic AVR x10 project. It has been a genuinely transformative initiative that will have lasting impact – I see the excitement of our AVR scientists in discovering their entrepreneurial skills, learning from each other, getting to know colleagues. Indeed, 5 start-up pitches in Term 1 alone is an exceptional achievement! And more to come in Term 2! Thanks again for making all of this possible”.