(FORTUNE Magazine) – Can creativity be tweaked from people who don't seem to have much? It can, and consultants are hard at work to sell you tweaking tools. Barely a year goes by that Dr. Edward de Bono doesn't toss off another book on the subject. His 1985 best-seller, Six Thinking Hats, was followed by Six Action Shoes, written in its entirety on a flight from London to Auckland. Hats he'd written between London and Melbourne. During layovers, de Bono makes himself available through the International Creative Forum, whose members (British Airways, Du Pont, IBM, Nestle, Alcoa, and Prudential, among others) typically pay $25,000 to belong. They can then skip the books and get their shot of creativity straight from the doctor. The Forum last met in November, in Boca Raton, Florida. The attendees were 40 middle-aged, ordinary-looking executives, not one wearing a beret -- and me. To save you 25 G's, here is Dr. de Bono's prescription in concentrated form: Force your mind to go places where, left to its own habits, it never would go. From there, the mind, mouselike, scurries back to familiar territory. The path between something random and something known may provide the insight you seek. Example: Newton's apple. Newton had a mass of information in his head awaiting something to order it. The apple fell, and -- bingo -- a random stimulus yielded the theory of gravity. ''Why wait for apples?'' asks de Bono. ''Why not shake the tree?'' To do that, he uses random words, provocations, reversals, exaggeration, and other exercises. The five people at my table are given a word, party. Our challenge: Use it to generate ideas for a new type of computer keyboard. After a moment we begin tossing out associations: keyboards that connect through a party line; keyboards that can be used only by persons ''invited'' (authorized) to use them; keyboards with ''surprise'' (preprogrammed) keys. This is fun. Now for Six Thinking Hats. This is the exercise that Prudential's former president, Ronald Barbaro, credits for having helped him come up with ''living benefits'' life insurance. What Hats does is give creative thinking an assigned place in any discussion. Participants figuratively don white, red, black, yellow, green, and blue hats, each representing a different state of mind. Criticism and fault-finding occur under the black hat, feelings under red, creative thinking under green, and so on. ''Do you think there's a dippy element to this?'' a tablemate asks me tentatively before we start. We agree there is. But before we're finished, we have to admit we're impressed. It works. Read the book.