Six Thinking Hats
by Edward de Bono

  • Business
  • Ashto = 5/10
  • Jonesy = 5/10
Six Thinking Hats

What You Will Learn From Six Thinking Hats

Used successfully by thousands of business managers, educators and government leaders around the world, Six Thinking Hats is a model that allows your brain to go through practical and unique approaches to make decisions and explore new ideas.

The six thinking hats depersonalise arguments and allow teams to work collaboratively. Named by Dr De Bono as ‘Parallel Thinking’, this method enables each person to look at all sides of a situation and fully explore the subject before coming to a mutual decision.

Four blind men are feeling an object for the first time. The first man says he feels a big solid pillar, like a tree trunk. The second one says he feels something long and skinny, like a rope. The third man says he feels something really wide and high, like a hummer car but with no doors. The fourth one grabs something that feels like a long garden hose but with two holes. The four men argue about what they feel, each believing that they’re right and everybody else is wrong. If they had decided to use parallel thinking, they would take turns to feel the various parts, and realise that they were all right. They would work out that they were feeling an elephant—one feeling the leg, one the tail, one the side of the body and the other the trunk.

The emphasis here is not on who wins and who loses, but rather on designing a path forward for everyone. Through case studies and real-life examples, Dr De Bono offers a simple tool that may provide you with clearer thinking, improved communication and greater creativity to make better decisions.

In Six Thinking Hats, Dr De Bono unscrambles the thinking process with the following:

  • White Hat: Neutral and objective, concerned with facts and figures
  • Red Hat: The emotional view
  • Black Hat: Careful and cautious, the devil’s advocate hat
  • Yellow Hat: Sunny and positive
  • Green Hat: Associated with fertile growth, creativity and new ideas
  • Blue Hat: Cool, the colour of the sky, above everything else, the organising hat.

 

The Six Thinking Hats

White Hat (The Detective)

When the white hat is in use, everyone focuses directly and exclusively on information gathering. The information can range from hard facts and figures to soft information like the opinions and feelings of your target market, based on studies and research.

Two contradictory pieces of information uncovered under the white hat aren’t up for debate. They are both put down in parallel as two pieces of information to be assessed later. The white hat is usually used at the beginning of a thinking session as a background for the thinking that is going to take place. It can also come back at the end of the session as a sort of assessment, comparing to see if the ideas and proposals fit in with the indisputable information.

Using the white hat is a great way to stick to the facts, rather than getting stuck in the weeds of arguments and fighting for conclusions.

 

Red Hat (The Heart)

Using the red hat provides an opportunity to express feelings, emotions and intuition without any need to explain or justify them.

On some occasions, the red hat provides a unique opportunity for us to put forward our feelings, emotions and intuition. When we’re wearing the red hat, we may come up with the following remarks: ‘I feel this is the right person for the job’; ‘I feel this is a risky venture’; ‘My gut tells me that this explanation is too complex.’ These feelings are useful even though intuition may not be right all the time.

There are a few ways in which emotion and feelings can affect thinking. In a discussion, there is always some kind of background emotion that is colouring everyone’s perceptions. It may be fear, anger, hatred, suspicion, jealousy or love. The purpose of the red hat is to bring those background feelings out of the background so we can observe their subsequent influence. Rather than tainting the discussion with some underlying feelings, sharing your emotions allows the discussion to progress unhindered.

 

Black Hat (The Reaper)

The black hat is probably the most used of all the hats before the six hats system comes along. The black hat is the hat of survival and caution. Like an animal who avoids wild blackberries that could be poisonous, corporate executives use the black hat to identify warning signs in ideas. We know that one silly mistake could wipe out our career or company, so we need to balance creativity with caution. The black hat stops us from doing things that are illegal, dangerous or unprofitable.

The black hat allows everyone to lay out all cautions and possible drawbacks of an idea. But when black hat time is over, it’s over. You can’t be cautious and a negative nancy the whole time, shooting down other people’s ideas just because you find one tiny thing wrong with it.

Black hat reasons must be capable of standing on their own, and they must make sense. They must be reasonable in cold print and not only acceptable when presented by a persuasive person.

 

Yellow Hat (The Sun)

Under the yellow hat, the thinker deliberately sets out to find whatever benefit there may be in a suggestion. Under the yellow hat, the thinking tries to see the possibilities of putting an idea into practice.

Compared to the black hat, wearing the yellow hat can feel challenging. Our human nature is somewhat programmed to look for problems. It’s harder to snap out of negative thoughts and identify opportunities.

Yellow hat thinking is about finding the positives, not creating positives. Just like the black hat, the yellow hat’s thinking must be logically based. You don’t bring up new ideas or develop existing ideas—you’re simply identifying the positives in an idea that was put forward.

 

Green Hat (The Seedling)

Under the green hat, we are able to put forward new ideas, suggest different alternatives or improve existing ideas.

Another value of the green is that a specific time is set out for everyone to make a creative effort and put forward possibilities. Possibilities play a much larger role in thinking than most people believe. Without the framework of possibilities, you can’t make progress or view information from different perspectives.

There may be more need for the green hat than for any other of the thinking hats. In the exercise of creative thinking, it may be necessary to put forward ideas that are deliberately illogical. The green hat allows us to generate new ideas and protect them from the instant frost of black hat thinking habits. As you get better at deliberate creative thinking, you will find that one idea usually leads to more ideas. In this way, the green hat makes creative thinking a formal part of the thinking process instead of just a luxury.

 

Blue Hat (Movie Director)

The blue hat thinker observes the thinking process that is taking place. They are the choreographer who designs the steps, but they are also the critic who watches what is happening. The blue hat thinker isn’t the one driving the car forward along the road. It’s the one watching the driver and noting the route that is being taken.

The blue hat is useful for the management of thinking, the organisation of thinking and the process of control. In a discussion, the blue hat thinker is the one that pulls what seems like a chaotic and free-flowing discussion into something coherent and well-formed. The difference between a good and a poor thinker often lies in the ability to focus. We should use the blue hat to bring about the definition of the focus and monitor any drift from this focus.

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