To cap it all! Six Thinking Hats can help secure a better outcome
by Mervin Straughan
Finding better solutions to challenges sometimes requires us to break free of habitual thinking. This applies whether working on something ourselves or as part of a group.
May 2021
In many cases, the solution to everyday challenges is straightforward and we know instinctively what to do. But what happens when the problem is more complex?
We increase the odds of finding more effective and sustainable solutions if we take more than one perspective into account.
Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats technique helps us to achieve exactly that. A psychologist, business and education consultant and author of 85 books, it was de Bono who coined the term lateral thinking back in the 1960s.
Six Thinking Hats is a great tool for facilitating discussions, generating ideas, helping to reach consensus and speeding up decision making.
Major organisations including Boeing, IBM and Motorola have used it to improve processes and develop new products. Swimwear company Speedo used it to develop a record-breaking swimsuit around ten years ago.
The six hats – white, red, yellow, green, black and blue – symbolise a different frame of thinking.
The process invites us to change hats and, therefore, our thinking style at different points. If we’re in a group, everyone wears the same hat at the same time.
These hats can be imaginary or real. And it can be particularly useful to change seats each time we change hats. This is to mark the start of a new thinking approach.
OPENNESS AND TRUST
Six Thinking Hats removes emotion from the process and enables us to reach an outcome much quicker. If we’re working in a group, it can help build openness and trust among team members, resulting in better collaboration.
Six Thinking Hats removes emotion from the process and enables us to reach an outcome much quicker. If we’re working in a group, it can help build openness and trust among team members, resulting in better collaboration.
Let's introduce the hats.
The white hat is the factual hat. When we wear it, we’re seeking reliable information. Our thinking is cool and neutral. We ask questions such as: "What does the data tell us?" "What data is missing and where can we find it?"
The red hat is our feelings and intuition hat. When we wear it, we have permission to express our feelings and hunches. There’s no need to justify them. We make statements such as "My reaction to this is …" or "My intuition tells me ..."
The black hat – sometimes known as the judge’s hat – ensures we don’t act on impulse. When we wear it, we use caution and criticism. Our logic identifies barriers, mismatches, mistakes and risks.
When we wear this hat, we’re likely to make statements such as: “That’s against the law” or “Those deadlines are too much of a stretch” or “We did it that way before and it didn’t work so why would it work now?”
The yellow hat – the optimist. When we wear this hat, we take a positive approach to the problem. We consider the advantages, benefits or opportunities an idea presents.
We might make statements such as: “That’s a great idea” and “We can get real benefit from doing that” and something like “It’s a challenge but let’s give it a go and see how we get on.”
The Green hat – the creator
When we wear this hat, we generate creative ideas and investigate what an idea is about.
We deliberately look for new ways for doing something. While the initial idea or ideas might not be practical, they can be stepping stones to an idea that has real possibility. The green hat also allows us to be provocative. For instance, in attempting to solve an environmental problem involving cars, a green hat thinker might suggest providing everyone with an electric scooter for getting around.
The blue hat – sometimes referred to as the chair or the conductor. When we wear this hat, we chair the process, determining how it will work and when. We assess the problem and the priorities.
With the blue hat, we summarise and conclude and use statements such as “We need more ideas so let’s go into green hat mode.” We might also say: “Can you summarise the points you’re making.”
We can use the six hats in different orders and combinations depending on each situation. We start the process wearing our white hat to give us the context. Having all the facts at our disposal at the beginning will enable us to know what we’re dealing with and its scale.
Then putting on our blue hat to chair the process, we invite ourselves to wear each hat, spending some time exploring each perspective though the red hat thinking is shorter because it’s about our instant reactions. We can wear a particular hat again if we feel it needs exploring further.
We finish the process in blue hat mode, concluding the meeting and deciding the next steps.
ENTIRETY
Using the de Bono technique gets us to examine the problem in its entirety, understanding the facts, reducing distractions. It also encourages cross-pollination of thinking styles. This more inclusive approach avoids the issue of one style of thinking hijacking the proceedings. This is important. For instance, while black hat thinking has its place, too much of it can leave the meeting drained and too much red feeling can eclipse logic.
Using the de Bono technique gets us to examine the problem in its entirety, understanding the facts, reducing distractions. It also encourages cross-pollination of thinking styles. This more inclusive approach avoids the issue of one style of thinking hijacking the proceedings. This is important. For instance, while black hat thinking has its place, too much of it can leave the meeting drained and too much red feeling can eclipse logic.
It’s best to avoid identifying with a particular hat. We all have natural preferences but we need to practise different modes of thinking to give us the rich diversity of views that can give us a more comprehensive viewpoint.
And there’s good news for those of us tired of unstructured meetings where everyone talks around an issue but fails to reach a conclusion. Users of the technique say it can reduce meeting lengths to a quarter of what they used to be with decisions made in minutes rather than hours.