Six Thinking Hats
by Edward de Bono
Historical note: I picked up this book in Bohemia Bookshop in Prague. I remember being very annoyed at Mr. De Bono when his philosophy was all the craze in Singapore schooling.
- Thinking
- Western thinking is concerned with “what is” – determined by analysis, judgment and argument. But there is another aspect which is concerned with “what can be” – constructive/creative thinking. In an argument both sides are right but often just looking at different aspects of the situation.
- 6 hats promotes parallel thinking – everybody examines all issues from all sides, with an emphasis on designing a way forward.
- Hats are not categories of people – they are modes of behavior everyone is capable of.
- Benefit: Power, Time Savings, Removal of Ego, One Thing at a Time
- 2 main purposes to the 6 hats: 1) to simplify thinking by allowing thinker to deal with one thing at a time and 2) allowing a switch in thinking – if a person in a meeting has been persistently negative, we can ask him to take off the black hat without threatening ego/personality
- White Hat: Facts
- Be objective and neutral
- Use focusing questions to fill in information gaps
- There are proven/checked facts, and facts believed to be true but unchecked
- Likelihoods – range from never true to sometimes to frequently to always true
- Red Hat: Emotion
- Legitimize your and others’ feelings as part of thinking
- Two types of feeling: ordinary emotions like fear and dislike and suspicion, and complex judgements like hunches, aesthetic feeling, etc.
- Black Hat: Caution
- Seek to avoid dangers and difficulties, identify matters that need attention
- Does this suggestion fit out policy/values/experience/resources/facts?
- Black hat thinking is not argument – it only puts caution points on the map
- Yellow Hat: Positivity
- Positive assessment vs black hat’s negative assessment
- Range of positiveness – from logical at one end to dreams/visions/hopes at the other
- Probe and explore for value and benefit – putting forward soundly based optimism.
- Making things happen – effectiveness and concrete proposals/suggestions
- Not just directly just positive euphoria (red hat) or creating new ideas (green hat)
- Green Hat: Creativity
- Both thinker and listener should be wearing green hats
- Fundamental: search for alternatives, going beyond known, obvious, and satisfactory
- Provocation is used to take us out of our usual patterns of thinking – eg random word method
- Lateral thinking is used to cut across patterns to generate new concepts
- Blue Hat: Control of Thinking
- Organizes thinking about the thinking
- Defines the subjects toward which the thinking is to be directed – defines the problems and shapes the questions
- Responsible for summaries, overviews and conclusions.
- Even when the specific blue hat thinking role is assigned to one person, it is still open to anyone to offer blue hat comments/suggestions.
- Benefits of 6-hat method
- By the end of the process going through the 6 hats, decisions seem to have made themselves.
- the 6 hats are a map laying out everything so it is clear to everyone what the best way forward is.
- If it is not possible to make a decision, then the final blue hat should lay out why it is not possible.
- If a decision still has to be made, then a red hat decision is made – in the end, all decisions are really red hat.
- The biggest enemy of thinking is complexity – the 6 hats is simple to understand and easy to use
The 6 Hats
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