Six Thinking Hats

'Six Thinking Hats' a tool created by Edward de Bono is an important and powerful technique used for decision making. This tool helps in thinking outside the normal styles and guides you to consider the rounded view of a situation. This is a very simple technique and easy to use, effective parallel thinking process that increased the productivity.  This tool, once learned can be applied immediately!

This technique is build based on the principle of parallel thinking which means at any moment everyone is looking in the same direction and the direction is been changed until we reach the decision.

Six Thinking Hats technique can be used in meetings targeted for a critical decision making. Each hat is a different style of thinking as explained below:

White Hat

·     Neutral and objective, Focus on the available data

·     Learn from the information that is available

·     Analyze past trends from historical data

·     Exclude opinions, feelings etc.,

·     Questions

o   What do we know? What is missing? What would we want to know?

·     Facts can be of two levels

o   Believed facts, Verified facts

Red Hat:

·     Emotional and angry

·     Look at problems using intuition, gut feelings

·     Understand the responses of people

·     Don’t expect any logical reasoning’s for the feelings and justifications

Black Hat:

·     Consider all the negative points

·     Be cautious and defensive

·     Make your plans 'tougher' and more resilient

·     Spot flaws and risks before the actions

·     Logically negative – Why this won’t work?

Yellow Hat:

·     Best case scenario

·     Benefits

·     Think positively

·     Have an optimistic viewpoint to see the benefits

Green Hat:

·     New ideas, concepts, creative solution

·     Alternative solutions

·     Growth and fertility

·     Stands for creativity

·     No criticism of ideas

Blue Hat:

·     Cool and sky above

·     Control the decision making process

·     Move Green hat in case we are running out of ideas

·     Move to black hat in case of contingency

·     Organizes the thinking

How to use the hats:

·     Use any hat as needed and it can be more than once

·     Sequence can be decided before the meeting or it can be evolved as we progress

·     Not necessary to use every hat for each decision making situation

·     Keep the time under each hat as short

·     Ensure discipline from each person and can have ground rules set before the meeting

·     This tool can be used by individuals and groups

·     Most used scenario - Open with a blue hat and end with blue hat

o   Open with blue hat

§  Why are we here? What are we thinking? What is the objective

§  Definition of the problem/situation

§  End state, Background or context

§  Plan the hats sequence

o   End with blue hat

§  What did we achieved

§  Outcome/Conclusion

§  Solution/Next steps

Summary:

Blue – Control & Organization of thinking process

White – Objective facts and numbers

Red – Emotions and feelings

Yellow – Hope, Positive

Green – Creative and lateral

Black – Careful and cautious