Which Thinking Hat are you wearing? And more importantly Why? (And When?)
💡 Edward de Bono’s Six Hats is a way of providing structure to discussions and ensuring that you bring different perspectives to the table when making decisions.
What are the hats?
🔵 Blue Hat: The Conductor’s Hat. Thinking about and managing the thinking process. The blue hat is the control hat. It is used for thinking about thinking. The blue hat sets the agenda, focus and sequence, ensures the guidelines are observed and asks for summaries, conclusions, decisions and plans action.
🟢 Green Hat: The Creative Hat. Generating ideas. The green hat is for creative thinking and generating new ideas, alternatives, possibilities and new concepts.
🔴 Red Hat: The Hat For The Heart. Intuition and feelings. The red hat is about feelings, intuitions and instincts. The red hat invites feelings without justification.
🟡 Yellow Hat: The Optimist’s Hat. Benefits and values. The yellow hat is for a positive view of things. It looks for the benefits and values.
⚫ Black Hat: The Judge’s Hat. Caution. The black hat identifies risk. It is used for critical judgment and must give the logical reasons for concerns. It is one of the most powerful hats.
⚪ White Hat: The Factual Hat. Information. The white hat is all about information. What information you have, what information you need and where to get it. (This is my favourite hat!)
Edward de Bono wrote the book “Six Thinking Hats” in 1985. He wrote “Lateral Thinking for Management” in 1971 and Six Hats is about “Parallel Thinking” – where people consciously “wear the same hat” as they explore all sides of an issue (in contrast to adversarial thinking).
🔑 By wearing each of the hats and by wearing them together with other people, you can gain a richer understanding of issues and how to solve them.
🗝 And as shown here, specific topics/issues may require a different order to the hat-wearing.
What do you reckon? Something you use? Or has it become – [groan; so sorry] – old hat?
📗 You can still buy the book: https://buff.ly/3SmbFLg
Here’s the de Bono website (where the above descriptions come from): https://buff.ly/3tRBjbX
This great illustration comes from here: https://buff.ly/3HHNHn2
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