When someone asks you to put on your thinking cap, and you ask, “which one?” you are no stranger to the Six Thinking Hats technique given by Edward De Bono to initiate and sustain creative thinking in groups.
So what is this technique with this fancy name?
Here’s a quick primer in simple, easy to understand language.
There’s this figure of speech that the Americans use – “putting on your thinking cap.” This effectively means, stop twiddling your thumbs and do some serious thinking.
I believe that De Bono named his Six Hats technique on the thinking cap. He said that any sort of problem solving requires six kinds of thinking, and each one of these six is essential if you want to think efficiently and arrive at a usable solution.
In order to add some color and style to his method, he said that for each of these thinking types, you could don a hat of a specific color (this of course doesn’t necessitate that you keep a colorful hat-stand handy – but it won’t hurt if you really had those colored hats in a neat n natty pile in the middle of your conference table.)
Now when a person would put on a hat of specific color, he’d think the way the color of his hat permits him or her to.
Let’s look at the six hats:
The White Hat: Is the hat of information. This means that when you wear a white hat, you think in terms of data and facts, which would also mean that you don’t really think at all. You “reflect” upon the information.
The Red Hat: Is the hat of intuition and feelings. When you wear this hat, you’ve got to open the windows of your mind and allow your feelings to flow freely. (Note that you should be careful if you wear the Red Hat around your boss/boss’s wife.)
The Black Hat: Is the logical hat of caution. When you wear the black hat, you try to look at the underside of everything.
The Yellow Hat: Is the logical hat of positivism. You wear this hat to think about the positives of everything.
The Green Hat: Is the hat of creativity. If your head is encased in green, you should think creatively/innovatively. You’ve got to come up with never before sort of ideas.
The Blue Hat: Is the hat of the moderator/facilitator. So, the person who wears the blue hat tries to think about the entire picture.
Question 1:
So how does it work?
Answer:
You choose the hats that you’d need for a specific portion of a thinking process. For example, a team thinking about a new advertising idea would use the White, Red, Green, and the Blue hat, in the visualization process; a team engaged in the course design process would wear all the six hats.
Question 2:
And who wears the hats?
Answer:
Everyone in the team gets to wear every hat, except the Blue one, which never leaves the moderator’s head.
Happy Six Hat Thinking!
