Six Thinking Hats - Simple & effective lateral thinking & decison making technique

'Six Thinking Hats' is powerful thinking technique. It helps to think decisions from a number of important perspectives. It challenges your habitual style of thinking, and helps you to get more logical view on decisions.

This technique was introduced by the writer Edward de Bono in his book “Six Thinking Hats” in 1985.

The underlying principles are based on human psychology and it challenges the way the human brain thinks.

Many of us think from very rational and positive viewpoint but may fail to look at a problem from an emotional, intuitive, creative or negative viewpoint. It means that resistance to plans are underestimated and at the end we fail to make creative leaps and do not make essential contingency plans.

Similarly, pessimists may be excessively defensive, and more emotional people may fail to look at decisions calmly and rationally.

If we look at a problem with the 'Six Thinking Hats' technique, our decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in execution, public sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning.

How to Use “Six Thinking Hats”

• It is an effective yet simple system that increases productivity. 

• There are six metaphorical hats and each defines a certain type of thinking. 

• You can put on or take off one of these hats to indicate the type of thinking you are using. 

• This putting on and taking off is essential, because it allows you to switch from one type of thinking to another. 

• When done in a group, everybody should wear the same hat at the same time. 

• The principle behind the 'Six Thinking Hats' is parallel thinking which ensures that all the people in a meeting are focused on and thinking about the same subject at the same time. 

• In this system, thinking is divided into six categories with each category identified with its own coloured metaphorical 'thinking hat'. 

• Organisations that use the 'Six Thinking Hats' system report that their teams are more productive and in general "happier and healthier". 

Each 'Thinking Hat' is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:

	White Hat Thinking- Facts Information and data Neutral and objective What do I know? What do I need to find out? How will I get the information I need?
	Yellow Hat Thinking- Benefits Positives, plus points Logical reasons are given. Why an idea is useful
	Black Hat Thinking - Cautions Difficulties, weaknesses, dangers Logical reasons are given. Spotting the risks
	Red Hat Thinking - Feelings Intuition, hunches, gut instinct My feelings right now. Feelings can change. No reasons are given
	Green Hat Thinking - Creativity Ideas, alternative, possibilities Provocation - "PO" Solutions to black hat problems
	Blue Hat Thinking- Process Thinking about thinking What thinking is needed? Organizing the thinking Planning for action

White Hat:

• When you put on your white hat, you focus directly on the information and data available– what is available, what is needed, and how it might be obtained. Proposals, opinions, beliefs and arguments should be put aside.

• Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.

• This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.

• The white hat covers facts, figures, data and information. Too often facts and figures are embedded in an argument or belief. 

• Wearing your white hat allows you to present information in a neutral and objective way. 

Questions you might ask while wearing your white hat include: 

• What information do we have here? 
• What information is missing? 
• What information would we like to have? 
• How are we going to get the information? 

Yellow Hat:

• Yellow symbolizes brightness, positive aspects and optimism

• The yellow hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to look for all the benefits of the decision, feasibility, the value in it and how something can be done. 

• Yellow hat thinking is a deliberate search for the positive. Benefits are not always immediately obvious and you might have to search for them. Every creative idea deserves some yellow hat attention.

• Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.. 

Questions you might ask while wearing the yellow hat include:

• What are the benefits of this option? 
• Why is this proposal preferable? 
• What are the positive assets of this design? 
• How can we make this work? 

Black Hat:

• It symbolizes judgement, evaluation and caution. It is often referred as devil’s advocate. 

• Using black hat thinking, look at all the bad points of the decision. Look at it cautiously and defensively. It allows you to consider your proposals critically and logically. 

• Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans 'tougher' and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. 

• Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance. This leaves them under-prepared for difficulties.

• Mistakes can be disastrous. So the black hat is very valuable. It is the most used hat and possibly the most useful hat. However, it is very easy to overuse the black hat. Caution, used too early in the problem solving process, can easily kill creative ideas with early negativity. 

Wearing your black hat you might consider the following:

• Costs. (This proposal would be too expensive.) 
• Regulations. (I don't think that the regulations would allow … ) 
• Design. (This design might look nice, but it is not practical.) 
• Materials. (This material would mean high maintenance.) 
• Safety issues. (What about handrails?) 

Red Hat:

• Red hat symbolizes feelings, emotions, hunches and intuitions.

• Wearing' the red hat, you look at problems using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.

• This hat helps us to express emotions and feelings such as fear, likes, dislikes, loves and hates.

• Usually, feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by logic. Often, the feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious. 

• Wearing the red hat allows you to put forward your feelings and intuitions without the need for justification, explanation or apology. 

Examples:

• My gut-feeling is that this will not work. 
• I don't like the way this is being done. 
• This proposal is terrible. 
• My intuition tells me that prices will fall soon. 

Green Hat:

• The Green Hat stands for creativity and new ideas. It focuses on possibilities and alternatives. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. 

• The green hat makes time and space available to focus on creative thinking. Even if no creative ideas are forthcoming, the green hat asks for the creative effort. 

• Often green hat thinking is difficult because it goes against our habits of recognition, judgment and criticism. 

The green hat is specifically concerned with below listed thinking processes

• creative thinking 
• Additional alternatives 
• putting forward possibilities and hypotheses 
• interesting proposals 
• new approaches 
• provocations and changes 

Typical questions include:

• Are there any other ideas here? 
• Are there any additional alternatives? 
• Could we do this in a different way? 
• Could there be another explanation? 

Blue Hat:

• The Blue Hat stands for control mechanism. It ensures that six thinking hats guidelines are observed. This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking, etc.

• Controlling the sequence of thinking 

• The blue hat is the overview or process control. It is for organizing and controlling the thinking process so that it becomes more productive. 

• The blue hat is for thinking about thinking. In technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition. 

Wearing your blue hat, you might:

• Look not at the subject itself but at the 'thinking' about the subject. 
• Set the agenda for thinking 
• Suggest the next step in the thinking, "
• suggest we try some green hat thinking to get some new ideas" 
• Ask for a summary, conclusion, or decision, "Could we have a summary of your views?"

Conclusion:

Six Thinking Hats is a good technique for looking at decision from various points of view.
It allows necessary emotion and skepticism to be brought into discussion without looking for any rationals. It opens up the opportunity for creativity. It helps both pessimistic and optimistic people by challenging their habitual way of thinking.