Friday, May 18, 2007

Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats, by Edward De Bono, presents a framework for organizing and improving thinking.

Switch Hats to Switch Your Thinking
By using a metaphor, the hat, it's easy to switch modes of thinking by switching hats. The main idea is to turn destructive arguments into constructive thinking. The approach is to have people wear a certain hat depending on what type of thinking is needed for the moment.

Six Hats
The six hats are:

  • White Hat - the facts and figures
  • Red Hat - the emotional view
  • Black Hat - the "devil's advocate"
  • Yellow Hat - the positive side
  • Green Hat - the creative side
  • Blue Hat - the organizing view

Key Themes
Key themes throughout the book are:

  • Thinking your way forward over judging your way forward.
  • Parallel thinking over argument, adversarial, and confrontational.
  • Setting direction for thinking over describing what perspective your thinking was.

Key Take Aways

  • By switching hats, you can switch points of view.
  • It's easier to ask somebody to wear another hat, than tell them to change their thinking
  • You can reduce time in meetings spent arguing towards constructive dialogue
  • You can better balance thinking, particuarly in a group (for example, creatitivity with negativity or emotional perspective with facts, particuarly)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you know there is an official training course and certification in this thinking method? Learn more here: http://www.debonoconsulting.com/Six_Thinking_Hats.asp

You can also buy the book at this site: http://www.debonoconsulting.com/deBonoConsulting_Store.asp

J.D. Meier said...

I think it's a great technique.

I've found a way to make it effective at work. When a meeting gets stuck, I list a question for each hat on the board:
* What are the facts and figures?
* What's your gut reaction? How do you feel about this?
* Why can't we do this? What prevents us? What's the downside?
* How can we do this?
* What are additional opportunities?
* How should we think about this? (what are the metaphors or mental models)

We then walk the questions as a team, with each other vs. against each other.