Six Thinking Hats
“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”
Kevin May owns the Sticks advertising agency in Seattle.
He holds ‘brainstorm salons’ where he invites groups of smart people who have nothing to do with the ad campaigns they will be talking about.
He says it’s amazing what an engineer has to say about lingerie or an artist has to say about accountancy problems.
You can get very different insights, reframed approaches and other ways of looking at problems that people immersed in the problem would never come up with because they’re blinkered by being too close.
As individuals, we are prone to similar patterns of thinking. Unsurprisingly, we don’t all think in the same way.
So, facing a challenge that requires us to be resourceful and think differently can leave us a bit hamstrung. The reason is that to be an effective problem solver, you need to think differently.
Dr. Edward De Bono has been described as one of the world’s greatest thinkers.
He has dedicated most of his life to teaching people ‘how’ to think rather than ‘what’ to think.
He devised the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ technique, a role-playing method whereby a group debates a problem by adopting different ‘hats’.
Each ‘hat’ requires the person to respond to the problem from a certain perspective. They are as follows:
1. White Hat - Facts
2. Red Hat - Emotions
3. Yellow Hat - Benefits
4. Green Hat - Ideas
5. Blue Hat - Planning
6. Black Hat - Judgement
Each person adopts the mentality of their given hat and applies its ‘lens’ to the problem at hand.
You will gather six different perspectives on the same problem as you go around the table.
At the end of this exercise, you'll find that you’ve magically created a whole new list of possible approaches or solutions to your original problem - you’ve learned to think differently.
Sometimes, you need to adopt a different mindset to generate a breakthrough.
The ‘Six Hats’ exercise is a useful tool to help you adopt multiple points of view on the same problem.
Interested in becoming a better problem solver?
Take our Problem Solving course co-created with an ex-Scotland Yard detective and former member of the Metropolitan Police's elite 'Problem Solving Unit.'
