Six Thinking Hats Technique)
Six Thinking Hats Technique)
Six Thinking Hats Technique)
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Organizations such as Prudential Insurance, IBM, Federal Express, British Airways, Polaroid, Pepsico,
DuPont, and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, possibly the world's largest company, use Six Thinking
Hats.
The six hats represent six modes of thinking and are directions to think rather than labels for thinking.
That is, the hats are used proactively rather than reactively.
The method promotes fuller input from more people. In de Bono's words it "separates ego from
performance". Everyone is able to contribute to the exploration without denting egos as they are just
using the yellow hat or whatever hat. The six hats system encourages performance rather than ego
defense. People can contribute under any hat even though they initially support the opposite view.
The key point is that a hat is a direction to think rather than a label for thinking. The key theoretical
reasons to use the Six Thinking Hats are to:
The published book Six Thinking Hats (de Bono, 1985) is readily available and explains the system,
although there have been some additions and changes to the execution of the method.
The following is an excerpt from John Culvenor and Dennis Else Engineering Creative Design, 1995)
This covers facts, figures, information needs and gaps. "I think we need some white hat thinking at this
point..." means Let's drop the arguments and proposals, and look at the data base."
This covers intuition, feelings and emotions. The red hat allows the thinker to put forward an intuition
without any ned to justify it. "Putting on my red hat, I think this is a terrible proposal." Ususally
feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by logic. Usually the
feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious.The red hat gives full permission to a thinker to put forward
his or her feelings on the subject at the moment.
This is the hat of judgment and caution. It is a most valuable hat. It is not in any sense an inferior or
negative hat. The rior or negative hat. The black hat is used to point out why a suggestion does not fit
the facts, the available experience, the system in use, or the policy that is being followed. The black hat
must always be logical.
This is the logical positive. Why something will work and why it will offer benefits. It can be used in
looking forward to the results of some proposed action, but can also be used to find something of value
in what has already happened.
This is the hat of creativity, alternatives, proposals, what is interesting, provocations and changes.
This is the overview or process control hat. It looks not at the subject itself but at the 'thinking' about the
subject. "Putting on my blue hat, I feel we should do some more green hat thinking at this point." In
technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition.