Reading the book, Edward de Bono: Six Thinking Hats, I got the idea of giving a summary of the book for those interested.
Thinking is the ultimate human resource. We always want to be better in our thinking skills. The main difficulty of thinking is confusion. We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls. The concept of the six thinking hats helps us separate all these kind of thinking from each other. Each hat indicates a role. They are directions and not descriptions of thinking. (A description is concerned with what has happened. A direction is concerned with what is about to happen. In other words, "what is" versus "what can be".)
Six coloured hats correspond to the six directions of thinking: white, red, black, yellow, green and blue. When using them, take care of using one at a time, do not want to do too many things at the same time. The colour of each hat is also related to its function.
White Hat - White is neutral and objective. It reports on the world. The white hat is concerned with objective facts and figures. It is about information that can range from hard facts as figures to soft facts as opinions and feelings. (If you report on someone else expressing feelings, that is white hat thinking). It is used at the beginning on a thinking session as a background to it or toward the end as a sort of assessment. This thinking is typical of the Japanese.
Red Hat - Red suggests anger (seeing red), rage and emotions. The red hat gives the emotional view. (If you report on your own feelings, that is red hat thinking). It gives you an opportunity to express feelings, emotions and intuition.
It is the opposite of neutral white had thinking.
Black Hat - Black is somber and serious. Using the black hat means being cautious and careful. It points out the weaknesses in an idea, difficulties, dangers and potential problems. It is also called the hat of caution or survival. It is not a bad hat. It is the most important and valuable of all the hats and certainly the most used. With this you point out and avoid danger to yourself and others. It prevents mistakes, excesses and nonsenses. It is also known about its risk assessment nature. This is the 'natural' hat of the Western thinking tradition.
Yellow Hat - Yellow is sunny and positive. The yellow hat is optimistic and covers hope and positive thinking. The thinker sets out to find whatever benefit there may be in a suggestion or how it may be possible to put the idea into practice. It is a judgement hat. It should be logically based. Focus on benefit. Constructive thinking and making things happen. Also called as speculative-positive. Or the best possible scenario thinking.
It is the opposite of black hat thinking in a sense that black is concerned with negative assessment and yellow is concerned with positive assessment.
Green Hat - Green is grass, vegetation, and abundance, fertile growth. The green hat indicates creativity and new ideas. It is the energy hat and the creative hat. We put forward new ideas. We lay out options and alternatives. Lateral thinking; reasons: creativity is used and it is directly based on the information behaviour.
Blue Hat - Blue is cool, and it is also for the colour of the sky, which is above everything else. It is an "overview". The blue hat is concerned with control, the organization of the thinking process, and the use of the other hats. It is thinking about thinking. It is used for the management of thinking, for the organization of thinking and for process control. At the beginning of a meeting under the blue hat, the agenda, the purpose and the goals are laid out. The blue hat is "worn" by a facilitator, a chairperson of the meeting. Focus is one of the key roles of the blue hat. Another key role is to give a summary at the end of the meeting.
It is the opposite of green hat thinking, new ideas as oppose to organization.
Thus, following the function of the hats we can think of three pairs of hats:
- white and red (objective vs. emotional)
- black and yellow (negative assessment vs. positive assessment)
- green and blue (creativity, new ideas vs. the organizing hat)
For instance as a guideline we can proceed like this:
We can use the hats in meetings in any order, but usually blue hat is used at the very beginning and end of the meeting signalling the following; the first blue hat indicates: why we are there, the definition of the situation, what we want to achieve, a plan for the sequence of hats to be used; the final blue hat indicates: what we have achieved, outcome, conclusion, design, solution and next steps.
After the opening blue hat, we can use the red hat in situations where there are strong feelings to the subject.
In an assessment situation, we can put the yellow hat (finding value to the idea) before the black hat (find difficulties) thus being motivated to overcome the difficulties.
In general, any sequence that makes sense as a "thinking strategy" is valid and will work. The hats may also be used by an individual thinking on his or her own. Green, yellow and black hats are useful for individual thinking.
Edward de Bono is regarded as the world's leading author on the teaching of thinking as a skill. He is the originator of the concept of "Lateral thinking", a systematic approach to creative thinking that employs formal techniques based directly on the behaviour of the human brain. The essence of his work has been to produce thinking techniques that are simple, practical, and powerful.
