Six Thinking Hat

 

“Six-Hats Thinking” is a technique developed by Edward de Bono used for problem analysis and decision-making in management.  The six-hats thinking technique look at problems from various different perspectives.  It helps:

• To understand the full complexity of the problem, and
• To spot issues and opportunities to which you might otherwise be blind.

Six-Hat Thinking offers six ways of thinking.  The idea is to be able to look at possible decisions about a problem wearing only one hat a time.  The six ways of thinking are:

Hats	Function	Emphasis
White Hat	like a computer	emphasis on facts and figures Questions: What are the facts here? What data do we have? Can we measure this in figures?
Red Hat	like an emotional barometer	emphasis on the emotional viewpoint of an individual or a group Questions: What’s our gut reaction? Who is happy or sad about this? How do you feel about this?
Black Hat	like gloom	emphasis on pessimism or playing the “devil’s advocate” Questions: Why can’t we do this? What could go wrong here? What’s the downside?
Yellow Hat	like sunshine	emphasis on the positive or optimistic side of things Questions: How can we do this? What would happen if everything went well? What if we just did this quickly?
Green Hat	like growth	emphasis on the creative or innovative side of things Questions: What are additional opportunities? What have we missed? How is this connected to other issues or challenges we have?
Blue Hat	like the sky	emphasis on detachment (unconstrained thinking) and then on how things might be organized Questions: How should we think about this? What are the metaphors or mental models? What is possible here? How might this change the ways we do things at a higher level?

 

Shared from:

Six-Hat Thinking

April 30, 2012 by Dr. Jon Warner

http://blog.readytomanage.com/