Tools and Technique Paper: 'six Thinking Hats'

Tools and Technique Paper: 'Six Thinking Hats'

This can be an intimidating task. Sometimes decisions can be as easy as choosing a TV channel or picking a flavor of ice cream. These decisions have little impact on the way you live your life. Other decisions have a bigger influence on your life and so you may be hesitant to decide, feeling nervous that if you pick incorrectly you will end up feeling unhappy. Examples of these types of decisions include choosing a spouse or determining what you want to do with your life in regards to work.

The 'Six Thinking Hats' is a technique that helps you see important decisions in different perspectives. This technique forces you to move outside your normal ways of thinking. It also helps you understand the difficulty of the decision, and spot issues and opportunities to which you might otherwise be blind. By using the 'Six Thinking Hats' technique, your decisions and plans will have a mix of sensitivity, creativity, ambition, and good contingency planning. Each 'Thinking Hat' is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:

1. White Hat - Focusing on the data that is available to you. Look at the information you have on hand and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and try to fill them or take account of them.

2. Red Hat - This is were you look at problems using your intuition, your gut reaction, and emotion. One should try to understand other responses of people who do not know your reasoning. Take into consideration how others will react emotionally.

3. Black Hat - Look at all the bad points of the decision. Try to see why it might not work. This will help highlight the weak points in a plan. It also allows you to eliminate them, alter them, or prepare possibility plans to counter them. Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans 'tougher' and flexible. This will also helps you think positive and allows you to get used to thinking positive of which you cannot see problems in advance.

4. Yellow Hat- Helps you think positive. It allows you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it. This hat helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.

5. Green Hat- This stands for creativity. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem.

6. Blue Hat- This stands for process control. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into other 'hats' mentioned above.

This technique can be used anywhere as it makes one 'think outside the box'. It can be used in teams where you want to use different types of thinking. Use it where individuals would feel inhibited by taking these roles without prior legitimization. One can use it to encourage use of a range of thinking processes. Use it for exploring ideas and explore how other people will react when you try to implement your idea. Only one hat is worn at a time so that it is clear what type of thinking is being used. However, there may be a great deal of overlap among hats and it is not necessary to be assertive about the use of one hat over another. One does not need to "put on" or "switch" hats at every moment, although it is important to make a conscious effort to think in the specific mode when it is identified.