Six Thinking Hats Approach

This tool encourages us to move outside our habitual thinking style, and helps reveal a more rounded view of a situation.

This tool was created by Edward de Bono. De Bono says “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’s like juggling too many balls”. De Bono describes 6 different types of thinking that we do all the time and associates each with a different color hat.

• Information (White) – considering purely available information, what are the facts

• Emotions (Red) – intuitive or instinctive gut reactions of emotional feeling

• Discernment (Black) – logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious or conservative

• Optimistic response (Yellow) – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony

• Creativity (Green) - provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes

• Managing thinking (Blue) – strategic, cool and controlled thinking; a helicopter view

Many successful people think from a very rational, positive viewpoint. This is part of the reason that they are successful. Often, though, they may fail to look at a problem from an emotional, intuitive, creative or negative viewpoint. This can mean that they underestimate resistance to plans, fail to make creative leaps and do not make essential contingency plans. Similarly, pessimists may be excessively defensive, and more emotional people may fail to look at decisions calmly and rationally.

If you look at a problem with the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ technique, it encourages you to make a more rounded decision, taking a combination of logic and emotion into play.