Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats' is an important Thinking Tool.It is used to look at decisions
from a number of important & perspectives.This forces you to move outside your habitual thinking style, and helps you to get a more rounded view of a
situation.

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.Emotional people may fail to look at decisions calmly and rationally.

Six Thinking Hats Advantages

Your decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in execution, public sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning.

White Hat
With this thinking hat you focus on the data available.
What information do we have?
How valid is it?
How relevant is it?
What can we learn from it?
What information is missing?

Green Hat
The Green Hat stands for creativity.
It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas.
What are the different ways to solve the problem?
What could the other ways?

Yellow Hat
It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and
the value in it.
What are the good points and benefits?
How it will help us?
Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.

Black Hat
Using black hat thinking, look at all the bad points of the decision.
Is it true? Will it work?
What is wrong with?
What are the weaknesses?

This is important because it highlights the weak points.So, you can eliminate them, alter
them, or prepare contingency plans to counter them.

Why is the black hat important?
Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans 'tougher' and more resilient.
It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action.
Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so
used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance.
This leaves them under-prepared for difficulties.

Red Hat
'Wearing' the red hat, you look at problems using intuition,gut reaction, and emotion.
How warm or cold I feel about this?
Also try to think how other people will react emotionally.Especially responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.

Blue Hat
The Blue Hat stands for process control.
This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings.
What have we done so far?
What decisions have we reached?
What next?

The Unique Blue Hat
The blue hat is different from the other hats because it is involved with directing the thinking
process itself.We are actually using the blue hat whenever we suggest the next hat to be used.

Attributes & Analogy

1. White hat (Blank sheet):
Information & reports, facts and figures (objective)

2. Green hat (Plant):
Alternatives, new approaches & 'everything goes', idea generation & provocations
(speculative/creative)

3. Yellow hat (Sun): Praise,positive aspects, why it will work (objective)

4. Black hat (Judge's robe):
Criticism, judgment, negative aspects, modus tollens (objective)

5. Red hat (Fire): Intuition,opinion & emotion, feelings (subjective)

6. Blue hat (Sky): "Big Picture," "Conductor hat,""Meta hat," "thinking about thinking", overall process (overview)

Situations & Hats

When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, you may use Green Hat thinking.
When contingency plans are needed, go for Black Hat thinking,etc.

Hats sequence in meetings

Present the facts of the case (White Hat).
Generate ideas on how the case could be handled (Green Hat).
Evaluate the merits of the ideas -List benefits (Yellow Hat).
List drawbacks (Black Hat).
Get everybody's gut feeling about the alternatives (Red Hat).
Summarize (Blue Hat).
W-G-Y-B-R-B

Hat Sequences

Assess an idea - Yellow hat followed by the Black Hat. (Y-B)
Improve a design - Black Hat followed by the Green Hat. (B-G)
Alternatively you could use Blue, Green and Red Hats. (B-G-R)
Caution Sequence – White, Black and then Blue/Red.
Comparing Facts and Opinion - Red and White. (R-W)

Six Thinking Hats or six thinking strategies, were identified by Edward de Bono.
He championed the cause which drove the creative processes in individuals.
These Thinking Hats have recently been incorporated in school business programs such as the IBT (International Business and Technology) program. - Wikipedia

Experience has shown that Six Hat thinking is much more powerful and constructive than argument or discussion. It is also very much faster. The Six Hats method gets rid of
egos, which are such a problem in traditional thinking. It is no longer a matter of
defending an idea or attacking an idea. If you want to show off you do so performing very well under each hat. – Edward De Bono

derivered from – mindtools.com