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Six Thinking Hats
Looking at a
Decision from
All Points of
View
“Six Thinking Hats”
is a powerful technique
that helps you look at important decisions from a
number of diferent perspectives. It helps you make
better decisions by pushing you to move outside
your habitual ways of thinking. As such, it helps you
understand the full complexity of a decision, and spot
issues and opportunities, which you might otherwise
not notice.
Many successful people think from a very rational,
positive viewpoint, and this is part of the reason that
they are successful. Often, though, they may fail to
look at problems from emotional, intuitive, creative
or negative viewpoints. This can mean that they
underestimate resistance to change, do not make
creative leaps, and fail to make essential contingency
plans.
Similarly, pessimists may be overly defensive, and
people used to a very logical approach to problem
solving may fail to engage their creativity or listen
to their intuition. If you look at a problem using the
Six Thinking Hats technique, then you will use all
of these approaches to develop your best solution.
Your decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in
execution, sensitivity, creativity and good contingency
planning.
Edward de Bono created this tool in his book Six
Thinking Hats.
How to Use the Tool:
To use Six Thinking Hats to improve the quality of your
decision-making, look at the decision “wearing” each
of the thinking hats in turn. Each “Thinking Hat” is a
diferent style of thinking. These are explained below:
White Hat
With this thinking hat, you focus on the data available.
Look at the information you have, and see what you
can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge,
and either try to fll them or take account of them.
This is where you analyze past trends, and try to
extrapolate from historical data.
Red Hat
Wearing the red hat, you look at the decision using
intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also, try to think
how other people will react emotionally, and try to
understand the intuitive responses of people who do
not fully know your reasoning.
Black Hat
When using black hat thinking, look at things
pessimistically, cautiously and defensively. Try to see
why ideas and approaches might not work. This is
important because it highlights the weak points in
a plan or course of action. It allows you to eliminate
them, alter your approach, or prepare contingency
plans to counter problems that arise. Black Hat
thinking helps to make your plans tougher and
more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal faws
WilliamManning