De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats – A Structured Group Thinking Tool

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

Edward De Bono introduced the concept and metaphor of thinking hats in his 1985 book, “Six Thinking Hats”. Since then, the term and the concepts have wound there way into the business and organizational community as a helpful tool to aid thinking, understanding and decision making.

The underlying premise behind the model is that by considering situations, contexts, problems and opportinities from a range of different perspectives, we’re more likely to find better solutions than if we just consider the context from a single perspective.

Let’s draw this out a bit.

If we only think about the situation we face from one mindset, then we’ll only ever connect with it in one way, we’ll only ever identify a specific set of solutions, we’ll only ever identify a certain set of risks etc. For example, to bring another metaphor into play, if we adopt the “I’m a hammer” mindset, then potentially everything we see will look like a nail, so we hammer it. In this mindset we might not notice that what we think is a nail is actually a screw, which should be interacted with in a very different way.

On the other hand, if we adopt a range of mindsets when considering a context, then we will broaden our understanding of the context, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the problem space and thus a more expansive set of responses and potential solutions. Chances are that this expanded option set contains a better option to pursue than the unexpacted set.

To make it easier to adopt different mindsets in our analysis, discussion and decision making, De Bono introduced the metaphor of hats. He uses six different hats, each of a different colour, each associated with a different frame and way of thinking. They’re as follow:

White Hat

A white hat mindset is about data an information. When “wearing” this hat you should try and focus on objectively considering facts and information. Ignore all the other stuff and just look for the data – what data do you have, what data are you missing, what is the data telling you, and so on.

Red Hat

The red hat mindset is all about connecting with your emotional feelings and responses, without needing to justify them. By exploring emotional responses to a situation we might be able to identify values conflicts or other concerns that aren’t apparant when wearing other hats. (NB – we think that emotions actually are just another form of data, but that’s a bit pedantic)

Black Hat

The black hat mindset is critical and cautious. When wearing this hat we should focus on looking for all the stuff that could go wrong. What’s the worst case scenario? What are the obstacles? What are the risks? Why is this idea rubbish? Why will it fail? Exploring a situation from this perspective helps ensure we have a more comprehensive understanding of downside uncertainties so that we can plan to mitigate and address them as possible.

Yellow Hat

The yellow hat mindset is the sunshine to the black hat’s midnight gloom. When adopting the yellow hat mindset the goal is to be look optimistically at upsides and focusing on potential benefits and good outcomes. Doing this is can help to identify opportunities as well as building confidence and motivation.

Green Hat

The green hat is all about being creative. When adopting the green hat mindset, the goal is to think expansively, to come up with and share new ideas, to think outside the box, to push the boundaries of what might be possible.

Blue Hat

The blue hat is the regulator of all these different hats. In a group environment, the person adopting the blue hat mindset is responsible for managing the overall thinking process of the group. They would set the agenda, organise the order and manner of thinking and ensures that guidelines are followed.

Basically, this is someone who would chair a meeting where the six hats approach was being used. As the six thinking hats can be used when on your own as well, it’s helpful to put a bit of structure around your own thinking processes too.

What’s the evidence say?

This is a bit of a tricky one. There doesn’t seem to be that much evidence that these six thinking hats really make that much of a difference. Certainly, when we speak to people who specialise in creativity and innovation, they don’t have that much to say about it.

That said, it’s been highly adopted and people seem to quite like to use it. Given this, there must be something in it that keeps people coming back to it. It could be that it enables smoother and better understood conversations, even if those conversations don’t actually lead to empirically improved outcomes.

There are clearly links to different behavioural and thinking patterns in this, and we’d recommend DiSC as a starting point on that side of things, though anything in the wider personality space could be of interest.

We also think that learning more about how we think is helpful when considering problem solving. Dual process theory could be of interest, as could our cognitive biases.

It might also be worth exploring bounded rationality, satisficing and maximizing and some more formal problem solving approaches, like the A3 approach to problem solving.

Interstingly, quite a few coaching models also adopt a problem solving approach, so something like the GROW coaching model could be intersting.

You might also enjoy a podcast on innovation – one is below:

Yup. Another model with some colours in it. My goodness there are a lot of them. Perhaps we need some standardization across all those colours.

We certainly believe that a diversity of thought and approaches to thinking is helpful when trying to understand a context. We also think it helpful when trying to identify and decide upon potential courses of action and strategic decisions.

We also think that by using a metaphor to help people conceptualise and adopt a range of mindsets, that we’re making it easier for them to do that. We also think that, across a typical group of people, individuals would instinctively adopt some of these different mindsets (perhaps aligned to their personalities etc). By giving space in a conversation to each of these mindsets, we are effectively giving space for a range of individuals thinking and behavioural preferences to be explored by the whole group, which can help them feel included and validated as well as helping to move the collective thinking on.

Overall, we’ve got no problems with this model and think it’s a nice tool to bring a bit fairly inclusive fun and playfulness to certain types of meetings or decision processes.

De Bono, E. (1985). Six Thinking Hats. Little, Brown and Company

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