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Meetings about meetings? Get more out of your day!

Are you busy being busy but not getting much done?  Take stock with our easy to read guide to one of the most powerful tools around for improving the quality of your decision making.

Edward De Bono developed this technique in his book "Six Thinking Hats".  It allows you to look at decision making from a number of different perspectives.   If you are naturally a rational, logical person who relies on facts and data to help you make decisions it will help you see the potential emotional and creative repercussions your decisions could have and vice versa.Using the Six Thinking Hats technique, allows you to develop robust solutions.  Your decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in execution, sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning.

How to Use the Tool:

As the title suggests, there are ‘six hats’ that you metaphorically ‘put on’ to see the decision making process from different perspectives.

White Hat:

Focus on data. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.  This could take the form of analysing past trends.

Red Hat:

This ‘hat’ focuses on intuition, gut reaction, and emotion.  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:

Black hat thinking is pessimistic, cautious and defensive. 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.

Yellow Hat:

The yellow hat is all about positivity, be optimistic and thinking of all the benefits, uncover value and spot opportunities. Put this hat on when you need to find ways to find a way to keep going when things look gloomy and difficult.

Green Hat:

The Green Hat stands for creativity. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas.

Blue Hat:

This hat is about process control, it is worn by people chairing meetings.  When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking, and so on.

You can use ‘Six Thinking Hats’ in any context – in meetings, on your own or even in your personal or home life.

In meetings it has the benefit of defusing the disagreements that can happen when people with different thinking styles discuss the same problem.  Alternatively, you can use ‘Six Thinking Hats’ to look at problems or needs from the point of view of your customer.  It is also a technique used widely in public relations and communications to avoid pitfalls.

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