Is there a magical way to quickly see a problem or decision from multiple angles? Yes, Edward De bono has developed a systems to do just that. In this Six thinking hats book summary we delve into the systems he developed and wrote about in his book .
Six thinking hats is the practice of thinking that brings about changes in the cognitive ability of people. Edward De Bono has been an acclaimed brain trainer and is one of the pioneers in the field. The book, The Six Thinking Hats envisions the six major thought cycles present in people. The aim is to get people to put on a particular thinking hat when a particular ability or capability is to be used.
The writer considers that thinking is a skill that can be acquired and by being able to think differently that suits the occasion, it is possible to achieve great heights in action. Over the years courses by De Bono have been taken up in the top corporations in the world and to critical acclaim too. But at the other end, the courses and books by Edward De Bono have been put to good use by school children as well making it well accepted to all sorts of people and not just the highly lettered ones.
Understanding The Six Hats
List of Contents
The Six Thinking Hats are six interchangeable tools that can be used to bring about critical thinking. With each of the six coloured hats, a particular aspect of the critical thinking is being deployed so that the person stresses certain type of thought over other more general thinking.
The six thinking hats each have a different colour so that they are different from each other and in many ways creates a unique thinking. The premise to start with is that an all-round thinking would only lead to more confusion as signals are generated with are at cross purpose to each other. With the Six Thinking Hats, a frame of relation is created that have three uses.
- You can optimize thinking.
- You can be focused in thinking.
- You can make thinking into a process.
Before we take up the strong point of each of the different type of hat available to the user, it would be noteworthy to understand the advantages of using the different hats.
- Encourages parallel thinking. That is if each member of a group thinks parallelly they tend to cover a lot more area than thinking at cross purpose.
- Thinking occurs in the full spectrum. This prevents stereotypical thinking to say the least and people are not limited to a single option.
- Kills the ego. What this means is the people thinking together in a group would tend not to associate an idea as their own but as a collective. This brings about a more concerted team effort to finding a solution for the problem at hand. Thinking does not take on a personal aspect.
- Ensures better individual participation. One of the advantages of the six thinking hats is that people tend to work better as a team. This produces results faster than otherwise possible when thinking to oneself.
- Ensures teamwork. Once the team sees themselves as part of a whole and not as individuals, the effort and thinking becomes together as a team of people.
From what has been discussed in the above, the advantages of using the Six Thinking Hats would be evident to the reader of the book.
Taking A Look at The Six Hats Individually
The six thinking hats have been separated out into six different colours and they are Blue, White, Red, Black, Yellow, and Green. We shall take up the six colours individually to get a better understanding of the thought process involved in using each of them.
The Blue Hat
With the Blue Hat, the stress is on the process. The end result is often not emphasized enough while wearing this hat and it is often used to create an atmosphere for critical thinking. In purely technical terms, the Blue Hat is all about meta-cognition. Meta-cognition describes how people should think and leave the end results to how the process works out.
The White Hat
The White Hat is all about getting and using facts. The points of thought are
- What are the materials that we have?
- What sort of information are we having?
- What more information do we need?
- How do you get that information that we need?
The idea is to collect as much data as possible and this would lead to a better understanding of the process; with it the better management of the situation.
The Red Hat
The Red Hat is best used when intuition and gut feeling needs to be relied upon to come to a decision. The gut feeling need not be explained to everyone but the action can be initiated based on the feel-good factor. It is seen that the Red Hat is crucial to team work as it stresses the fact that people can work to their own comfort levels.
The Black Hat
While using the Black Hat, people look to find faults within a working system. This is where alternative thinking comes to the picture so see if something can be done in another manner or process. When an organization or person does not employ the Six Thinking Hats methodology, often it is the Black Hat that is often worn most of the time.
The Yellow Hat
When it is the positives of a product or process that is being called to action, then it is the Yellow Hat that is being used. The person with the Yellow Hat does not rule out any possibilities but tries to bring a harmony with what is available for use.
The Green Hat
The Green Thinking Hat is for creativity and thus is used with people who needs to be creative with their work. It makes it possible to take on a process without knowing for sure what the end result would be.
Conclusion
Quite to the contrary to popular thinking, the Six thinking Hats do not compartmentalize decision making but works to complement each type of thinking. Often it is a mixture of the Six Hats that bring about a successful set of actions and not a single Hat alone. The Six Thinking Hats allow people to be better focused at what they are doing and to seek a positive outcome from what could have been chaos.
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