The White Hat

Think of white paper, which is neutral and carries information.

The white hat covers facts, figures, data and information. Too often facts and figures are embedded in an argument or belief. Wearing your white hat allows you to present information in a neutral and objective way.

Questions you might ask while wearing your white hat include:

• What information do we have here?
• What information is missing?
• What information would we like to have?
• How are we going to get the information?

When you put on your white hat, you focus directly on the information. For a moment you look to see what information is available, what is needed, and how it might be obtained. Proposals, options, beliefs and arguments are put aside.

The Red Hat

The red hat covers intuition, feelings, hunches and emotions.

Usually, feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by logic. Often, the feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious. Wearing the red hat allows you to put forward your feelings and intuitions without the need for justification, explanation or apology.

Putting on the red hat, you express what you feel about the project.

• My gut-feeling is that this will not work.
• I don’t like the way this is being done.
• This proposal is terrible.
• My intuition tells me that persons with disabilities will have to be considered in design decisions soon.

The red hat allows feelings, as such, to come into the discussion without pretending to be anything else. It is always valuable to get feelings out into the open.

The Black Hat

Think of a stern judge wearing black robes.

The black hat is the hat of “caution” and “judgment”.

Wearing the black hat allows you to consider your proposals critically and logically. The black hat is used to reflect on why a suggestion does not fit the facts, the available experience, or the system of use, or the policy that is being followed. The black hat must always be logical..

Wearing the black hat you might consider the following:

For example you can ask someone who's getting negative to take their Black Hat off for a moment - this is far more neutral than telling them to stop being so negative!

• Costs. (This proposal would be too expensive.)
• Regulations. (I don’t think that the regulations would allow.)
• Design. (This design might look nice, but is not practical.)
• Tools. (These tools would mean high training costs and maintenance.)
• Accessibility issues. (What about visual impairments and physical dexterity problems?)

Mistakes can be disastrous. So the black hat is very valuable. It is the most used hat and possibly the most useful hat. However, it is very easy to overuse the black hat. Caution, used too early in the problem solving process, can easily kill creative ideas with early negativity.

The Yellow Hat

Think of sunshine.

When struggling with an apparently insurmountable problem you might call on the team to put on their Yellow Hats to generate some positive approaches.

 

The yellow hat is for optimism and the logical positive view of things. Wearing the yellow hat allows you to look for benefits, feasibility and how something can be done. It can also be used to find something of value in what has already happened.

Questions you might ask when wearing the yellow hat include:

• What are the benefits of this option?
• Why is the proposal preferable?
• What are the positive assets of this design?
• How can we make it work?

Yellow hat thinking is a deliberate search for the positive. Benefits are not always immediately obvious and you might have to search for them. Every creative idea deserves some yellow hat attention.

The Green Hat

Think of vegetation and rich growth.

The green hat is specifically concerned with new ideas and new ways of looking at things. This is the hat for:

• Creative thinking
• Additional alternatives
• Putting forward possibilities and hypotheses
• Interesting proposals
• New approaches
• Provocations and changes

The green hat makes time and space available to focus on creative thinking. Even if no creative ideas are forthcoming, the green hat asks for the creative effort. Often green hat thinking is difficult because it goes against our habits of recognition, judgment and criticism.

Questions you might ask while wearing your green hat include:

• Are there any other ideas here?
• Are there any additional alternatives?
• Could we do this in a different way?
• Could there be another explanation?

The Blue Hat

Think of the sky and an overview.

Many Six Thinking Hats discussions start with an Initial Blue Hat and end with a Final Blue Hat.

The blue hat is the overview or process control. It is for organizing and controlling the thinking process so that it becomes more productive. The blue hat is for thinking about thinking. In technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition.

At the beginning of a Six Thinking Hats discussion, it is important to identify the topic to be discussed and to decide which hats are going to be used in what order. Because this is Blue Hat thinking, most meetings start with an Initial Blue Hat under which these matters are decided.

At the end of a Six Thinking Hats discussion, it is important to identify what conclusions, if any, have been reached, and to evaluate the quality of the thinking that has occurred, and such things as whether the particular sequence of hats was adequate. Because this is Blue Hat thinking, most Six Thinking Hats discussions end with a Blue Hat specifically for this purpose.

Wearing your blue hat, you might:

• Look not at the subject itself but at the “thinking” about the subject.
• Set the agenda for thinking
• Explore the next step in the thinking, “I suggest we try some green hat thinking to get some new ideas”

Develop a summary, conclusion, or decision.