This is a well known method of enhancing team communication created by Edward De Bono. It fosters collaboration, creativity and innovation. There are six metaphorical hats. You ‘put on’ or ‘take off’ one of these hats to indicate the type of thinking being used. ‘Putting them on’ and ‘taking them off’ is essential: you must all be wearing the same hat at the same time. The hats must never be used to categorize people, even though their behavior may seem to invite this.
The Red Hat:
This covers intuition, feelings and emotions.
The red hat allows the thinker to put forward an intuition without any need to justify it.
The red hat gives full permission to a thinker to put forward his or her feelings on the subject at the moment.
The Yellow Hat:
This is the logical positive— why something will work and why it will offer benefits. It can be used in looking forward to the results of some proposed action, but can also be used to find something of value in what has already happened.
The Green Hat:
This is the creative mode of thinking, green represents growth and movement. In the green hat we look for new ideas and solutions. lateral thinking wears a green hat.
The Blue Hat:
This is the overview or process control hat. It looks not at the subject itself but at the 'thinking' about the subject. 'Putting on my blue hat, I think we should do some more
green hat thinking.'
green hat thinking.'
The White Hat:
The information seeking hat. This covers facts, figures, information needs and gaps. ‘I think we need some white hat thinking at this point...’ means ‘Let's drop the arguments and suggestions and look
at the data.’
at the data.’
The Black Hat:
This is the hat of judgement and caution. It is a most valuable hat. It is not in any sense an inferior or negative hat. The black hat is used to point out why a suggestion does not fit the facts, the available experience, the system in use, or the path that is being followed. The black hat must always be logical.
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