Six Thinking Hats

Why? 

What is your instinctive approach to decision making? If you're naturally optimistic, then chances are you don't always consider potential downsides. Similarly, if you're very cautious or have a risk-averse outlook, you might not focus on opportunities that could open up.  Often, the best decisions come from changing the way that you think.  

Six Thinking Hats can help you structure thinking and conversations, creating meaningful, focused discussions that remove the “groundhog day” factor in meetings. It can create permission for people to intentionally take a different viewpoint, and can inject energy and humour.

How? 

Each "Thinking Hat" is a different style of thinking: 

White Hat

With this thinking hat, you focus on the available data. Look at the information that you have, analyse past trends, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and try to either fill them or take account of them. 

Red Hat

"Wearing" the Red Hat, you look at problems using your intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also, think how others could react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning. 

Black Hat

Using Black Hat thinking, look at a decision's potentially negative outcomes. Look at it cautiously and defensively. Try to see why it might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan. It allows you to eliminate them, alter them, or prepare contingency plans to counter them. 
 
Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans "tougher" and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. It's one of the real benefits of this model, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that they often cannot see problems in advance. This leaves them under-prepared for difficulties. 

Yellow Hat

This hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it. Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult. 

Green Hat

The Green Hat represents creativity. This is where you develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. (You can explore a range of  creativity tools to help you.) 

Blue Hat

This hat represents process control. It's the hat worn by people chairing meetings, for example. When facing 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. 

When combined with Catalytic Questioning, this could significantly boost your creative problem solving and decision making prowess!