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Penguin Life is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the United States of America by Little, Brown and Company 1985
Revised and updated edition published by First Back Bay 1999
Published in Great Britain by Penguin Books 2000
Copyright © IP Development Corporation, 1992
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover Design: Dan Mogford
Edward de Bono hereby asserts his moral right to be known as the author of this work.
For more information about training in Dr de Bono’s methods, see www.debono.com
ISBN: 978-0-241-33687-8
Preface
1 Introduction
2 Six Hats, Six Colours
3 Using the Hats
The White Hat
4 The White Hat: Facts and Figures
5 White Hat Thinking: Whose Fact Is It?
6 White Hat Thinking: Japanese-Style Input
7 White Hat Thinking: Facts, Truth and Philosophers
8 White Hat Thinking: Who Puts on the Hat?
9 Summary of White Hat Thinking
The Red Hat
10 The Red Hat: Emotions and Feelings
11 Red Hat Thinking: The Place of Emotions in Thinking
12 Red Hat Thinking: Intuition and Hunches
13 Red Hat Thinking: Moment to Moment
14 Red Hat Thinking: The Use of Emotions
15 Red Hat Thinking: The Language of Emotions
16 Summary of Red Hat Thinking
The Black Hat
17 The Black Hat: Cautious and Careful
18 Black Hat Thinking: Content and Process
19 Black Hat Thinking: The Past and the Future
20 Black Hat Thinking: The Problem of Overuse
21 Summary of Black Hat Thinking
The Yellow Hat
22 The Yellow Hat: Speculative-Positive
23 Yellow Hat Thinking: The Positive Spectrum
24 Yellow Hat Thinking: Reasons and Logical Support
25 Yellow Hat Thinking: Constructive Thinking
26 Yellow Hat Thinking: Speculation
27 Yellow Hat Thinking: Relation to Creativity
28 Summary of Yellow Hat Thinking
The Green Hat
29 The Green Hat: Creative Thinking
30 Green Hat Thinking: Lateral Thinking
31 Green Hat Thinking: Movement Instead of Judgement
32 Green Hat Thinking: The Need for Provocation
33 Green Hat Thinking: Alternatives
34 Green Hat Thinking: Personality and Skill
35 Green Hat Thinking: What Happens to the Ideas?
36 Summary of Green Hat Thinking
The Blue Hat
37 The Blue Hat: Control of Thinking
38 Blue Hat Thinking: Focus
39 Blue Hat Thinking: Program Design
40 Blue Hat Thinking: Summaries and Conclusions
41 Blue Hat Thinking: Control and Monitoring
42 Summary of Blue Hat Thinking
43 Benefits of the Six Hats Method
Conclusion
Follow Penguin
The Six Thinking Hats method may well be the most important change in human thinking for the past twenty-three hundred years.
That may seem a rather exaggerated claim but the evidence is beginning to point that way. When this book was first published fourteen years ago, such a claim would have been nonsense. But over the years, the evidence to support it has been steadily accumulating.
A major corporation (ABB) used to spend thirty days on their multinational project team discussions. Using the parallel thinking of the Six Hats method, the discussions now take as little as two days. A researcher from a top IBM laboratory told me that the Six Hats method had reduced meeting times to one quarter of what they had been. Statoil in Norway had a problem with an oil rig that was costing about one hundred thousand dollars a day. A certified trainer, Jens Arup, introduced the Six Hats method and in twelve minutes the problem was solved – and the one-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-day expenditure was reduced to nil. There were two similar law cases: in one case the jury took more than three hours to reach a decision. In the second case, one juror introduced the Six Hats method. A decision was reached in fifteen minutes. In a simple experiment with three hundred senior civil servants, the introduction of the Six Hats method increased thinking productivity by 493 per cent.
Those examples show huge changes. We are normally very happy with productivity increases of 5 or 10 per cent. Here we have changes of 500 per cent and more. Something is happening.
I can report that the Six Hats method is now very widely used around the world. When I first designed the concept I had no idea how rapid the spread would be. The method is simple, robust and effective – which accounts for the very widespread use.
Last year I received two letters on the same day. One letter was from the head of research at Siemens in Germany. Siemens is by far the largest corporation in Europe with close to four hundred thousand employees and a turnover in excess of sixty billion dollars. They now have thirty-seven internal trainers in my methods and every department has a special ‘innovation unit’ based on my methods. In his letter, the head of research told how he had used the Six Hats method with success at a senior research meeting. The second letter was from Simon Batchelor, who had been on an aid mission to Cambodia to help the Khmer villagers drill for water. He found it difficult to get the villagers involved in the process. He had my book Teach Your Child How To Think with him and, from this book, he taught the Six Hats method to the Khmer villagers. They became so enthusiastic that they told him that learning to think was more important than drilling for water.
A few days later I was in Wellington, New Zealand, and the head teacher of Wellesley School (a leading school in New Zealand) told me that he was teaching the method to five-year-olds. (A few months later, the head teacher of Clayfield College in Brisbane told me that they even taught it to four-year-olds.) A week after being in New Zealand I spoke at a major Microsoft marketing meeting in Seattle and introduced the attendees to the parallel thinking of the Six Hats method. The method has been used by NASA, IBM, DuPont, NTT (Japan), Shell, BP, Statoil (Norway), Marzotto (Italy), and Federal Express, among many others. This shows the remarkable adaptability of the Six Hats method: it can be taught with equal success to top-level executives and to pre-school children.
Thinking is the ultimate human resource. Yet we can never be satisfied with our most important skill. No matter how good we become, we should always want to be better. Usually, the only people who are very satisfied with their thinking skill are those poor thinkers who believe that the purpose of thinking is to prove yourself right – to your own satisfaction. If we have only a limited view of what thinking can do, we may be smug about our excellence in this area, but not otherwise.
The main difficulty of thinking is confusion. We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls.
What I am putting forward in this book is a very simple concept which allows a thinker to do one thing at a time. He or she becomes able to separate emotion from logic, creativity from information, and so on. The concept is that of the six thinking hats. Putting on any one of these hats defines a certain type of thinking. In the book I describe the nature and contribution of each type of thinking.
The six thinking hats allow us to conduct our thinking as a conductor might lead an orchestra. We can call forth what we will. Similarly, in any meeting it is very useful to switch people out of their usual track in order to get them to think differently about the matter in hand.
It is the sheer convenience of the six thinking hats that is the main value of the concept.
I am writing this special note because a few people have misinterpreted the black hat and have somehow regarded it as a bad hat. On the contrary, the black hat is the most valuable of all the hats and certainly the most used. Using the black hat means being careful and cautious. The black hat points out difficulties, dangers and potential problems. With the black hat you avoid danger to yourself, to others and to the community. It is under the black hat that you point out possible dangers.
For the most part, the thrust of Western thinking has been the ‘black hat’ with an emphasis on critical thinking and caution. It prevents mistakes, excesses and nonsenses.
Today, there is a huge amount of experience using the Six Hats method. This was not the case when I first wrote the book. The method can therefore be introduced with confidence. It is no longer a matter of trying out something new and exotic. It is now a matter of catching up with a powerful thinking method that has been in use for fourteen years across all ages, cultures and abilities.
People are sometimes hesitant about the hats and colours because they do not seem serious or complicated enough (some people love complexity). In practice, the simplicity has never been a problem. People realize they need the hats and colours as simple mental hooks. Hats and colours are much easier to remember than are complicated psychological terms.
This revised and updated edition is based on my experience using and working with the Six Hats method. Over the years it has become apparent that the method is both powerful and easy to use. The effectiveness of the method is much greater than I had ever imagined. It is an alternative to the argument system, which was never intended to be constructive or creative. With the Six Hats method the emphasis is on ‘what can be’ rather than just on ‘what is’, and on how we design a way forward – not on who is right and who is wrong.
Think of paper. Think of a computer printout. The white hat is about information. When the white hat is in use, everyone focuses directly and exclusively on information.
What information do we have?
What information do we need?
What information is missing?
What questions do we need to ask?
How are we going to get the information we need?
The information can range from hard facts and figures that can be checked to soft information like opinions and feelings. If you express your own feeling, that is red hat, but if you report on someone else expressing a feeling, that is white hat.
When two offered pieces of information disagree, there is no argument on that point. Both pieces of information are put down in parallel. Only if it becomes essential to choose between them will the choice be made.
The white hat is usually used towards the beginning of a thinking session as a background for the thinking that is going to take place. The white hat also can be used towards the end of the session as a sort of assessment: Do our proposals fit in with the existing information?
The white hat is neutral. The white hat reports on the world. The white hat is not for generating ideas though it is permissible to report on ideas that are in use or have been suggested.
A very important part of the white hat is to define the information that is missing and needed. The white hat defines the questions that should be asked. The white hat lays out the means (such as surveys and questionnaires) for obtaining the needed information.
White hat energy is directed at seeking out and laying out information.