Edward de Bono’s book, Six Thinking Hats, suggests that the application of role-playing can make you and your project team better thinkers. His Six Thinking Hats process provides a way to integrate role-playing with discussion, creative thinking, problem solving, and decision making. By applying de Bono’s six colored hats, each of which represents a different role, project teams can reach a higher level of communication, understanding, and consensus.
de Bono’s role-playing structure uses six different hats, each of which represents a different perspective or thinking process:
White hat
- Neutral and objective
- Focuses on facts and figures
- Has no concern for emotions
- Wants the facts and only the facts
- Takes a very scientific approach to the thinking process
Red hat
- Takes the emotional view
- Feels no need to justify feelings or establish a logical basis for them
Black hat
- Careful and cautious
- Considers all potential risks, obstacles, or concerns with the intent of drawing attention to them in order to protect those involved
- Has good intentions for being the “devil’s advocate”
Yellow hat
- Sunny and positive
- Focuses on the benefits without any consideration for risks
Green hat
- Associated with creativity and new ideas
- Focuses on ingenuity
- The ultimate lateral thinker, with no concern for cost or risk
- Focuses on “What can we do?” rather than “What are our limitations or what might go wrong?”
Blue hat
- The organizing hat
- Focused thinker concerned with organizing everything from the thinking process itself to the next steps of the initiative, project, or problem analysis
- If we want organized structure, we need a blue-hat thinker
How to Apply the Six Thinking Hats Process
In a project team meeting, the project leader requests the team members to role play a chosen hat. By mentally switching gears from one hat to another, the team members are forced to leave their own perspectives behind.
Each team member can wear a single hat, different from the other members. They can wear multiple hats at the same time as other members. Or the entire group can choose to wear the same hat at the same time in order to see things from the same perspective.
This forces the team members to constructively, objectively, or even emotionally look at the situation under review from alternate perspectives. The goal is to force individuals to reach outside their limited perspective and better appreciate alternate views. It is a more holistic way of thinking.
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