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Six Thinking Hats

The six thinking hats look at one decision from separate stances, including facts, feelings, caution, and creativity, instead of mixing them into one argument.

The questionCan the group look at this decision from one stance at a time, instead of arguing from six different ones at once?

De Bono called the wider approach parallel thinking.

Process · Edward de Bono, 1985

White Facts, claims, and what is missing
Red Feelings and hunches, kept short
Black Caution, risks, and thin evidence
Yellow Value and the conditions it works under
Green New options, collected without judging
Blue Control of the process and next steps

Schematic of the six hats and what each one is for, using common hat colors.

When to use it

A meeting keeps turning into a debate between the person who is worried and the person who is excited, and neither is hearing the other.
A group decision involves mixed seniority, and junior people are not speaking until the senior people have.
A proposal has had one kind of review, usually financial, and nobody has written down its benefits or its risks.
You need a short, repeatable structure for a group decision in an hour or less.

When to avoid it

The disagreement is about values or power, not about the mode of thinking. The hats will not settle it. Negotiate it, or escalate it.
The decision needs analysis the hats do not supply, such as a forecast or a cost model. The hats organize a discussion and calculate nothing.
The client will read the exercise as a game. With senior people who dislike role play, a plain agenda of facts, risks, benefits, and options does the same job without the vocabulary.
The group is two people who already listen to each other.

Overview

Six Thinking Hats gives a group six named stances to take one at a time: facts, feelings, caution, benefits, new options, and control of the process. Everyone looks the same way at the same moment, which replaces the usual pattern in which each person argues from a different stance. It supports a group decision or review that has stalled in debate.

It organizes a discussion and adds no analysis of its own. The evidence for it is mostly practitioner accounts, and a published review of de Bono’s thinking tools found little research support for general gains in thinking. Treat it as a meeting technique, which is where it is most useful.

The hats

White

Facts and information. What is known, what is only claimed, and what is missing and how to get it. Opinions presented as facts are moved to another hat.

Red

Feelings, hunches, and reactions, given without a need to justify them. It is kept short so that it stays a gut reaction and does not turn into an argument.

Black

Caution. What could go wrong, what does not fit, and where the evidence is thin. It is judgment aimed at the proposal, and it is useful when the problems are stated so they can be fixed or priced.

Yellow

Value and benefit. What is good about the idea and under what conditions it works. It is a search for reasons, not cheerleading.

Green

New options, alternatives, and modifications. Ideas are collected without judging them yet, including ones that are probably unworkable, because they can lead to ones that are not.

Blue

Control of the process. The blue hat sets the agenda, chooses the sequence, keeps the group on the current hat, summarizes, and decides what happens next. Sessions normally open and close with it.

What it is not

A personality test. The hats are stances the whole group takes for a few minutes, not types of people. Telling someone they are "always black hat" defeats the purpose.
A fixed sequence. The order depends on the purpose. A group that disagrees about facts starts with white, and a group short of options starts with green.
A method with strong research behind it. The support is mostly practitioner accounts, and a 2006 review of de Bono's thinking tools found sparse research evidence for general improvements in thinking.

The steps

Name the decision and choose a sequence

Write the decision in one sentence. Pick an order by purpose. Start with white if facts are in dispute, put green early if options are thin, and put black and yellow after options exist. Give each hat a time limit. What comes out is a written agenda with minutes per hat.
Open with white to build a shared fact base

List what is known, what is claimed, and what is missing. Separate facts from opinion on the board, and assign owners to the gaps. Groups often find at this step that the argument was partly about missing numbers. What comes out is a fact list and a gap list.
Run the remaining hats one at a time

Everyone takes the same hat at the same moment. Capture contributions on a flip chart, one sheet per hat. When someone argues from another hat, name it and set it aside until its turn. What comes out is a separate list for each of the stances.
Keep the red hat short

Go around the room and ask each person for a reaction to the options, with no reasons required. A dot vote works. This surfaces objections people have not said aloud, such as a concern about how a decision is announced or who it affects. What comes out is a reading of the room's feelings.
Close with blue

Summarize what the lists say about each option, decide what the group will decide now and what needs more work, and assign owners and dates. The person running the blue hat should not also be the person who owns the decision. What comes out is a decision or a defined next step.

In practice

Forty minutes into the meeting on whether to close the second distribution center, the CFO and the head of operations were making the same two points to each other for the third time. The consultant asked for ten minutes, wrote six colors on the whiteboard, and proposed a fifty-minute sequence: white, green, yellow, black, red, and a closing blue. Both of them agreed, mainly because it would end the repetition.

The white hat settled a question that had not been asked: nobody in the room had the lease exit cost. Green produced two options besides close or keep, which were consolidating shifts and subletting half the floor. Black on the sublet option raised a customer service contract with a floor-space clause. Red showed that the operations head was less opposed to the closure than to how it would be announced. The group left without a decision, with three options, a missing number with an owner, and a date to decide.

What you leave with

A fact base with the gaps named and an owner for each.
Options the group had not listed before the session, if the green hat produced any.
Separate lists of benefits and risks for each option, written down before anyone argued about them.
A record of gut reactions, including objections people had not voiced.
A decision, or a named next step with an owner and a date.

Failure points

Hats as costumes

A facilitator insists on literal hats with senior clients who find it patronizing. Attendance continues and engagement drops. The method works through the discipline of one stance at a time, and the props are optional.

Black hat takes over

Criticism comes naturally to most groups, so the session ends with a long list of risks and a thin list of benefits. Time-box the black hat and run yellow and green before it.

Hats assigned to people

Someone becomes the permanent black hat, and the group stops hearing them. Everyone should take every hat in turn.

The facilitator owns the decision

When the person running the blue hat is also the sponsor, they steer the sequence toward a conclusion they already hold. Use a separate facilitator, or agree the sequence before the sponsor sees the options.

Skipping white

Opinions stand in for facts, and the later hats debate positions the data could have settled. A typical sign is a number quoted from memory by three people, each slightly different.

The failures above are usually Presence: the framework was sound, but the attention of the stakeholders was not held.

Origin

Edward de Bono, the Maltese-born writer who also coined the term lateral thinking, published Six Thinking Hats in 1985. The hat metaphor appeared earlier. De Bono used an imaginary hat as a symbol for a thinking direction as far back as his 1971 book Lateral Thinking for Management, and a related set of tools appeared in his 1973 CoRT thinking program for schools.

Six Thinking Hats is a registered trademark, and official training is licensed through the De Bono Group and its franchisees. The colors and roles are widely taught in adapted form. This note describes the hats in its own words and does not reproduce the official course materials, which are proprietary.