Because I am an introvert, I am always looking for techniques and fun ways to help me facilitate and manage a room of diverse personalities without having the session devolve into a campy, everyone holding hands, singing kumbaya, love-fest that accomplishes nothing.

I first heard about Six Thinking Hats at some conference, somewhere, where the session leader mentioned using the method to help facilitate brain-storming sessions. Intrigued, I did a bit more research and found some great content on the www.marketingteacher.com website that I have since tweaked and applied to many of the typical Agile ceremonies our doyens conduct when doing coaching.

Six Thinking Hats is a tool for group discussion and group thinking designed by Edward de Bono in 1985. The basic premise is that the human brain often thinks in several distinct ways which can be focused and challenged in a systematic way.

In our thinking, we often try to do too much at the same time:

  • We look at the facts of the matter
  • We try to build a logical argument
  • We may try to come up with new ideas
  • We may even get emotional

When this happens in large groups, conversations often go in all different directions with new tangents spinning up, one after the other, and no one thread ever coming to a logical conclusion. The Six Thinking Hats method forces the group to do one sort of thinking at a time with each colored hat being a metaphor for each type of thinking.

In our coaching sessions, we often introduce Six Hats before conducting our first Strategy, Operations, and Service Delivery Review meetings. We go into more detail about the role of each colored hat, but the gist of each one is noted below.

  • Red Hat (Emotional) – The red hat is for emotions, feelings, hunches, and intuition. The red hat is not interested in facts, but only in people’s feelings.
  • Yellow Hat (Sunshine) – The yellow hat is optimistic and positive when looking forward to the future.
  • Green Hat (Creative) – The green hat is for new ideas, alternatives, new solitons or inventions.
  • Blue Hat (Systematical) – The blue hat gives an overview of our thinking. It represents organization, process, and decisions.
  • Black Hat (Critical) – The black hat is the one that prevents us from making mistakes and doing silly things.
  • White Hat (Factual) – The white hat is neutral, objective, and just wants the facts without any emotional baggage attached.

Then we ask each meeting attendee to, appropriately enough, pick a color out of a hat and then ask them to play that role in the session. Then depending on the meeting, we conduct the session with each hat taking a turn to have their say. Examples of our Strategy and Risk Review meetings are below.

Create your own order and apply it to your own meetings. Have some fun with it while making the meetings productive and focused.