1-Page Summary

Six Thinking Hats is a handbook for training people to think more efficiently and productively, using the metaphor of wearing different hats for different types of thinking. Since the book’s original publication, many institutions have implemented it with great success, particularly in business and educational contexts. Author Edward de Bono is a Maltese doctor and psychologist. He’s credited with coining the term “lateral thinking,” and he’s also known for advocating more teaching of thinking skills in schools.

Six Thinking Hats was originally published in 1985. This guide refers to the revised and updated version published in 2017.

The Six Hats

De Bono’s six hats represent the following types of thinking:

When you face an important decision, the hats can help you compartmentalize and organize your thinking. In group discussions, the hats help to keep things clear and orderly, as well as making sure that no important ideas are neglected.

The six thinking hats allow you to pull apart the tangle of normal thinking and sort it into six self-contained strands. Because you keep the strands separate right from the beginning, you can weave them together in a more deliberate and systematic way. This improves the efficiency of the thinking process.

Thinking as Exploration

Our traditional view of advanced thinking is debate: the refinement of ideas through argument and confrontation. The Six Hats method asks you to see thinking as mental exploration in a particular direction. In the physical world, you can always check a compass and then deliberately choose to walk to the north, south, east, or west. Think of the six hats as mental compass points. At any point, you can stop and consciously decide on the best course.

sixhatscompass.png

Trying to walk north and south at the same time would be pointless and exhausting for your physical body. Similarly, your brain works best when it can focus on one type of thinking at a time. If it’s looking for danger, let it look for danger uninterrupted. If it’s creatively breaking existing patterns to make new ones, let it do that.

Conducting a systematic mental exploration of the problem allows you to draw a detailed map of the context for any decision you need to make. With this detailed map in hand, your decisions will be so thoroughly considered that the best route will become obvious.

Why Hats?

The Blue Hat

The blue hat is the master hat. Blue hat thinking is metacognition, or thinking about thinking. The master hat is the same color as the sky, to symbolize the bird’s-eye view you’re taking of the process when you’re wearing this hat. The blue hat determines what exactly you’re trying to achieve and how you’ll go about doing it. It also monitors the discussion to make sure everything stays on track.

For simplicity, usually the chair of the meeting wears the blue hat for the whole meeting—however participants can also don their blue hats to offer procedural suggestions.

Blue hat data includes planning documents such as agendas, checklists, calendars, and Gantt (project tracking) charts. It also includes final outputs such as reports and overviews. Blue hat contributions include procedural suggestions, comments on the progress of the discussion, and suggestions for next steps.

In the blue hat role, asking questions is a powerful way to focus attention. Questions often result in more open-ended, independent thinking than directives. For best results, mix specific, targeted questions with more general, open questions.

How to Use the Blue Hat

The White Hat

The white hat is the neutral hat. White hat thinking is the gathering of relevant factual information. The white hat considers what you know about the situation, how reliable this information is, what you don’t yet know, and how you’ll find the missing information. Avoid interpreting data while wearing this hat. Words like “because” and “so” belong to the yellow and black hats.

When you wear the white hat, you think about objective data. Emotions, judgments, and interpretations are quiet. Think of a white sheet of paper ready to be filled with information. This is the white hat.

White hat data usually takes the form of facts and figures: sales figures, financial information, objective facts. These should be as specific as possible, and ideally should include a date (for example, polling data used for a political campaign should be clearly labeled with the date).

White hat data also includes the reported opinions and feelings of people not at the meeting, if they’re relevant.

How to Use the White Hat

The Red Hat

The red hat is the emotional hat. Red hat thinking is pure emotion. Red is the color of blood, symbolizing strong emotions like passion and anger. Under the red hat, you reflect on exactly how you feel about a person or situation.

The red hat is the opposite of the white hat. The white hat wants pure facts, stripped of emotion and agenda. The red hat wants your emotions, intuitions, and gut feelings about the issue, with no need for supporting evidence or explanations.

Examples of red hat contributions are:

Red hat data includes emotions, intuitions, and gut feelings. Emotions are necessary for proper thinking, and they play an important role in any decision. In fact, any final decision needs to feel good as well as being intellectually justifiable. Suppressing emotions just makes them pop up again cloaked in rationality. The red hat allows people to express their emotions fully and honestly, without needing any justification or rationalization. Intuitions are quick assessments of a situation that you can make based on significant previous experience. Gut feelings are premonitions you have about the outcome of a situation (for example, “You know, I just can’t see this ending well for anybody.”)

How to Use the Red Hat

The Black Hat

The black hat is the critiquing hat. Black hat thinking looks for problems and logical flaws. The black hat is focused on survival—it’s the hat that looks out for danger and keeps us alive. Black hat thinking kept our ancestors from being eaten by predators or falling off cliffs. Being sensitized to danger is a crucial part of our neurochemistry and serves a valuable purpose. The black hat considers the questions: “What’s wrong with this picture?”, “What’s the worst possible outcome?”, and “What are the risks?” Specifically, the black hat asks: “Has this type of thing failed before? If so, why?”

Current education systems, especially at post-secondary level, teach and reward critical thinking, so it’s no surprise that many people are experts with the black hat. They excel at finding problems everywhere and pointing out logical flaws. This is useful and important, because black hat thinking keeps us from making irreparable mistakes. But too much of the black hat can stunt our thinking under other hats, especially yellow and green.

The black hat gets misused in two main ways.

  1. People who are black hat thinkers by default often have great difficulty switching off the criticism when it’s time to work with the other hats. This can mean that new ideas get squashed before they have time to grow, or that a proposal is thrown out entirely rather than examined for its potential strengths.
  2. Black hat thinking can easily become tied to ego. Using the black hat to feel smarter than others is a common abuse of the black hat. Before making a black hat contribution, stop and ask yourself: “Is this genuinely helpful, or am I just saying it to make myself look good?”

How to Use the Black Hat

The Yellow Hat

The yellow hat is the constructive hat. Yellow hat thinking is positive and concrete. You can remember this easily: Builders often wear yellow hardhats when working on new buildings, and yellow is the color of sunny optimism. Under the yellow hat, you find ways to be optimistic. You search for value. You ask: “What’s the silver lining?” and “How can I make this work?”

Like black hat data, yellow hat data is based on logic. Under both the black and the yellow hats, you’re considering ideas in light of your and other people’s past experiences. But this time, instead of thinking about everything that’s gone wrong in the past, you’re thinking about what’s worked.

Yellow hat contributions are about improvement. Proposals are classic yellow hat contributions. The yellow hat is concerned with generating proposals, finding sound reasons why proposals are likely to work, and developing strong proposals further.

Simple, obvious suggestions are just as valuable as revolutionary ones. In fact, you may choose to save this type of serious out-of-the-box thinking for the green hat.

How to Use the Yellow Hat

The Green Hat

The green hat is the creative hat. Green is the color of new growth, and green hat thinking looks for new and original ideas. Though the attitudes that drive green hat and yellow hat thinking are quite similar (a sense of possibility; a desire to build rather than break down), the thinking styles involved are qualitatively different. For example, you might know someone who is very optimistic but quite conventional in their ideas. You might also know someone who is highly creative but not very optimistic. This is why we consider the green hat and the yellow hat separately in practice.

The green hat asks, “How can I look at this problem differently?” and “Where does this new idea take me? When you put on the green hat, you’re coming up with combinations of ideas that, as far as you know, nobody has ever considered before.

Po and the Stone That Jolts the Wheel out of the Rut

Green hat thinking is about jolting yourself out of your normal thinking patterns. Think of a horse-drawn carriage being driven along a dirt track. Though the whole path is available to the carriage, it quickly settles into the ruts left by previous carriages. The wheels will stay in the ruts until they’re jolted out, either through an input of deliberate energy from the driver and horses or by an obstacle such as a stone.

Similarly, thinking will tend to follow normal, well-traveled pathways unless something gets put in the road. A provocation is a mental stone in the rut of normal thinking. A provocation might be something like “People should be paid to have pets” or “A manager’s subordinates should decide whether or not she gets promoted.”

Po, standing for “provocative operation,” is a word you can use to signpost a provocation. The deal is that you’re not allowed to meet a po with a black hat—you have to run with the suggestion. Here are some examples of po:

How to Use the Green Hat

Introduction

Six Thinking Hats is a handbook for training people to think more efficiently and productively, using the metaphor of wearing different types of hats for different types of thinking. Since the book’s original publication, many institutions have implemented it with great success, particularly in business and educational contexts. Author Edward de Bono is a Maltese doctor and psychologist. He’s credited with coining the term “lateral thinking,” and he’s also known for advocating more teaching of thinking skills in schools.

Six Thinking Hats was originally published in 1985. This guide refers to the revised and updated version published in 2017.

Meet the Six Hats

De Bono’s six hats represent the following types of thinking:

When you face an important decision, the hats can help you compartmentalize and organize your thinking. In group discussions, the hats help to keep things clear and orderly, as well as making sure that no important ideas are neglected.

Why We Need to Develop Specific Thinking Skills

The six types of thinking presented through the six hats aren’t radically new or different from the thinking you already do, but the hats system is more efficient. When presented with a problem, you already think about the information you have, your feelings about the problem, drawbacks and risks, potential novel solutions, and so on. But you probably do this in a fairly haphazard way.

The six thinking hats allow you to pull apart the tangle of normal thinking and sort it into six self-contained strands. Because you keep the strands separate right from the beginning, you can weave them together in a much more deliberate and systematic way. This improves the efficiency of the thinking process. It also transforms thinking into a collaborative effort rather than an argument, which results in more harmonious meetings, more consensus, and better-considered outcomes.

Today’s schools are good at teaching content. But most fail at something more basic: teaching children how to think. Most children learn thinking skills indirectly, via examples that prioritize debate and argumentation.

Our Western intellectual tradition is essentially dialogic in nature. It dates back to the ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) who codified a thinking style based on debate, questioning, and intellectual combat. Under this tradition, each person presents their ideas as completely as possible, and then another person clarifies and refines them through criticism and argument. We usually experience this dynamic in a confrontational way: If you have an idea, you present it as completely as possible. Then you defend it while other people attack it from different angles. You can think of this as the “marble statue” approach: Start with a complete block of marble and chip away at it until you have what you need.

Because our culture has been steeped in this tradition for thousands of years, it’s invisible. To us it just feels like normal thinking. But what happens when we use a different metaphor to think about thinking? What if the statue is made out of clay or sand rather than marble—so instead of carving off what you don’t need, you’re starting with nothing and gradually building? Or what if thinking is a journey that you go on with friends?

Thinking as Exploration

The Six Hats method asks you to drop the idea that thinking is combat. Instead, see it as mental exploration in a particular direction. In the physical world, you can always check a compass and then choose to walk to the north, south, east, or west. The six hats work in the same way. Think of them as mental compass points. At any point, you can stop and consciously decide on the best course. With each step you take, you’re charting the terrain of the decision you’re currently facing.

sixhatscompass.png

Trying to walk north and south at the same time would be pointless and exhausting for your physical body. Similarly, trying to engage in two or more types of thinking at once is inefficient and exhausting for your mind. Your brain works best when it can focus on one type of thinking at a time. If it’s looking for danger, let it look for danger uninterrupted. If it’s creatively breaking existing patterns to make new ones, let it do that. Our normal, untrained thinking is usually a poorly controlled jumble of different types of thinking, and we often rely on pure luck to stumble with solutions.

Think of a drunk person stumbling around an area randomly looking for gold. Now think of an explorer with a compass, systematically walking through the area and sketching out a map as she goes. Who’s more likely to find the gold?

Conducting a systematic mental exploration of the problem allows you to draw a detailed map of the context for any decision you need to make. With this detailed map in hand, your decisions will be so thoroughly considered that the best route will become obvious.

Why Hats?

One of the reasons that de Bono selected hats as metaphors for this new thinking method was the pre-existing association between thinking and hats. He simply took the phrase “put your thinking cap on” and diversified it. But the hat metaphor is helpful for other reasons. For example, a hat is something that’s easy to put on and take off. This mirrors the six different thinking styles, which you can ideally call upon in a flexible and relatively effortless manner.

Hats are also visually obvious. If someone else is wearing a hat, you’ll notice. This signposting function is important in the Six Hats method because you want your current thinking direction to be clear to everyone, including to yourself. By putting on your metaphorical hat, you’re signposting the direction that your thoughts will take.

Another basic feature of hats is that they’re temporary. You put hats on and then take them off, and who you are doesn’t change fundamentally in the process. In the Six Hats system, there are no thinking specialists, no “yellow hat people” or “black hat people.” (The only exception is the blue hat role, which is usually executed by one person at a time—more on this in Chapter 2.) You may have a natural tendency toward one or more of the hats, and that’s fine. But changing hats constantly keeps you from getting stuck. The temporary nature of the hats can be liberating for those who always find themselves cast in the same role in meetings, perhaps as “the creative one” or “the wet blanket.”

On an individual level, the method builds cognitive flexibility. Instead of taking pride in their ability to critique an idea, or in their ability to find and synthesize relevant information, people instead learn to be proud of their versatility. Consider an actor who always dresses up in the same costume and plays the same role. Now consider an actor who can don wildly different costumes and excel in a variety of roles. Which actor do you admire more?

Using the Hats Effectively in a Group

In a meeting or group discussion, a good strategy is to ask everyone to put on each hat for a given time period. The facilitator can do this through statements such as the following:

Individuals can also invoke the hats in free discussion. For example:

Guide Structure

In Chapters 1-6, we’ll discuss each hat in turn: blue (Chapter 1), white (Chapter 2), red (Chapter 3), black (Chapter 4), yellow (Chapter 5), and green (Chapter 6). Each of these chapters starts with a general introduction to each hat and a few questions you can use to guide your thinking in that direction. After that, you’ll find a description of the types of data that fit under each hat. The next section clarifies potential points of confusion that might arise when using the hat. The last section of each chapter gives some advice on how to use the hat, divided into tips for individuals or group members and tips for facilitators.

Chapter 1: The Blue Hat

The blue hat is the master hat. Blue hat thinking is metacognition, or thinking about thinking. The master hat is the same color as the sky, to symbolize the bird’s-eye view you’re taking of the process when you’re wearing this hat.

For simplicity, usually the chair of the meeting wears the blue hat for the whole meeting—however participants can also don their blue hats to offer procedural suggestions. The blue hat designs the process, determines the agenda, and monitors the success of the discussion. The blue hat wearer is like an air traffic controller, orchestrating the contributions of the group so that they’re offered and received as smoothly and safely as possible.

The blue hat serves different functions at different stages of the process. Before the discussion, the blue hat offers plans, agendas, and a clear focus. During the discussion, the blue hat prompts and monitors contributions to make sure that everyone is on track. After the discussion, the blue hat collects the outputs and compiles them into a report, executive summary, or other communication.

Blue Hat Questions

While wearing the blue hat, consider these questions:

Blue Hat Data

Blue hat data includes planning documents such as agendas, checklists, calendars, and Gantt (project tracking) charts. It also includes final outputs such as reports and overviews.

Blue hat contributions include procedural suggestions, comments on the progress of the discussion, and suggestions for next steps.

Key Blue Hat Concepts

Attention and Focus

The blue hat monitors where people’s attention is going in a discussion. Are they clearly focused on the task at hand? Are their contributions appropriate to the hat that’s currently in focus? For example, if you’re currently all supposed to be wearing the white hat and someone offers a stinging critique, the blue hat wearer suggests that they hold this criticism until it’s time for the black hat.

“Focus” doesn’t mean that the meeting has to have only one goal. There can be multiple focuses, as long as everyone present is clear on what these are. An effective method is to frame the discussion with one broad objective and several more specific sub-objectives. For example, a meeting could have the broad objective of finding ways to increase customer satisfaction. Sub-objectives could be improving the company website and enhancing customer service in-store. The blue hat role manages the interplay among these three objectives, providing both the freedom to generate creative ideas on a general level and the discipline to stay with the sub-objectives long enough to workshop some specific, useful, practical ideas in these areas.

Probing and Targeting Questions

Asking questions is a powerful way to focus attention. Questions often result in more open-ended, independent thinking than directives do. Consider the following instructions:

The second instruction carries a sense of freedom and potential that the first doesn’t. There’s nothing wrong with direct orders—they might even be preferable in some circumstances—but they prompt a different type of thinking than questions do. Blue hat expertise is knowing when it’s best to ask questions.

Blue hat wearers also need to be clear on the type of questions they’re asking. There are two main types of questions: Probing questions and targeting questions. Probing questions are open. As in fishing, you put your bait on a hook, drop it in the water, and see what shows up (if anything). Targeting questions set up a specific target and aim at it. Targeting questions are usually questions with yes or no answers, questions that have objectively verifiable answers, or questions that set up a few different alternatives and try to identify which is correct.

Examples of probing questions are:

Examples of targeting questions are:

Breaking Down Problems

Most problem-solving meetings start with a large, amorphous problem. To discuss this problem properly, it helps to break down the high-level problem into small pieces that can be solved more easily. The blue hat wearer decides exactly which sub-problems will be addressed and in which order.

Examples of sub-problems might be:

It’s also the job of the blue hat to acknowledge when little progress has been made on a sub-problem. The blue hat wearer should acknowledge this openly (“OK, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere on this and I’d like to move on”) and decide whether to continue or to shelve the issue temporarily or permanently.

How to Use the Blue Hat

General Advice

Advice for Facilitators

Exercise: Try on the Blue Hat

Create a draft meeting agenda or thinking plan based on the six hats.

Chapter 2: The White Hat

The white hat is the neutral hat. White hat thinking is the gathering of relevant factual information.

When you wear the white hat, you think about objective data. Emotions, judgments, and interpretations are quiet. Think of a white sheet of paper ready to be filled with information. This is the white hat.

White Hat Questions

While you’re wearing the white hat, consider these questions:

White Hat Data

White Hat data usually takes the form of facts and figures: sales figures, financial information, objective facts. Be as specific as possible:

White Hat data also includes the reported opinions and feelings of people not at the meeting, if they’re relevant. These can be things you’ve read (“Economics expert Dr Julie Bloggs believes that interest rates will fall this year”) or opinions that were directly expressed to you (“My client Ms. Chan said that she’s thinking of finding another law firm with better customer service.”) You can include anecdotes under the white hat, but make sure they’re labeled clearly as such.

Avoid interpreting data while wearing this hat. Words like “because” and “so” belong to the yellow and black hats.

Key White Hat Concepts

Facts: Accuracy and Probability

Accuracy

There are facts you’re completely sure of, facts you’re pretty sure of, and facts that you think might be correct. All of these are admissible under the white hat, as long as you label them correctly.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s classify white hat facts into two categories: Level 1 (certain, independently verified) and Level 2 (needs verification). Feel free to propose as many Level 2 facts as you like. But if you’re going to make a decision based on a Level 2 fact, make sure to verify it and take it to Level 1 first.

Probability

Truth is a philosophical question. It has to do with logic and mathematical proof. For example, if you go through your whole life only seeing orange carrots, you might believe the following statement to be true: “All carrots are orange.” But the moment you see a white or purple carrot, you have to acknowledge that this statement has been false all along.

If you’re thinking only in terms of black-and-white logic, you have to throw out the “All carrots are orange” statement completely. But Six Hats deals with practical thinking, not mathematical logic. If we waited to be absolutely sure in logical terms, we’d be waiting lifetimes, and Six Hats is about getting fast, practical results. In practical terms, it is useful to know that the vast majority of the carrots that you’ll encounter in your life (depending on the country you live in, of course) are orange.

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s also useful to know about rare exceptions (the purple carrot). For example, if you’re developing or prescribing a medication, you need to know about any rare but serious side effects.

We can depict uncertainty as a continuum:

It’s completely fine—even encouraged—to include uncertain information and rare exceptions. But remember to annotate any white hat contributions with this information.

How to Use the White Hat

General Advice

Advice for Facilitators

Exercise: Try on the White Hat

Work with the white hat on a problem of your choice.

Chapter 3: The Red Hat

The red hat is the emotional hat. Red hat thinking is pure emotion. Red is the color of blood, symbolizing strong emotions like passion and anger.

The red hat is the opposite of the white hat. The white hat wants pure facts, stripped of emotion and agenda. The red hat wants your emotions, intuitions, and gut feelings about the issue, with no need for supporting evidence or explanations.

Red Hat Questions

While you’re wearing the red hat, consider these questions:

Red Hat Data

Red hat contributions are simple statements of emotion. They don’t have to be justified or justifiable—in fact, while wearing the red hat you’re specifically discouraged from providing explanations.

Examples of red hat contributions are:

Key Red Hat Concepts

Red hat data includes emotions, intuitions, and gut feelings.

Emotions

Feelings are extraordinarily diverse in terms of intensity, quality, and duration. All are welcome under the red hat. It’s common to disparage emotions in the workplace, but in reality emotions are necessary for proper thinking, and they play an important role in any decision. In fact, any final decision needs to feel good as well as being intellectually justifiable.

Suppressing emotions just makes them pop up again cloaked in rationality. The red hat allows people to express their emotions fully and honestly, without needing any justification or rationalization. A bonus is that after people have been given the opportunity to express their feelings, it’s often easier for them to set aside these emotions and engage in other types of thinking.

Intuitions

The word “intuition” can be misleading, as we use it to refer to two different things:

  1. A flash of inspiration. This might completely change your perception of a problem you’re working on, or offer a solution that was right in front of your eyes the whole time.
  2. A quick assessment of a situation based on significant previous experience.

Red hat intuition is the second type: What do you feel about this situation, if you look at it through the lens of your accumulated previous experiences? The first type of intuition belongs under the green hat, where you’re looking at established mental patterns and figuring out how to break them.

Gut Feelings

Gut feelings are premonitions you have about the outcome of a situation (for example, “You know, I just can’t see this ending well for anybody.”) Some gut feelings have obvious explanations, while others are more mysterious.

Most people aren’t very good at working with gut feelings. They either let the feeling determine the decision, using one-sided white hat information and either yellow or black hat analysis to support the feeling, or they repress the gut feeling and attempt to proceed using logic only. Neither of these approaches is ideal. Under the red hat, people’s hunches and gut feelings form an important part—but only one part—of the overall picture that will be used to determine the path forward.

How to Use the Red Hat

General Advice

Advice for Facilitators

Exercise: Try on the Red Hat

Work with the red hat on a problem of your choice.

Chapter 4: The Black Hat

The black hat is the critiquing hat. Black hat thinking looks for problems and logical flaws. The black hat is focused on survival—it’s the hat that looks out for danger and keeps us alive. Black hat thinking kept our ancestors from being eaten by predators or falling off cliffs. Being sensitized to danger is a crucial part of our neurochemistry and serves a valuable purpose.

Current education systems, especially at post-secondary level, teach and reward critical thinking, so it’s no surprise that many people are experts with the black hat. They excel in finding problems everywhere and pointing out logical flaws. This is useful and important, because black hat thinking keeps us from making irreparable mistakes. But too much of the black hat can stunt our thinking under other hats, especially yellow and green.

People can misuse the black hat in two ways:

  1. Those who are black hat thinkers by default often have great difficulty switching off the criticism when it’s time to work with the other hats. This can mean that new ideas get squashed before they have time to grow, or that a proposal is thrown out entirely rather than examined for its potential strengths.
  2. Black hat thinking can easily become tied to ego. Using the black hat to feel smarter than others is a common abuse of the black hat. It’s important to shelve these motivations as much as possible and remember that black hat thinking serves a larger purpose than ego gratification. Before making a black hat contribution, stop and ask yourself: “Is this genuinely helpful, or am I just saying it to make myself look good?”

Fortunately, people who have learned to overuse the black hat are usually those who benefit the most when they start to consciously practice with it. People who are lifelong black hat thinkers by default often surprise themselves and others with how creative and constructive they can be when they let themselves take off the black hat for a while.

Black Hat Questions

While you’re wearing the black hat, consider these questions:

Black Hat Data

Black hat data includes drawbacks, obstacles, design problems, deficiencies, and weak points. It’s important to note that black hat thinking draws significantly on the past: It considers past experiences and uses this to make logical projections into the future. When wearing the black hat, you’re asking, “Has this type of thing failed before? If so, why?”

Most black hat thinking revolves around the word “but”:

Key Black Hat Concepts

Logical Flaws vs. Practical Obstacles

Black hat thinking is useful for identifying two types of problems:

  1. Logical flaws in an argument
  2. Potential design flaws and practical obstacles that a project might face in the real world

Most of us have been taught that if there’s a logical flaw in someone’s argument, their conclusion must be incorrect. However, this isn’t necessarily the case: It’s possible to reach a correct conclusion through faulty reasoning. Because the Six Hats method is concerned with practical usefulness and not logical perfection, finding holes in someone’s argument isn’t enough to invalidate their conclusion. If you find a logical flaw in someone’s argument, go ahead and point it out, but try to trace exactly how it’s leading to an incorrect conclusion.

How to Use the Black Hat

General Advice

Advice for Facilitators

Exercise: Try on the Black Hat

Work with the black hat on a problem of your choice.

Chapter 5: The Yellow Hat

The yellow hat is the constructive hat. Yellow hat thinking is positive and concrete. You can remember this easily: Builders often wear yellow hardhats when working on new buildings, and yellow is the color of sunny optimism.

While some people are naturally disposed toward yellow hat thinking, for many of us it doesn’t come naturally—and it’s typically not taught well in schools and universities. Most people could use some consistent, focused practice to strengthen their yellow hat thinking abilities.

Yellow Hat Questions

While you’re wearing the yellow hat, consider these questions:

Yellow Hat Data

As with black hat data, yellow hat data is based on logic. Under both the black and the yellow hat, you’re considering ideas in light of your and other people’s past experiences. But this time, instead of thinking about everything that’s gone wrong in the past, you’re thinking about what’s worked.

Yellow hat contributions are about improvement. Proposals, for example, are classic yellow hat contributions. Proposals take a problem and set out ways to fix it. They take suboptimal situations and provide concrete, well-reasoned, solidly grounded suggestions for improvement. The yellow hat is concerned with generating proposals, finding sound reasons why proposals are likely to work, and developing strong proposals further.

Yellow hat contributions don’t have to be flashy. Simple, obvious suggestions are just as valuable as revolutionary ones. In fact, you may choose to save this type of serious out-of-the-box thinking for the green hat.

Key Yellow Hat Concepts

Yellow Hat Thinking vs. Blind Optimism

Yellow hat thinking is positive and optimistic, but ideally it’s also grounded in evidence and logic. “Don’t worry, even though things look bleak, everything’s going to be all right” isn’t genuine yellow hat thinking—it’s blind optimism.

In practice, the dividing line between blind optimism and a tiny but exciting possibility can be difficult to see. There are examples everywhere of people who started new ventures based on improbable dreams and succeeded. So how can you tell what’s viable yellow hat thinking and what isn’t? The answer is to think about the next step. If your plan requires a great deal of luck to work (for example, happening to get the attention and interest of a large investor), it’s a pipe dream. Set it aside. However, if you can see a clear path forward that’s mostly composed of your own efforts, the proposal is worth developing further.

To manage yellow hat probabilities intelligently, consider using a probability spectrum:

Next to each yellow hat contribution, note down where it stands on the probability spectrum and use that to help guide your decision.

Value

Yellow hat thinking can feel like panning for gold. You’re actively searching through a proposal or idea and looking for something valuable. In black hat thinking, you scan for weak points. In yellow hat thinking, you scan for opportunities. What has potential here? Where are the hidden footholds? What can you build on?

How to Use the Yellow Hat

General Advice

Advice for Facilitators

Exercise: Try on the Yellow Hat

Work with the yellow hat on a problem of your choice.

Chapter 6: The Green Hat

The green hat is the creative hat. Green is the color of new growth, and green hat thinking looks for new and original ideas. Though the attitudes that drive green hat and yellow hat thinking are quite similar (a sense of possibility; a desire to build rather than break down), the thinking styles involved are qualitatively different. For example, you might know someone who is very optimistic but quite conventional in their ideas. You might also know someone who is highly creative but not very optimistic. This is why we consider the green hat and the yellow hat separately in practice.

Green Hat Questions

While you’re wearing the green hat, consider these questions:

Green Hat Data

Green hat data is anything completely new. When you put on the green hat, you’re coming up with combinations of ideas that, as far as you know, nobody has ever considered before.

Green hat ideas can range from novel but commonsense to completely outrageous, and all are welcome. Many successful ideas were fanciful or absurd in their original form and then brought down to earth through more practically oriented black hat and yellow hat refinements.

Key Green Hat Concepts

Relationship With the Yellow Hat: Construction vs. Creation

The relationship between the yellow hat and the green hat is interesting. Creativity benefits when it starts from a base of optimism and relaxation. It’s hard for your brain to be creative when it’s sensitized to danger and risk.

But yellow hat and green hat contributions are distinct. Yellow hat contributions are concrete and positive. When you have the yellow hat on, you’re systematically putting bricks into place. You know exactly what you’re building. Green hat contributions are more fragile. When you have the green hat on, you’re planting rare seeds, watering them, and seeing whether or not they sprout.

Though the yellow and green hats are complementary, and can be used in tandem to generate and develop ideas, they’re not the same type of thinking.

Po and the Stone That Jolts the Wheel out of the Rut

Green hat thinking is about jolting yourself out of your normal thinking patterns. Think of a horse-drawn carriage being driven along a dirt track. Though the whole path is available to the carriage, it quickly settles into the ruts left by previous carriages. The wheels will stay in the ruts until they’re jolted out, either through an input of deliberate energy from the driver and horses or by an obstacle such as a stone.

Similarly, thinking will tend to follow normal, well-traveled pathways unless something gets put in the road. A provocation is a mental stone in the rut of normal thinking. A provocation might be something like “People should be paid to have pets” or “A manager’s subordinates should decide whether or not she gets promoted.”

Po, standing for “provocative operation,” is a word you can use to signpost a provocation. The deal is that you’re not allowed to meet a po with a black hat—you have to run with the suggestion. Here are some examples of po:

The point of po is not to present a final idea. It’s to generate momentum. Jump on the back of the po and see where it takes you.

There are a few standard ways to generate po statements. The first is reversal. For example, usually tenants are penalized financially for damage to the properties they rent. Reversing this gives you: “Po tenants should be paid for looking after their rental properties well.”

The second is random word association. For example, let’s say that you want to generate ideas about rainforest conservation. You open a dictionary to a random page and find the word “window.” Perhaps this leads you to the idea of windows into a rainforest, which then leads you to the idea of setting up cameras in a rainforest that people can check online at any time, thus increasing people’s interest in the forest and motivation to conserve it. Or perhaps you want creative ideas about emotional health for stressed workers and you open the dictionary to “guitar.” A guitar has six strings at different levels of tension—perhaps people could sort their work tasks according to the level of tension they provoke and organize their days according to this. Or perhaps they could be encouraged to listen to calming music at work. Perhaps you could investigate whether the workers play an instrument and suggest they form a band and rehearse at lunchtime.

The random word association method can be surprisingly effective. Just introducing something new and seeing where it takes you can jolt you out of your cognitive rut and onto much more interesting and fertile terrain.

How to Use the Green Hat

General Advice

Advice for Facilitators

Exercise: Try on the Green Hat

Work with the green hat on a problem of your choice.