Thursday, April 30, 2015
3:58 PM | 
Posted by
Kaplan Center for Health and Wellness
The Six Thinking Hats
Everyone
wants to be heard!
Dorette Nysewander, EdD, “DrD”
Believe it is a given to say that all employees and volunteers have
attended numerous workforce meetings? What is your experience repeatedly? Were
you able to interject your thoughts or subject matter expertise? If you were,
was it heard? With demands placed on the active workforce, everyone has the
task of focusing on achieving positive end results for their companies; however
to arrive at this point takes communication, communication and more
communication! Whether it’s a meeting or project if all communications are presented
through personalities, multiple tasks, and emotions it often causes a decline
in a Results. Oriented. Work. Environment or [R.O.W.E.]. By applying patterns
of critical thinking is it possible to come up with a methodology in which
everyone manages the initiative through a role? Let’s see what you think…
Edward de Bono created the six thinking hats for business leaders in
hopes that each would come to the understanding that thinking is a “skill”. He
took a positive, practical approach towards decision-making and the exploration
of new ideas. All of us at one time were thrilled with the idea of coloring
inside the lines with primary color crayons and playing nicely in our sandbox.
It has been mentioned a few times in our lives that all we really need to know
is what we learned in kindergarten. As with then and now the only difference is
the ability to apply it while maturing, growing and gaining wisdom. So…what are
these hats and how do they work?
Blue hat --- managing hat, cool the color of the sky
above everything else, vision
White hat --- neutral and objective hat, concerned
with facts and figures
Yellow hat --- sunny and positive hat, always
optimistic and radiates hope
Red hat --- presents an emotional point of view
Black hat --- careful and cautious, concern with
profit and loss
Green hat --- associated with fertile growth,
creativity and new ideas
This process serves two purposes. The first is to simplify thinking by
allowing a thinker to deal with one thing at a time. Instead of having to deal
with all six perspectives at once, the process helps to separate each role and
thought. The second is to allow a switch in thinking. While in a meeting if an
individual wearing a black hat is consistently pessimistic they might be asked
to wear the yellow hat. The most important take away here is that the process
does not threaten an individual’s ego or personality.
Some guidelines for using the thinking hats is for all individuals to
stay within the role of the current hat they’re wearing. No personality is to
be presented. The managing blue hat directs the initiative. There is no
particular order for critical thinking thus no order in which roles of the hats
are presented. It is important to switch up the roles of the group at an
appropriate time. The blue hat can also direct all parties to think in the role
of one particular hat at a time. The thinking hats can be used in a singular
practice as well. If an individual has presented a profitable idea [black hat],
ask them to put some green hat thinking towards the idea to creatively
determine another use and possible two-fold profits.
Hope by now the inner child has surfaced and you feel inspired to
participate. Results frequently reported by Fortune 500 companies are typically
associated with four categories of influence: power, time saving, removal of
the ego, and practicing one thing at a time. The power of the process is
working all parties intellectual, knowledge, skill and abilities in the same
direction for a positive end result. Meetings that would typically take 4 hours
have been reduced to 45-minutes with all parties aligned. Know that United
States managers spend nearly 40% of their time in meetings! Just think if using
the six thinking hats reduced all meetings by 75 percent, you would have
created 30 percent more manager time—at no extra cost!
Alright everyone, it is time to put on your critical thinking hat!
References
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1 comments:
None of these trends are natural ways of thinking, but rather how some of us already represent the results of our thinking.
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