Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono's technique) is a decision-making and problem-solving method that uses a hat metaphor to deliberately switch between distinct thinking styles — the point is that a group (or an individual) explicitly adopts one thinking mode at a time, rather than mixing all of them at once the way unstructured discussion usually does.

The six hats

• White Hat — objective, factual thinking: what information is available, and what's still needed to decide.
• Red Hat — emotional thinking: instincts, feelings, and intuitions about the decision, made explicit rather than smuggled in disguised as "logical" objections.
• Black Hat — critical thinking: risks and potential problems with the decision — deliberately pessimistic, on purpose, rather than scattered unpredictably through the discussion.
• Yellow Hat — optimistic thinking: benefits and positive aspects — the deliberate counterweight to the Black Hat.
• Green Hat — creative thinking: generating new ideas and possibilities (overlapping with Ideation's general divergent-thinking discipline, applied as one specific mode here).
• Blue Hat — meta-cognitive thinking: the overall process, structure, and organization of the session itself — typically the facilitator's hat, managing which hat the group wears when.

Why separating the modes helps

Ordinary discussion mixes emotional reaction, critical objection, and creative suggestion together unpredictably, often with one mode (usually critical) dominating and suppressing the others. Wearing one hat at a time gives every mode of thinking a deliberate, protected turn — a Black Hat critique doesn't get to shut down Green Hat idea generation, because they happen in separate, explicit phases.

Where it's used

From individual problem-solving to group decision-making, across personal and professional settings — commonly used specifically to improve group decision-making sessions where one dominant thinking style (often unstructured criticism) would otherwise crowd out the others.

Common pitfalls

• Skipping the Blue Hat / no facilitation — without someone actively managing which hat is currently "on," a group tends to drift back into its default, usually critical, mode.
• Treating the hats as personality types rather than temporary modes — the technique's value comes from everyone deliberately adopting each mode in turn, not from assigning one hat permanently to whoever's "naturally" that type.
• Skipping the Red Hat as "unprofessional" — suppressing the explicit emotional-reaction phase doesn't remove emotional influence from the decision, it just leaves it unacknowledged and harder to account for.

Learn more

• Creative Thinking for the broader technique family this specializes.
• Ideation for the divergent-thinking discipline the Green Hat mode draws on specifically.