Team Tools: The Six Thinking Hats
Join a short, social and experimental session to familiarise yourself with a famous, powerful and playful tool for generating ideas, beating biases and bringing teams together.
Psychologist, author and inventor Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a piece of ‘mental software;’ a framework to separate, order and develop the emotions and ideas colouring your decision making.
A proven tool to try among teams (or indeed solo) — de Bono's Hats get us intentionally out of our default world view, ensuring diverse perspectives are being heard and that our default biases are dampened.
Each ‘hat’ is worn (within a variety of exercises), and represents a different mode of thinking — logic, gut instinct, pessimism and more - which work together, for powerful combinations of perspectives, combined towards a common goal.
The tool is useful for lots of different contexts: meetings and idea generation sessions; in teams or in private; for examining problems and making decisions big and small. Big businesses like IBM, Boeing and Siemens use it to this day, and it was even used to create a relief plan after the Indian Ocean tsunami.
This coming session will practically and collaboratively take you through the ins and outs of the six thinking hats, laying out some of the most popular frameworks to follow, and the role and significance of each one. You’ll leave with the confidence to experiment with the tool in your own teams; super-charging your creative thinking and decision making.
“Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement."
What we’ll cover
• The six thinking hats as a concept and the ‘modes of thinking,’ they represent.
• Frameworks for using the hats solo and in teams.
• How to explore each hat to the fullest.
• Spotting our own default views within the hats.
• Using the hats to challenge biases.
• Ways you can use the tool immediately.
How the session will be structured
We'll work with pace through a series of short exercises that demonstrate the core ideas at the heart of the Six Thinking Hats, applying them to live challenges and opportunities within the group. You'll work in small, supportive breakout groups with curious peers, and leave with ongoing workbooks and resources to experiment and practice back in your own teams.
Who the session’s for
Anyone keen to arm themselves with a new tool to support creative, collective and decisive thinking.
To support what we cover in the session, and to help you practice and explore among your teams, you'll be welcome to a handy workbook and some follow on nudges; directly after the session and across the following weeks.