Use the Six Thinking Hats for Meeting Effectiveness
Why do meetings often fail?
People refuse to see other perspectives and fail to open themselves up to a diverse range of options. Without openness, you can’t achieve shared understanding.
What can we do to overcome these challenges?
Realize there are different ways of interpreting and processing information. Develop a system of communication that facilitates shared understanding and your meetings will be more productive.
Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hat method helps facilitate more productive group meetings through utilizing different perspectives, but ensuring that everyone is aligned to only one perspective at a time.
Each hat represents a specific perspective. Each team member wears each hat in turn. For example, “Okay, let’s put on our White Hats. Jim, you’re up first.”
White Hat: The neutral White Hat offers objective facts and figures and is used in the beginning of a meeting to establish relevant facts and information about the issue at hand.
Red Hat: The emotional and intuitive Red Hat is used to get people’s gut reactions to an idea or when you want the team to express their emotions freely.
Black Hat: The cautious Black Hat is used when you want to get the critical viewpoint of an idea or situation. The “devil’s advocate” hat helps decrease the chances of making a poor decision.
Yellow Hat: The sunny and positive Yellow Hat helps identify the value of ideas and plans. The Yellow Hat helps counterbalance the judgmental thinking of Black Hat.
Green Hat: The creative Green Hat comes on when you want to generate fresh ideas and new directions. This is a very powerful hat that each player needs to wear.
Blue Hat: The organizing Blue Hat sets objectives, outlines the situation, and defines the problem in the beginning of the meeting and returns at the end to summarize and draw conclusions.
Remember, these six hats represent perspectives, not people or personalities. Every person in a meeting must be able to wear each hat in turn. See de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats for further explanation.
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This is great, Scott! I think it also applies just as well to “solo” entrepreneurs as it does to group meetings.
As a psychotherapist.. and much like many entrepreneurs in the health and wellness industry, one of my greatest challenges is wearing different hats.
I always have my therapist hat on, and my creative hat, or my sunny “yellow” hat… These hats are fine, but when I take on operational tasks I get nowhere. I find when I can mentally slap on my operations hat, or marketing hat… or “Black” cautious hat… my thinking and productivity is way better and resistance to take on certain questions or tasks diminishes.
Thanks for the resource!
Good point, Matt. Michael Gerber talks about the entrepreneur has to be able to adopt multiple roles, essentially wearing all the different hats necessary for running a business. We all prefer certain hats over others and tend to spend time on the hats we’re best at. But all the various hats are important understand certain conditions.