Six Thinking Hats
Six Thinking Hats
What are the Six Thinking Hats?
- Six colors, six ways of thinking
- Everyone thinks in the same direction at once
- Criticism isn’t banned, just scheduled for later
What the Six Thinking Hats really changes is not the speaking order but who owns each role. In most meetings, roles are attached to people. Sales always supports, finance always applies the brakes, and the front line always says it is hard to execute. The longer someone sits in that seat, the more fixed the role becomes, and what they say is judged by their department rather than by its content. The moment a hat goes on, the role moves from the person to the time slot. During the 5 minutes of Black Hat, even the proposer has to look for risks in their own idea, and during the 5 minutes of Yellow Hat, even the skeptic has to name the benefits. What defines a statement is not who said it but which hat is on right now.
A few ground rules apply to running it. Allow 3–5 minutes per hat, only about 10 minutes for green (where ideas are generated), and finish the whole session within 30–40 minutes. Give participants more time and they take the hats off and slip back into their usual way of talking. The order depends on the purpose. To solve a problem from scratch, use blue–white–green–yellow–black–blue; to vet a proposal already on the table, blue–white–yellow–black–red–blue works well. Put yellow before black, because if criticism comes first, benefit-seeking thinking shuts down on the spot. 4–8 people is the right size, and beyond 12, the red hat degrades into a perfunctory go-around. It is easy to confuse with brainstorming, but brainstorming is closer to a single green hat stretched out long.
The most common mistake is handing out a different colored hat to each person. Assigning roles such as “Kim wears black, Lee wears yellow” turns parallel thinking into role-play, and whoever gets the black hat is remembered as the opponent long after the meeting ends. The technique rests on one premise: everyone wears the same color at the same time. The second pitfall is skipping the black hat for fear of spoiling the mood. When there is no place to voice risks, those concerns move to the hallways and chat apps, and the proposal gets overturned at the approval stage. The third is when an executive takes the blue hat. If the facilitator is also the decision-maker, an instruction to switch hats is read as a signal steering toward a conclusion, and participants try to guess which color the boss wants before they speak.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of “B2B Marketing Design” and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jinho DanAccounting instructor who makes financial statements, costing, and tax easy to understandA parallel thinking technique introduced by Edward de Bono in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a cosmetics OEM with 240 employees, had failed for three months to decide on a KRW 1.8 billion (≈ US$1,346,700) line expansion at its second plant. At every meeting the production head would say, "Think how much volume we lost by missing deliveries," and the finance head would counter, "Look at the debt ratio first." The agenda stayed put while the same argument repeated five times.
- Kim, a senior manager in Business Planning, opened the meeting wearing the blue hat. After stating up front that "today we won’t decide for or against; we’ll only gather input for the decision," Kim split the time into 5 minutes per hat, 40 minutes in total.
- During the 5 minutes of the white hat, the finance director put forward only numbers: "average utilization last year was 87%, and in Q3 alone we turned down 12 orders because of delivery deadlines." The usual "that won’t work" was held back until the black hat turn.
- In the yellow hat round, the finance head, who had been opposed, had to find the benefits. "If lead time drops by 9 days, we have grounds to ask clients for a 3% price increase," came out right there.
- During the 5 minutes of Black Hat, the head of production, who had been pushing for expansion, raised the weak points himself: "Two months of equipment inspection means accepting a 15% output cut on existing lines." It was the first such number in three months of debate.
- During the 3 minutes of Red Hat, no one was asked for evidence. The quality director said, "I can’t explain it, but running one more line with our current headcount makes me uneasy," and only then did the staffing problem come to the surface.
- The item that had dragged on for 3 months closed in two 40-minute meetings. Instead of a full KRW 1.8 billion (≈ US$1,346,700) expansion, the conclusion was a KRW 900 million (≈ US$673,400) partial expansion and hiring 6 field staff in advance, and the board approved it two weeks later without changes.