Six Thinking Hats
Monday, September 12th, 2005
Small groups at Synod today used Edward de Bono�s �Six Thinking Hats�, a parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. To introduce the process I invited five friends to join me on stage to role play the consideration of a question on interest rates and mission opportunities for growing mission opportunities.
The six functions and thinking roles are:
White Hat - calls for information known or needed.
Yellow Hat - explores positives and probes for value and benefit.
Red Hat - signifies feelings, hunches and intuition.
Black Hat - provides the caution and points out potential difficulties and dangers.
Green Hat - focuses on creative possibilities, alternatives and new ideas.
Blue Hat - ensures the six Thinking Hats guidelines are observed.
On stage we modeled what might happen if we assigned hats to different people. Next time we need to model what might happen if we all think with the same hat at the same time.
Tags: De Bono, Reconciliation, Uniting Church
Looking through De Bono’s book, “The Six Value Medals”, I’m finding some very useful material for my work with communities discerning their shared core values. In particular, I’m finding material here that addresses the deep concerns of people who have been through company value clarification exercises that only focused on organisational values or paid only lip service to human values.
