Six Thinking Hats

Beginning around the second half of the 20th century, some business leaders realized the deficiencies in the traditional “top-down” style of management, in which a small number of high-ranking individuals dictated orders for lower-ranking employees to carry out. They were responding to more general post-WWI sociocultural trends that questioned the value of old hierarchies and advocated for a more egalitarian approach in both business and politics. They gradually began to take a more collaborative approach to problem-solving, a method so entrenched that it is now the foundation of many advanced business education programs. Collaboration typically helps to ensure ownership of an issue or a business plan in addition to leveraging a variety of skills and ideas.

Collaborative Leaders Network, a nonprofit group, has identified nine stages of collaborative problem-solving. To begin, a team clarifies intentions, performs a background inquiry, and develops a process design. The team then launches the group who will work on the issue or issues by analyzing them, generating a range of options and solutions, evaluating those options to create a plan, producing documents to define the plan, and conducting an executive review.

De Bono asserts that the Six Thinking Hats method makes problem-solving more effective by separating out conflicting styles of thinking. In this way it is different from books on collaborative problem-solving that focus on building trust, such as Mike Robbins’s We’re All in This Together (2020); there is no need for trust-building, since Six Thinking Hats takes ego out of the process. It is more similar to books that provide a framework for decision making, such as educators Spetzler, Winter, and Meyer’s Decision Quality (2016). Their book provides a complex process based on decision theory and behavior research. That framework also has six requirements for decision-making, although it relies on a structured process rather than idioms, or modes, of thinking.

Six Thinking Hats has been criticized for several reasons. It can be time-consuming, especially if a group is tasked with trying on all six hats in one setting. It can also lead to confusion, as participants struggle to shift from one “hat” to another or must “wear” a thinking style that is foreign to them. Some experts suggest using it along with other decision-making techniques for the most effective results. Furthermore, de Bono’s work has also been criticized by some academics for lacking verifiable proof for his theories about thinking and decision-making and contest the efficacy of his methods.