Six Thinking Hats: An Exercise to Combat Confusion and Develop Thinking Skills

Abstract

"Edward deBono, creativity expert, has written a book targeted at the business management community. In Six Thinking Hats, (1985), deBono claims that the main difficulty we have with thinking is that we get confused. When we try to think, too much Crowds in on us at once-- emotions, information, logic, hope, creativity, doubt. He offers a (not so simple) solution: Teach people to do one kind of thinking at a time. To teach managers to think in one style at a time, deBono introduces the gimmick of six different colored thinking hats, each representing a different thinking style. These visual referents help managers isolate and practice the different thinking styles. The purpose of this exercise is to introduce the six thinking styles to students in an experiential format. The exercise is appropriate for those management, organizational behavior and marketing classes in which creativity, problem solving, planning or decision making are addressed. An important feature of the design is that it can be presented by a group of six students as a class project. "