The Six Thinking Hats - Edward de Bono

I finally read the book, “The Six Thinking Hats” by Edward de Bono. I cannot say this book has only left cursory Impressions on me. The impact, I believe, is much more deeper.

The premise of the six thinking hats proposes a fundamental shift in how we think about our common and uncommon problems and issues, and how we work out their solution. It is a great improvement in human thinking skills.

For the most part, we either stick to either thinking about the positive side of an argument, or stay focused on the negative aspect of it, or at times, a mix of both. As de Bono writes in his book, the main difficulty of thinking is confusion, when we try to process emotions, information, facts, upsides, down sides, all at the same time. What six thinking hats provides you is a method to isolate all of these important factors, only to be taken one at a time, but all things considered at the end of thinking exercise.

We all know what six thinking hats is about, I think, there’s no need to repeat those. To get more information about what six thinking hats is about; please refer to the mind tools website here: Six Thinking Hats – Introduction and Examples or read the book, The six thinking hats.

The method is easy to follow, in that, it allows humans to assume roles of certain type of thinking, and relate to different colors in thinking, than having to remember difficult psychological terms.

What’s more important to note that, how it simplifies seemingly complex decisions, and how effective this tool can be, when used properly for decision-making considering all the important factors.

I personally feel, this method is helping me to improve how I think about certain issues and problems, and how do I worked out and approach their solutions. It’s one of the major improvements I had gone through, and out of all of the creativity module literature, this piece struck me most, and that’s why I wanted to talk about it.

References:

de Bono, Edward (2001), The Six Thinking Hats