Six Thinking Hats: Looking at a Decision from All Points of View

What is your instinctive approach to decision making? If you’re naturally optimistic, then chances are you don’t always consider potential downsides. Similarly, if you’re very cautious or have a risk-averse outlook, you might not focus on opportunities that could open up.

Often, the best decisions come from changing the way that you think about problems, and examining them from different viewpoints.

“Six Thinking Hats” can help you to look at problems from different perspectives, but one at a time, to avoid confusion from too many angles crowding your thinking.

It’s also a powerful decision-checking technique in group situations, as everyone explores the situation from each perspective at the same time.

Six Thinking Hats was created by Edward de Bono, and published in his 1985 book of the same name. You can now find it in a new edition.

It forces you to move outside your habitual thinking style, and to look at things from a number of different perspectives. This allows you to get a more rounded view of your situation.

You can often reach a successful solution or outcome from a rational, positive viewpoint, but it can also pay to consider a problem from other angles. For example, you can look at it from an emotional, intuitive, creative or risk management viewpoint. Not considering these perspectives could lead you to underestimate people’s resistance to your plans, fail to make creative leaps, or ignore the need for essential contingency plans.

In this article, we explore how to use the Six Thinking Hats technique, and show an example of how it can work.

 

Brainstorming: Generating Many Radical, Creative Ideas

How often have you used brainstorming to solve a problem? Chances are, you’ve used it at least once, even if you didn’t realize it.

For decades, people have used brainstorming to generate ideas, and to come up with creative solutions to problems. However, you need to use brainstorming correctly for it to be fully effective.

In this article, we’ll look at what it is, why it’s useful, and how to get the best from it.

 

8 Ways to Add Value to Meetings: Making a Strong Contribution

Have you ever come out of a meeting feeling that you didn’t perform at your best? Maybe you forgot to bring data to back up a colleague, or felt that you didn’t get your point across, or just sat in silence for long periods.

Meetings don’t have to be like this and, with the right approach, it’s possible to make valuable contributions to meetings, and so get more from them. In this article, we’ll explore eight practical ways that you can do this.

 

Personal SWOT Analysis: Making the Most of Your Talents and Opportunities

You are most likely to succeed in life if you use your talents to their fullest extent. Similarly, you’ll suffer fewer problems if you know what your weaknesses are, and if you manage these weaknesses so that they don’t matter in the work you do.

So how you go about identifying these strengths and weaknesses, and analyzing the opportunities and threats that flow from them? SWOT Analysis is a useful technique that helps you do this.

 

Why We Should Be Disagreeing More at Work

Disagreements are an inevitable, normal, and healthy part of relating to other people. There is no such thing as a conflict-free work environment. You might dream of working in a peaceful utopia, but it wouldn’t be good for your company, your work, or you. In fact, disagreements — when managed well — have lots of positive outcomes. Here are a few…

 

What to Do When You Don’t Feel Valued at Work

It’s no fun to toil away at a job where your efforts go unnoticed. How can you highlight your achievements without bragging about your work? Who should you talk to about feeling underappreciated? And if the situation doesn’t change, how long should you stay?

 

How to Get Out of a Meeting You Know Will Waste Your Time

You can often predict which meetings will be unproductive from the moment you receive the invitation. There’s the “team update” where you spend two hours listening to a rundown of how everyone spent their week, or the “planning meeting” where you hash out picayune details that should have been handled elsewhere, or the “brainstorming session” where extroverts shout out random ideas.

Some of these you can dodge, but others are much harder to escape — especially if the invitation comes from your boss, a key client, or an influential colleague. Here are five ways to get out of a meeting that you know will be unproductive, or at least to limit the collateral damage to your productivity and schedule.