How to: Wear 6 Hats to Make Better Decisions

Welcome to the series of How To:Quality. Your 3 min guide on how Quality Professionals address various business needs to drive Improvement and Governance.

Quality Professionals, regardless of the sector they work in, strive to help businesses achieve their strategic objectives. They do this in various ways: be it deploying governance frameworks, implementing improvement strategies, or delivering assurance programmes.

This month, I bring you the concept of wearing 6 hats to make better decisions. If you have been to meetings that concluded with a sense of lack of luster, and nothing was achieved, if you were working on an improvement project that was faced with so much resistance but you were not able to understand the reason behind such resistance, then this model could be of help to you.

How to: Quality

The 6 thinking hats is nearly 40 years old. It was created by Dr Edward de Bono. It helps participants appreciate the different points of view and come to a collective decision having considered different angles. In Quality Management, we emphasise the importance of risk-based thinking and decisions driven by facts. This approach supports this very same organisational culture. Read on to familiarise yourself with the 6 hats and how to implement this targeted approach.

Let us start with each of these hats. Each hat has a colour and represents a specific type of view. Each hat encourages its wearer to think within the discipline of this hat. So the glass is not always half empty, nor always half full. You consider each point of view and gather your insights – as a team – accordingly.

• Blue Hat – Conductor: the conductor helps keep you on track. So when wearing this hat you ensure each team has an agenda, and sticks to the thinking hat they are wearing. You will expect results or summaries at the end.
• Green Hat – Creative: the creative is the one who can think out of the box as if there are no restrictions. You come up with ideas to progress and jot them down.
• Red Hat – Emotional: this is to help you recognise how you feel when dealing with the task at hand. No logic is expected, your feelings are valid and needs to be addressed when dealing with the initiative the team is working on
• Yellow Hat – Optimist: this is the best-case scenarios. Think blue skies and the sun shining. This is to accentuate outcome with the most value add.
• Black Hat – Judge: this is the skeptical thinker who goes through the risk assessment before embarking on any actions.
• White Hat – Factual: this is a person who will provide the data you have. This could be data about the process performance, the voice of the customer, SLA performance, etc.

So how to run a 6-hat thinking approach:

Get your team in a room and allocate different hats to them. Make sure you have these three points ready to set the workshop:

1. What is the problem we want to solve?
2. Why have we got this problem in the first place?
3. How are we going to resolve this problem? One loose idea on what good looks like, remember, one of the hats can give you better ideas.

With these in hand, you set the scene, and the activity is ready to kick off. You can approach this workshop in two ways.

• Approach 1: If you have an agreed solution, or desired state to get to, present this to the team and get the hats to go in turn: Blue, White, Green, Red, Yellow, Black, Blue again.
• Approach 2: If you do not have an agreed solutions or desired state, you can get the team to brainstorm as one group to narrow down the ideas to potential two or three possible ways, and then you run approach 1 with them on the selected ideas.

The idea of wearing 6 hats is that it opens up the discussion in a structured way, in a safe environment where everyone can contribute. The black hat does not need to feel pessimistic because they have been openly given the task of judging and conducting risk reviews. The yellow hat does not need to feel restricted in coming up with ideas and is expecting that ideas are going to be reviewed, analysed and emotionally assessed. And so on for all of the hats.

You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future.

Dr. Edward de Bono (https://www.debono.com, Accessed Feb 2024)

You need excellent timekeeping skills, and the blue hat can help you with this. At the end of this activity, let the blue hat share the summaries, the agreed points, and the next steps. And once you get to this stage, check in and see if anyone felt the meeting was not productive or if the next steps remained ambiguous. Most importantly, check in to see whether everyone has become more aligned toward what needs to happen. You may be very surprised with the response.

You can find a lot more of the 6 hats exercise and how to run directly from the source: https://www.debono.com where the concept is trademarked.

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