The 6 Thinking Hats

How Your Mind Got Tangled

Picture the last meeting where a real decision had to be made. Someone laid out a proposal. Within thirty seconds, three things happened at once. One person defended the idea on logical grounds. Another felt a flicker of irritation and started searching for a reason it would fail. A third was already imagining how the budget might stretch. Nobody admitted to the emotion driving them. Everybody believed they were being rational. An hour later, the group had circled the same point four times, two careers were quietly bruised, and the loudest voice had won.

Edward De Bono spent his life studying that scene. His diagnosis was simple. The main difficulty of thinking, he wrote, is confusion. We try to feel, judge, gather facts, predict consequences, and dream up alternatives all in the same breath. The mind, asked to do five jobs at once, does none of them well. We mistake the resulting tangle for serious deliberation.

The 6 Thinking Hats, first published in 1985, is De Bono's answer. The idea sounds almost embarrassingly simple. There are six distinct modes the mind can work in. Wear one at a time. Switch deliberately. Get the whole group to wear the same one at the same moment. De Bono claimed this small change in habit might be the most important shift in human thinking in twenty-three centuries.

That sentence makes most people smirk. The smirk usually fades when they see the numbers. A multinational called ABB went from thirty-day project debates to two-day debates. An IBM laboratory cut meeting time to a quarter. A trainer named Jens Arup walked onto a Norwegian Statoil oil rig, where downtime was costing roughly a hundred thousand dollars a day, and solved the problem in twelve minutes. A study of three hundred senior British civil servants reported a 493 percent jump in thinking productivity. Siemens trained nearly four hundred internal facilitators. NASA, IBM, DuPont, NTT, Shell, BP, and Federal Express all adopted the method.