Making brainstorming easier, using the "Six Thinking Hats" approach

Making Brainstorming easier, using the “Six Thinking Hats” approach.

Holding a brainstorming session with your teams for the first time might work well. There might be people in the room who embrace this type of interactive session without any prompting. They might find such a session inspiring and a place to create multiple ideas. Then again, there might be introverts within your teams who won’t speak up for fear of being made to feel foolish when they make a suggestion.

It doesn't take a lot to unbalance brainstorming sessions. All you need is a couple of outspoken people who tend to hold the attention of everyone else, and the introverts begin to feel that they can't speak up.

Brainstorming is about setting the scene and making sure people know it’s a safe space to put forward their ideas no matter how wild they may seem. Establishing ground rules at the beginning of a brainstorming session is just as important as the session itself. If you don’t let people know what to expect before the session starts, you might be on a hiding to nothing.

One possible way to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak up is by using a method developed by Edward De Bono called the “Six Thinking Hats”.?He used the Hats as a metaphor, to represent a certain way of thinking.

In a brainstorming session, everyone would wear each of these “Hats” for a specific length of time.

Using all 'Six Thinking Hats' means that you are giving the opportunity to fully utilise everyone’s knowledge and experiences during the session. What are the Hats and what do they mean in practice?

The White Hat?- Analysis of facts and figures. These can be proven facts and perceived facts. During this time, we are looking for people to remain?neutral and try to be objective. Wearing the White Hat provides the ability to demonstrate facts and figures, KPIs and statistics in a listening environment.

For example, it could be the number of times that a specific product or service has been delivered late or the number of times a supplier hasn’t supplied on time.

The Red Hat?- Feelings, emotion, and intuition. Feelings and emotions can be expressed under this Hat. You can use it as an important part of?the problem solving process. Wearing this Hat would include opening up about emotions, such as fear and disliking of an idea and also hunches and intuition around feelings and ideas.

Examples of where these feelings would be used are “I feel that this is a good thing to do” or “I feel that this idea has potential” even though you may not have the evidence to back it up as yet.

The Black Hat?- Caution and critical thinking. The Black Hat wearer discusses potential issues in a constructive way. It allows the review of potential problem areas and prevents us from doing things that are dangerous or unprofitable, ensuring more of a cautious approach in business.

We need to be aware of the possible dangers regarding health and safety for this session to work. We need to lay out all of the potential obstacles and difficulties. Black Hat thinking is not used to blow things up into an argument, it is there to help point out errors in the thinking itself.

The Yellow Hat?- this is the Hat of optimism and the way to put ideas into practice. This Hat is about recognising the good ideas and looking at things in a positive way. It's about looking for the positive benefit from the ideas being put forward.

The Green Hat?- This Hat is about new ideas as well as improved and alternative suggestions. You don’t have to be a naturally creative person to be creative. This Hat is about the time you spend trying to generate ideas. The Green Hat provides you with an opportunity to find alternative or new ideas. It’s about looking at the things we do and how to do them a bit differently, perhaps even better.

The Blue Hat?- the facilitator and leader of the discussion. The Blue Hat wants to get the best out of the team they are working in the session with. They are?your facilitator and the one who decides which of the Hats to start with and work through. They are the ones looking at the procedure you’re following to get the best out of the session. They also deal with the outcomes and provide the conclusions.

This Hat usually stays with one person, although others can use the Blue Hat thinking for comments as they go through the session.

This is just a brief summary of Edward De Bono's ideas with regard to the 'Six Thinking Hats'. If you are able to adapt even elements of his approach it should help improve the chances of success in your brainstorming sessions.

I really hope you found this newsletter interesting. You can also pick up a copy of our free PDF called "Taking Continuous Improvement from Concept to Business Reality" via the weblink?https://fullcircleci.co.uk/business-reality/

Alternatively, if you'd like to have an informal chat about our continuous improvement training programmes, including our "Learning to Brainstorm in 30 mins" online programme, you can send me a Direct Message via Linked In or email me on [email protected]

You can find further information via our LinkTree?https://linktr.ee/fullcircleci, including links to our website, continuous improvement training programmes, blog and YouTube Channel, if you'd like to learn a bit more.

Enjoy your week.

Liz