Olympic Games usually lose hundreds of millions of dollars. The 1984 Los Angeles Games ended with a surplus of 250 million, even though the city had refused to spend municipal funds on them. Edward de Bono opens Six Thinking Hats with that case: their organizer, Peter Ueberroth, explained in an interview that he had used lateral thinking to generate new concepts, a technique De Bono had presented in a talk Ueberroth attended nine years earlier.
The book came out in English in 1986; this study is based on its Spanish edition, published by Granica in 1988. It starts from a diagnosis: the main difficulty of thinking is confusion, because we try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope and creativity crowd in together, like juggling too many balls. De Bono’s proposal is to separate them: six colored hats, each tied to one kind of thinking, so that the thinker can do one thing at a time.
Acting As If: Thinking as a Role
The book’s first argument is almost theatrical. If you deliberately act as if you were a thinker (De Bono invokes the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker), he argues, you will end up becoming one. Intention is not enough: you have to make the moves, like the Tibetan who does not merely intend to pray but actually spins the prayer wheel. The hats are the tangible structure that turns intention into performance.
That intention is rare. De Bono asked a group of very well-educated Americans to rate their thinking skill from one to ten, and the average was eight: people are remarkably tolerant of their own thinking and cannot imagine how to improve it. In Venezuela, by contrast, Luis Alberto Machado asked, to general laughter, to be named Minister for the Development of Intelligence. Some 106,000 teachers were trained in De Bono’s thinking lessons, and by law every pupil spends two hours a week developing specific thinking skills.
A role also protects the ego. Many people find it hard to see themselves as wrong or foolish, but they accept a well-defined role and take pride in playing it well, as actors do. That is why people who want to be negative often shelter behind the role of devil’s advocate, which is very close to the black hat. De Bono breaks the thinker’s role into six parts, as different from one another as the witch and the prince in a pantomime: changing hats means changing roles.
First the Map, Then the Route
De Bono distinguishes two ways of thinking. One is reactive, like driving: you read the signs and react. The other draws a map of the matter from a neutral position, and only then chooses a route. Argument belongs to the first kind: each side states its case and listens to the other only to attack it. For the author, the Western habit of argument leaves out the creative and the generative: critical thinking is good for reacting to what is put in front of us, but it produces no proposals.
To draw maps, De Bono created the PMI, the first lesson of his school thinking program: note the Plus points first, then the Minus points, and finally what is Interesting. In Sydney, a class of thirty students voted in favor of being paid five dollars a week to go to school; after doing a PMI, and without the teacher suggesting anything, twenty-nine changed their minds. The six hats work like the colors of a printed map: each one is printed separately, and at the end the whole picture appears.
The author also contrasts, in a version he himself calls somewhat idealized, Western and Japanese meetings. In the former, participants arrive with their conclusions, and ideas are carved out through argument. In the latter, no one brings a preconceived idea: each person contributes, in turn, a piece of neutral information, the map fills in, and the route becomes obvious. The white hat lets a group act as if it were in a Japanese meeting.
Six Hats, Six Colors
Each hat takes its name from a color, and the color recalls its function:
- White: facts and figures, presented neutrally, as a computer would. It separates checked facts from facts that are only believed to be true.
- Red: emotions, feelings, hunches and intuitions, with no need to justify them.
- Black: negative judgment: what is wrong, the risks, and why something will not work. It is not argument but an objective attempt to put the negatives on the map.
- Yellow: positive assessment: the value and benefits of an idea, with logical support for them.
- Green: creativity: alternatives, new ideas and provocations.
- Blue: control of the process. It is the orchestra conductor who decides which hat to use and when.
The names are colors rather than functions for a practical reason. Asking someone for their emotional reaction rarely gets an honest answer, because being emotional is thought to be wrong, but “red hat” is a neutral phrase. And it is easier to ask someone to take off the black hat for a moment than to ask them to stop being so negative. Thinking becomes a game with clear rules, not a matter of exhortation.
According to De Bono, the white hat demands the most skill. In one example, someone claims there is a growing trend of women smoking cigars. Under the white hat, the right statement is that the figures have risen over each of the last three years; calling it a trend is already an interpretation.
Yellow Before Black
One of the book’s most concrete tips concerns order. Many people put on the black hat first to dismiss impractical ideas quickly, and for many purposes that works. But it is much easier to see the faults of any new proposal than its virtues, and once the mind is set on the negative, it is very hard to see the positive. So with new ideas, De Bono asks for the yellow hat before the black one. And not only from the person proposing: everyone is responsible for looking for the benefits.
Nor should the black hat be a disguise. Negative feelings belong under the red hat, and the black hat is kept for judgment: whether something clashes with experience, what could go wrong in the future, what risks it carries. Without the formality of the hats, the author warns, some thinkers would get stuck in a single mode, usually the black one.
The Green Hat: Movement and Provocation
Green is the hat of creative and lateral thinking. Its key is replacing judgment with movement: using an idea for where it can take you, not for whether it is right. It is not enough, De Bono insists, to postpone or suspend judgment, as other approaches propose; each idea has to be used actively to move on to another. Green also includes the creative pause: stopping at any point to consider alternatives, with no reason needed.
To provoke, De Bono proposes a marker word, rendered op in the Spanish edition and short for provocative operation: a white flag that forbids killing the idea with the black hat. One of his provocations is that a factory polluting a river should be located downstream. From it comes a practical idea: a law requiring every factory’s water intake to sit downstream of its own outflow, so that it is the first to detect its own pollution. Other routes to provocation are reversal and the random word.
The Blue Hat: Setting the Sequence
Blue is the hat of control: it thinks about the thinking. It sets the focus, defines the problems, frames the questions, decides which thinking tasks to carry out, and handles the summary and conclusions. It also makes sure the rules of the game are respected. It can call for a hat from time to time or design a full sequence in advance, like the choreography of a ballet.
The order depends on the situation. If a subject stirs strong emotions, De Bono suggests starting with red, so that feelings are out in the open; otherwise, they may slip in by other routes, such as an excess of black-hat thinking. Then comes white, to put the information on the table, and then yellow, for the proposals. There is no need, he adds, to use the hats all the time, and the method works best when a whole organization shares its language.
A Shorthand for Thinking
The book has two central aims: to simplify thinking, so one thing can be handled after another, and to allow a switch of mode without offending anyone. The hats work as a precise shorthand, and De Bono argues that their very artificiality is their greatest value. With the same candor, he admits that his chemical explanation of the method, the idea that the hats might trigger different chemicals in the brain, goes beyond what was known at the time.
For researchers, the book is a practical proposal supported by examples and anecdotes rather than studies with data. For educators, it offers a neutral language for asking students for one kind of thinking at a time, in the spirit of the PMI. For professionals, it is a way to run meetings in which argument gives way to the map. The article on creative thinking techniques for educators presents the method alongside other techniques, and the one on creativity at work covers how to bring these tools to teams.
In the creativity course, Week 7 is devoted to applying lateral thinking techniques, the green hat’s territory.
Original source: De Bono, E. (1988). Seis sombreros para pensar [Six thinking hats] (M. Pandolfo, Trans.). Ediciones Juan Granica. (Original work published 1986).
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