Shift Happens: Put On Your Thinking Hat
managing change, part 2
Today we continue our three-week series on planning and discernment. Last week we addressed some of the WHAT. Today I share one of my favorite tools for group exploration, which is a bit of HOW. It’s based on the work of Edward de Bono, a psychologist and physician who died last year at age 88. De Bono coined the term lateral thinking, which is the practice of moving beyond the obvious and finding solutions through creative reasoning. (Fun fact: improv is all about lateral thinking; in fact, my brother-in-law was in an improv group in college called De Bono. Tagline: a rich lather of lateral thinking).
De Bono’s most famous legacy was the thinking hats, a way of helping groups get in sync by explicitly working on one kind of information at a time. The idea is for a group to be intentional about putting on the same hat and exploring the topic fully from that vantage point. (I’m going to share the hats as de Bono originally envisioned them, with some commentary from me at the end.)
White hat: think “white paper” – facts, figures, data, analysis
Red hat: think “fire” – emotions, intuitions, impressions
Yellow hat: think “sunshine” – optimism, hopefulness: what if things went as beautifully as possible?
Black hat: think “stern judge” – pessimism, risk: what could go wrong
Green hat: think “vegetation and growth” – new ideas, brainstorming, ideating
Blue hat: think “wide-open sky” – processes, next steps, big picture management
I imagine many of you read that list and identified the hat you like to wear most often, or have to wear even if you don’t prefer it. Or maybe you pictured the person who acts as if the black hat is stapled to their head. But the hat metaphor allows for some flexibility and playfulness–with some trust and humor, even the “just the facts” person can don the red or yellow hat. After all, you can always take it off again! This framework also honors that the naysayer is serving an important function. We need to tend to the risks and threats. We just don’t want to do it while we’re in green-hat creative space.
I’ve shared the hats with clients and cohorts, and many have been quite taken with the idea. One person went out and found a presentation that includes a suggested order for the hats depending on the kind of group work you’re doing (evaluation, design, etc.) Another bought hats for the elders in her church! (Aren’t they cute?)
Very important addendum: As someone who does a lot of professional work around antiracism and inclusion, I love the thinking hats because they privilege many different kinds of knowing. And it’s dangerous and counterproductive for groups to act as if we’re always in objective facts and figures mode without acknowledging our emotional reactions and even our biases.
However, we need to be culturally literate and sensitive to the meanings that colors convey for our people. And I recommend we move away from the white and black colors altogether, lest we fall into a white/black, good/bad dichotomy. When I introduced this concept recently, I changed the black hat to gray and compared it to storm clouds–where on the horizon do we see “bad weather” ahead? I never came up with a good alternative for white, so we used orange, simply because that was the marker I had handy when we wrote the hats on the flip chart. Maybe you have a suggestion! One group suggested symbols on the hats instead of colors: graph paper for the facts and figures hat, a sunflower for optimism, etc. Make this framework your own.
We’ll be back next week to wrap up our series. In the meantime, here’s last week’s article in case you missed it.
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What I’m Up To
I’m preaching this weekend at Trinity Presbyterian in Herndon. Watch via livestream at 10:15 Eastern.
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Link Love
50 year old church cookbooks. [Chef’s kiss]