Six Thinking Hats

 

The White Hat

 

Think of paper.

Think of a computer printout.

The white hat is about information.

When the white hat is in use, everyone focuses directly and exclusively on information.

What information do we have?

What information do we need?

What information is missing?

What questions do we need to ask?

How are we going to get the information we need?

 

Six Frames For Thinking about Information

 

The information can range from hard facts and figures that can be checked to soft information like opinions and feelings.

If you express your own feeling, that is red hat, but if you report on someone else expressing a feeling, that is white hat.

When two offered pieces of information disagree, there is no argument on that point.

Both pieces of information are put down in parallel.

Only if it becomes essential to choose between them will the choice be made.

The white hat is usually used toward the beginning of a thinking session as a background for the thinking that is going to take place.

The white hat also can be used toward the end of the session as a sort of assessment: 

Do our proposals fit in with the existing information?

The white hat is neutral.

The white hat reports on the world.

The white hat is not for generating ideas though it is permissible to report on ideas that are in use or have been suggested.

A very important part of the white hat is to define the information that is missing and needed.

The white hat defines the questions that should be asked.

The white hat lays out the means (such as surveys and questionnaires) for obtaining the needed information.

White hat energy is directed at seeking out and laying out information.

 

Facts and Figures

 

Can you role-play being a computer?

Just give the facts in a neutral and objective manner.

Never mind the interpretation: 

just the facts, please.

What are the facts in this matter?

Computers are not yet emotional (though we shall probably have to make them emotional if they are to think intelligently).

We expect a computer to show us the facts and figures on demand.

We do not expect a computer to argue with us and to use its facts and figures only in support of its argument.

Too often the facts and figures are embedded in an argument.

The facts are used for some purpose rather than presented as facts.

Facts and figures can never be treated objectively when put forward as part of an argument.

So we badly need a switch that says: 

"Just the facts please — without the argument."

Unfortunately, Western thinking, with its argument habits, prefers to give a conclusion first and then to bring in the facts to support that conclusion.

In contrast, in the map-making type of thinking that I am advocating, we have to make the map first and then choose the route.

That means that we have to have the facts and figures first.

So white hat thinking is a convenient way of asking for the facts and figures to be put forward in a neutral and objective manner.

At one time a mammoth antitrust case was being pursued against International Business Machines in the United States.

The case was eventually dropped probably because it was realized that the US needed the strength of IBM in order to compete with the highly organized Japanese electronic competition.

It has also been suggested that there was another reason for dropping the case.

IBM provided so many documents (about seven million, I believe) that no court could cope with the volume.

If the judge dies during the course of a case, the case has to start all over again.

Since judges are not appointed until they are relatively old enough to be relatively wise, there was a very good chance of the judge dying in the course of the case.

So the case was un-triable unless a very young judge was appointed in order to make this case his or her whole career.

The point of this story is that it is possible to reply to a request for facts and figures with so much information that the asker is overwhelmed by the amount. 

…If you want the facts and figures you can (expletive deleted) have them.

All of them.

This sort of response is understandable because any attempt to simplify the facts could be seen as a selection of facts to make a particular case.

In order to avoid being drowned in information, the person requesting the white hat thinking can focus his or her request in order to draw forth the needed information. 

…Give me your broad white hat thinking on unemployment. 

…Now give me the figures for school-leavers six months after they have left school.

The framing of suitable focusing questions is part of the normal process of asking for information.

Lawyers skilled in cross-examination do this all the time.

Ideally, the witness should be wearing the white thinking hat and should answer the questions factually.

Judges and courtroom lawyers might find the white hat idiom most convenient. 

…As I said, he returned to his apartment at six-thirty in the morning because he had spent the whole night gambling. 

…Mr.Jones, did you actually see the defendant gambling on the night of June 30, or did he tell you he had been gambling?

… No, Your Honor.

But he goes gambling almost every night. …Mr.Jones, if you were wearing the white thinking hat what might you have said?

… I observed the defendant return to his apartment at six-thirty in the morning on July 1. …Thank you.

You may step down.

It has to be said that lawyers in a courtroom are always trying to make a case.

Their questions are therefore framed to support their line of argument or to destroy the line of argument of the other side.

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of white hat thinking.

The role of the judge is a curious one.

In the Dutch legal system there is no jury.

The three judges or assessors try to use pure white hat thinking in order to find out the facts of the case.

Their task is to make the "map" and then to pass judgement.

This does not seem to be the case in England or the United States, where the judge is there to preserve the rules of evidence and then to respond to the evidence extracted by the lawyers either directly or by means of a jury.

So any person framing questions in order to extract information needs to be sure that he or she is using the white thinking hat himself or herself.

Are you really trying to get the facts or to build up a case for an idea forming in your head?

… Last year there was a twenty-five percent increase in the sale of turkey meat in the US, due to the interest in dieting and the concern with health.

Turkey meat is perceived as being "lighter." …

Mr.Fitzler, I have asked you to put on your white hat.

The fact is the twenty-five percent increase.

The rest is your interpretation. …No, sir.

Market research clearly shows that the reason people give for buying turkey meat is that they think it is lower in cholesterol. …Well then you have two facts.

Fact one: 

that turkey meat sales have risen by twenty-five percent in the last year.

Fact two: 

some market research shows that people claim to buy turkey meat because of their concern with cholesterol.

The white hat gives a sort of direction to aim toward in dealing with information.

We can aim to play the white hat role as well as possible.

This means aiming to get the pure facts.

It is obvious that the white hat role involves some skill — perhaps more than the other hats. 

… There is a rising trend in the number of women smoking cigars. 

… That is not a fact. 

… It is.

I have the figures here. 

… What your figures show is that for each of the last three years the number of women smoking cigars has risen above the level for the previous year. 

… Isn't that a trend?

… It could be.

But that is an interpretation.

To me a trend suggests something that is happening and will continue to happen.

The figures are the fact.

It may be that women are smoking more cigars because they are smoking more anyway possibly due to increased anxiety.

Or it may simply be that over the last three years cigar makers have spent an unusual amount of money persuading women to smoke cigars.

The first is a trend that could provide opportunities.

The second is much less of an opportunity.

…I simply used the word trend to describe rising figures.

That may be a fair use of the word trend, but there is the other use with the implication of an ongoing process.

So it might be better to use pure white hat thinking and to say: 

"For the last three years the figures show an increase in the number of women smoking."

Then we can discuss what this means and what it may be due to.

In this sense white hat thinking becomes a discipline which encourages the thinker to separate quite clearly in his or her own mind what is fact and what is extrapolation or interpretation.

It might be imagined that politicians would have considerable difficulty with white hat thinking.

 

 

Whose Fact Is It?

 

Is it a fact or a likelihood?

Is it a fact or is it a belief?

Are there any facts?

Much of what passes for fact is simply a comment made in good faith or is a matter of personal belief at the moment.

Life has to proceed.

It is not possible to check out everything with the rigor demanded of a scientific experiment.

So in practice we establish a sort of two-tier system: 

believed facts and checked facts.

We are certainly allowed to put forward believed facts under white hat thinking, but we must make it absolutely clear that these are second-class facts. 

…I think I am right in saying that the Russian merchant fleet carries a significant part of world trade . 

…I once read that the reason Japanese executives have such large expense accounts is that they give all their salary to their wives. 

…I believe I am right in saying that the new Boeing 757 is much quieter than the previous generation of aircraft. 

…The irritated reader might point out that these "weasel" phrases allow someone to say virtually anything and to get away with it. 

…Someone once told me that he had heard from a friend that Churchill secretly admired Hitler.

The way is open to allegation, gossip and hearsay. This is quite true. 

Nevertheless, we do have to have a way of putting forward believed facts.

The important point is the use to which the facts are to be put.

Before we act upon a fact or make it the basis for a decision, we do need to check it.

So we assess which of the believed facts could be useful and then proceed to try and verify it.

For example, if the believed quietness of the Boeing 757 is vital to the siting of an airport, then we certainly need to take that from the "believed" status to the "checked" status.

The key rule for white hat thinking is that something should not be put forward at a higher level than is actually the case.

When the statement is properly framed as a belief, then the input is permissible.

Keep in mind the two-tier system.

Let me repeat that we do definitely need the belief tier because the tentative, the hypothetical and the provocative are essential for thinking.

They provide the frameworks which move ahead of the facts.

We come now to a rather difficult point.

When does "belief" become "opinion"?

I can "believe" that the Boeing 757 is quieter.

I can also "believe" (opinion) that women smoke more because they are now under more stress.

Let me say at once that your own opinion is never permissible under white hat thinking.

That would destroy the whole purpose of the white hat.

You can, of course, report the actual opinion of someone else. 

… It is Professor Schmidt's opinion that man-powered flight will never be possible.

Note very carefully that the belief level of fact simply means something which you believe to be a fact but have not yet checked out thoroughly.

You might prefer to have the two tiers as

1. checked fact, and

2. unchecked fact (belief).

In the end it is the attitude that matters.

When wearing the white hat, the thinker puts forward neutral "ingredient" statements.

These are laid on the table.

There can be no question of using them to push a particular point of view.

As soon as a statement seems to be used to further a point of view, it is suspect: 

the white hat role is being abused.

In time the white hat rule becomes second nature.

The thinker no longer tries to sneak in statements in order to win arguments.

There develops the neutral objectivity of a scientific observer or an explorer who notes carefully the different fauna and flora without any notion of a further use for them.

The map-maker's task is to make a map.

The white hat thinker lays out the "specimens" on the table — like a schoolboy emptying his pockets of some coins, some chewing gum and a frog.

 

 

Thinking Japanese-Style Input

 

Discussion, argument and consensus.

If no one puts forward an idea, where do ideas come from?

Make the map first.

The Japanese never acquired the Western habit of argument.

It may be that disagreement was too impolite or too risky in a feudal society.

It may be that mutual respect and saving face are too important to allow the attack of argument.

It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: 

argument often has a strong ego base.

The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong.

It seems odd to us that they do not argue.

It seems odd to them that we cherish argument.

At a Western-style meeting the participants sit there with their points of view and in many cases the conclusion they wish to see agreed upon.

The meeting then consists of arguing through these different points of view to see which one survives the criticism and which one attracts the most adherents.

Modifications and improvements do take place in the initial ideas.

But it tends to be a matter of "marble sculpture," that is to say starting with a broad block and then carving it down to the end product.

A Western-style consensus meeting is less fiercely argumentative because there are no outright winners or losers.

The output is one that is arrived at by everyone and agreeable to everyone.

This is more like "clay sculpture": 

there is a core around which pieces of clay are placed and molded to give the final output.

Japanese meetings are not consensus meetings.

It is hard for Westerners to understand that Japanese participants sit down at a meeting without any preformed ideas in their heads.

The purpose of the meeting is to listen.

So why is there not a total and unproductive silence?

Because each participant in turn puts on the white hat and then proceeds to give his piece of neutral information.

Gradually the map gets more complete.

The map gets richer and more detailed.

When the map is finished the route becomes obvious to everyone.

I am not suggesting that this process takes place at just one meeting.

It may be stretched out over weeks and months with many meetings involved.

The point is that no one puts forward a ready-made idea.

Information is offered in white hat fashion.

This information slowly organizes itself into an idea.

The participants watch this happen.

The Western notion is that ideas should be hammered into shape by argument.

The Japanese notion is that ideas emerge as seedlings and are then nurtured and allowed to grow into shape.

The above is a somewhat idealized version of the contrast between Western argument and Japanese information input.

It is my intention here to make this contrast rather than to follow those who believe that everything Japanese is wonderful and should be emulated.

We cannot change cultures.

So we need some mechanism that will allow us to override our argument habits.

The white hat role does precisely this.

When used by everyone during a meeting, the white hat role can imply: 

"Let's all play act being Japanese in a Japanese meeting."

It is to make this sort of switch in a practical manner that we need artificial devices and idioms like the white thinking hat.

Exhortation and explanation have little practical value.

(I do not want to get into an explanation of why the Japanese are not more inventive.

Invention can require an ego-based culture with cantankerous individuals able to persist with an idea that seems mad to all around.

We can do it in a more practical manner with the deliberate provocations of lateral thinking, which I discuss elsewhere and also in the section on green hat thinking.)

 

 

Facts, Truth and Philosophers

 

How true is a fact?

Of what value are the language games of philosophy?

Absolute truths and "by and large."

Truth and facts are not as closely related as most people seem to imagine.

Truth is related to a word-game system known as philosophy.

Facts are related to checkable experience.

The practical-minded who are not much concerned with such matters can skip to the next chapter.

If every swan we happen to see is white, can we make the bold statement that "all swans are white"?

We can and we do.

For the moment that statement is a true summary of our experience.

In this sense it is also a fact.

The first black swan that we see makes the statement untrue.

So we have switched from true to untrue with remarkable abruptness.

Yet if we are looking at facts, one hundred white swan experiences are still set against one black swan experience.

So as a matter of experienced fact we can say: 

"most swans are white"; 

"by and large swans are white"; 

"slightly more than ninety-nine percent of swans are white."

This "by and large" stuff is immensely practical (by and large children like ice cream; by and large women use cosmetics) but of no use at all to logicians.

The "all" is essential in the statement "all swans are white."

This is because logic has to move from one absolute truth to another.

If this is true … then this follows …"

When we come across the first black swan, the statement "all swans are white" becomes untrue.

Unless we choose to call the black swan something else.

Now it becomes a matter of words and definitions.

If we choose to keep whiteness as an essential part of the definition of a swan, then the black swan is something else.

If we drop whiteness as an essential part of the definition, then we can include the black swan and we base the definition of a swan on other features.

It is the design and manipulation of such definitions that is the essence of philosophy.

White hat thinking is concerned with usable information.

So the "by and large" and "on the whole" idioms are perfectly acceptable.

It is the purpose of statistics to give these rather vague idioms some specificity.

It is not always possible to collect such statistics, so we often have to use the two-tier system (belief, checked fact).

… By and large corporations that base their spending on extrapolated future sales run into trouble.

(It is possible to point to a few companies that have done this and been successful.) 

… Sales will tend to rise if prices are lowered.

(When house prices rise there may actually be increased sales for reasons of speculation, fear of inflation and fear of being left behind.) 

… If you work hard, you will be successful in life.

(A lot of hard-working people are not particularly successful.)

The spectrum of likelihood might be expressed as follows:

• Always true
• Usually true
• Generally true
• By and large
• More often than not
• About haIf the time
• Often
• Sometimes true
• Occasionally true
• Been known to happen
• Never true
• Cannot be true (contradictory)

How far along this spectrum is it permissible to go with the white hat role?

As before, the answer to that question lies in the framing of the information.

For example, it can be useful to know things that happen only very occasionally.

… Measles is usually harmless, but it can sometimes be followed by secondary infections, such as ear infections. 

… In very rare cases inoculation can be followed by encephalitis. 

… When irritated this breed of dog has been known to snap at children.

Obviously there is a value in being aware of this sort of information.

There is also a dilemma.

In the second example given, people's perception of the danger of encephalitis following inoculation may be thousands of times greater than the actual statistical danger.

So it can be important to give actual figures in order to avoid inadvertent misinformation.

Are anecdotes acceptable under white hat thinking?

… There was a man who fell out of an airplane without a parachute and survived. 

…Ford is said to have designed the Edsel on the basis of market research and it was a total disaster.

These may indeed be statements of fact and as such the white hat thinker has the right to put them forward.

They must be framed as "anecdotes" or "instances." 

… Designs based on market research can often fail.

Take for instance the Edsel car, the design of which is said to have been based on market research.

It was a total failure.

The above statement is not legitimate white hat thinking — unless there is much more support for the claim that designs based on market research fail.

Cats can fall off roofs but that is not normal behavior.

Exceptions stand out simply because they are exceptions.

We notice black swans because they are usually in a tiny minority.

We notice the man who survives a fall from an aircraft without a parachute because it is somewhat unusual.

The Edsel is always referred to for the same reason.

The purpose of white hat thinking is to be practical.

So we must be able to put forward all sorts of information.

The key point is to frame it properly.

… All the experts predict that the interest rate will fall by the end of the year. 

…I talked to four experts and each of them predicted that the interest rate will fall by the end of the year. 

…I talked to Mr.Flint, Mr.Ziegler, Ms. Cagliatto and Mr.Suarez and all of them predicted that the interest rate will fall by the end of the year.

Here we see three levels of precision.

Even the third level may not be good enough.

I may want to know when you talked to these experts.

There is nothing absolute about white hat thinking.

It is a direction in which we strive to get better.

 

 

Who Puts on the Hat?

 

Put on your own hat.

Ask someone to put on the hat.

Ask everyone to put on the white hat.

Choose to answer with the hat on.

Most situations are covered with the above statements.

… What it amounts to is that you can ask, be asked or choose.

What went wrong with our sales campaign?

… To answer that I am going to put on my white hat.

We reached thirty-four percent of retailers.

Of these only sixty percent took the product.

Of those who took the product forty percent took two items on a trial basis.

Of the people we spoke to seventy percent said the price was too high.

There are two competitive products on the market with lower prices.

… Now give me your red hat thinking.

… We have a poor product which is overpriced.

We have a bad image in the market.

The competition's advertising is better and there is more of it.

We do not attract the best salespeople.

The "feel" aspects of the red hat thinking may be more important in this instance.

But these "feel" aspects could not be put forward under the white hat except in reporting what potential customers had said.

… Let's start off by all putting on our white thinking hats and telling what we know about juvenile crime.

What are the figures?

Where are the reports?

Who can give evidence?

… You have told me that you are going to order Prime computers.

Could you give me your white hat thinking on that?

… I don't want your guesses on what would happen if we lowered our trans-Atlantic fare to two hundred fifty dollars.

I want your white hat thinking.

It is clear that white hat thinking excludes such valuable things as hunch, intuition, judgement based on experience, feeling, impression and opinion.

That is, of course, the purpose of having the white hat: 

to have a way of asking only for information.

… You have asked for my white hat thinking on why I am changing jobs.

The salary is no better.

The perks are no better.

The distance from home is no different.

The career prospects are the same.

The type of job is identical.

That is all I can say under the white hat.

 

 

Summary of White Hat Thinking

 

Imagine a computer that gives the facts and figures for which it is asked.

The computer is neutral and objective.

It does not offer interpretations or opinions.

When wearing the white thinking hat, the thinker should imitate the computer.

The person requesting the information should use focusing questions in order to obtain information or to fill in information gaps.

In practice there is a two-tier system of information.

The first tier contains checked and proven facts — first-class facts.

The second tier contains facts that are believed to be true but have not yet been fully checked — second-class facts.

There is a spectrum of likelihood ranging from "always true" to "never true."

In between there are usable levels such as "by and large," "sometimes," and "occasionally."

Information of this sort can be put out under the white hat, provided the appropriate "frame" is used to indicate the likelihood.

White hat thinking is a discipline and a direction.

The thinker strives to be more neutral and more objective in the presentation of information.

You can be asked to put on the white thinking hat or you can ask someone to put it on.

You can also choose to put it on or to take it off.

The white (absence of color) indicates neutrality.

 

 

 

The Yellow Hat

The Positive Spectrum

Thinking Reasons and Logical Support

Constructive Thinking

Speculation

Relation to Creativity

Summary of Yellow Hat Thinking

 

Think of sunshine.

Think of optimism.

Under the yellow hat a thinker deliberately sets out to find whatever benefit there may be in a suggestion.

Under the yellow hat the thinker tries to see how it may be possible to put the idea into practice.

The yellow hat is a harder hat to wear than the black hat.

There is a natural mechanism in the brain that helps us to avoid dangers.

There is no such natural mechanism for the yellow hat.

For this reason most people are much better using the black hat than the yellow hat.

We need to develop "value sensitivity."

That means being as sensitive to value as we already are sensitive to danger.

That is a habit that has to be developed.

I have sat in on many creative meetings where excellent ideas have been generated.

Unfortunately, the people present do not see the value in their own ideas.

It is a waste of time setting out to be creative if you are not going to recognize a good idea.

That is why the development of value sensitivity is so very important.

The yellow hat has a high value because it forces people to spend time seeking out value.

Sometimes there are big surprises under the yellow hat.

Something that did not seem very interesting suddenly has a high value.

Even the most unattractive ideas can be found to have some value, if we look hard enough.

The yellow hat should be logically based.

There should be some reason given for the value put forward.

The yellow hat is a judgement hat and is not based on fantasy.

What are the values?

For whom?

Under what circumstances?

How are the values delivered?

'What other values are there?

 

Speculative-Positive

Positive thinking.

Yellow is for sunshine and brightness.

Optimism.

Focus on benefit.

Constructive thinking and making things happen.

Being positive is a choice.

We can choose to look at things in a positive way.

We can choose to focus on those aspects of a situation that are positive.

We can search for benefits.

Negative thinking may protect us from mistakes, risk taking and danger.

Positive thinking has to be a mixture of curiosity, pleasure, greed and the desire to "make things happen."

It could be argued that man's progress depends on this desire to make things happen.

In my book about success, Tactics: The Art and Science of Success, the one thing that characterized successful people was this overwhelming desire to make things happen.

I have termed the yellow hat "speculative-positive" because with any plan or action we are looking forward into the future.

That is where the action or plan is going to be worked out.

We can never be as certain about the future as we are about the past, so we have to speculate as to what might happen.

We set out to do something because it is worth doing.

It is our assessment of this "worth" or value that provides the "positive" aspect of speculative-positive.

Even when we look at something that has happened, we can choose to look at the positive aspects or extract a positive interpretation.

… The positive thing is that now we know how he is going to act.

The uncertainty is over.

… Let's put on our yellow hats and look at the positive aspects.

Kodak has decided to go into the instant-camera market.

So they will have to advertise their products.

That will increase the public's awareness of the merits of instant photography.

That should help our sales — especially if the public perceives that our product is better.

… Failing that examination was the best thing that could have happened to her.

She would not have been happy as a teacher.

For a few people, being positive is a natural habit of mind.

Most people will be positive when they are putting forward an idea of their own.

Most people will be positive about an idea if they immediately see something in it for themselves.

Self-interest is a strong basis for positive thinking.

The yellow thinking hat does not have to await such motivations.

The yellow thinking hat is a deliberate device which the thinker chooses to adopt.

The positive aspect is not the result of seeing merit in the idea but precedes this.

The yellow hat comes first.

The thinker puts on the yellow hat and then follows its requirements to be positive and optimistic.

In the printing analogy that I used earlier, the yellow hat puts on the yellow color just as the red hat puts on the red color.

… Before you do anything else I want you to put on your yellow hat and to tell me what you think about this new approach.

… You have told me all the reasons why you do not like the idea and why it will probably fail.

Now I want you to put your yellow thinking hat firmly in place.

What do you see now?

… From a yellow hat point of view, can you see any merit in making this fitting out of plastic instead of metal?

The cost would be about the same.

… I have this idea of selling potato chips in a twin pack.

No one seems to like it.

Will you yellow hat it for me?

… Right now I do not want a balanced view or an objective view.

I want a definite yellow hat view.

… My black hat tells me that this new cheap lighter could hurt our sales.

But my yellow hat tells me that the cheap lighter could kill the middle market and force some buyers up to the expensive market and so benefit us.

… It is hard to wear a yellow hat at the moment.

But the newspaper strike could make people realize how much they missed their papers and how newspapers are much better than television for some things.

Although yellow hat thinking is positive, it requires just as much discipline as the white hat or the black hat.

It is not just a matter of making a positive assessment of something that turns up.

It is a deliberate search for the positive.

Sometimes this search is futile.

…I am wearing my yellow thinking hat but I cannot find anything positive to say.

…I will put on my yellow hat but I do not expect to find anything positive.

It may be claimed that unless a positive aspect is obvious, it cannot really be worth much.

It may be claimed that there is no point in cudgeling one's brain to find remote positive points that will have little practical value.

This is to misunderstand perception.

There may be very powerful positive points that are not at all obvious at first sight.

That is how entrepreneurs work.

They see the value that those around them have not yet spotted.

Value and benefit are by no means always obvious.

 

The Positive Spectrum

When is optimism foolishness?

From the hopeful to the logical.

What is realism?

There are people who will think well of a con man even after he has deceived them.

They feel that he was sincere at the time and that he was let down by events or colleagues.

They remember his persuasiveness and how they enjoyed being persuaded.

There are Pollyanna-type people who are optimistic to the point of foolishness.

There are people who seriously expect to win major prizes in a lottery and seem to base their lives on this hope.

There are industrialists who look at the huge aspirin market and feel that if they could only get a tiny part of it, it would be well worthwhile.

At what point does optimism become foolishness and foolish hope?

Should yellow hat thinking have no restraints?

Should yellow hat thinking take no account of likelihood?

Should that sort of thing be left to black hat thinking?

The positive spectrum ranges from the over-optimistic at one extreme to the logical-practical at the other.

We have to be careful how we handle this spectrum.

History is full of impractical visions and dreams which inspired the effort that eventually made those dreams a reality.

If we restrict our ye! low hat thinking to what is sound and well known, there is going to be little progress.

The key point is to look at the action that follows the optimism.

If that action is to be no more than hope (like the hope of winning a lottery prize or the hope that some miracle will rescue the business), then such optimism may be misplaced.

If the optimism is going to lead to some action in the chosen direction, it becomes more difficult.

Overoptimism usually leads to failure, but not always.

It is those who expect to succeed who do succeed.

… There is a remote chance that someone survived the crash-landing on the glacier.

We must go and look.

… It is possible that this new party will split the opposition vote.

… If we invest heavily in promoting this film, we should have a success on our hands.

… There is a chance it will be chosen car of the year.

We should be prepared to follow that up in our publicity.

It may not happen but we have to be ready.

As with the other thinking hats, the purpose of the yellow hat is to color the notional thinking map.

For this reason optimistic suggestions should be noted and put on the map.

There is no need to assess them in detail before putting them on the map.

Nevertheless, it is worth labeling such suggestions with a rough estimate of likelihood.

A simple likelihood classification can be drawn up:

Proven

Very likely, based on experience and what we know

Good chance — through a combination of different things

Even chance

No better than possible

Remote or long shot

This is somewhat similar to the one used for white hat thinking.

We may choose never to back a long shot, but that long shot needs to be on the map.

If it is on the map, we have the choice of rejecting it or trying to improve the odds.

If it is not put on the map, we have no choice at all.

… I know he is very busy and very expensive but get in touch with him and invite him to open the conference.

He may just accept.

At worst he can only say no.

… Every girl wants to be an actress and only a very few succeed, so the chances of success are not great.

However, some people do make it, so try if you want to.

… You are not likely to find any hidden art treasure in a village antique shop.

But then most hidden art treasures were in places no one expected to find them.

 

Thinking Reasons and Logical Support

What is the positive view based upon?

Why do you think it will happen this way?

Background reasons for the optimism.

A positive assessment may be based on experience, available information, logical deduction, hints, trends, guesses and hopes.

Does the yellow hat thinker have to spell out the reasons for his or her optimism?

If no reasons are given, the "good feeling" may just as well be placed under the red hat as a feeling, hunch or intuition.

Yellow hat thinking should go much further.

Yellow hat thinking covers positive judgement.

The yellow hat thinker should do his or her best to find as much support as possible for the proffered optimism.

This effort should be conscientious and thorough.

But yellow hat thinking need not be restricted to those points that can be fully justified.

In other words, there should be a full effort to justify the optimism, but if that effort is not successful, the point can still be put forward as a speculation.

The emphasis of yellow hat thinking is on exploration and positive speculation.

We set out to find the possible benefits.

Then we seek to justify them.

This justification is an attempt to strengthen the suggestion.

If this logical support is not provided under the yellow hat, it is not going to be provided anywhere else.

… My yellow hat thinking suggests that omelettes would make good fast-food items.

If I look around for reasons to support that view, I might pick on diet consciousness and the preference for light foods.

I might also say that as people tend not to have eggs for breakfast any longer, there is room to have eggs at other times .

… What about a range of action gloves?

Not just gloves to keep you warm but gloves for working on the car, gloves for eating with, gloves for housework.

People must do more for themselves today.

They are also becoming more conscious of appearance and skin care.

 

Constructive Thinking

Making things happen.

Proposals and suggestions.

Imagine eight brilliant critical thinkers sitting around a table to consider means to improve the town's water supply.

None of those brilliant minds can get started until someone puts forward a proposal.

Now the full brilliance of that critical training can be unleashed.

But where does the proposal come from?

Who has been trained to put forward the proposal?

Critical thinking is a very important part of thinking, but it is by no means sufficient.

What I so strongly object to is the notion that it is enough to train critical minds.

This has been the tradition of Western thinking and it is inadequate.

Black hat thinking covers the aspect of critical thinking.

When dealing with the black thinking hat, I made it quite clear that a thinker wearing the black hat should play this role to the full: he or she should be as fiercely critical as possible.

This is an important part of thinking and it should be done well.

It is to yellow hat thinking that the constructive and generative aspect is left.

It is from yellow hat thinking that ideas, suggestions and proposals are to come.

We shall see later that the green hat (creativity) also plays an important role in designing new ideas.

Constructive thinking fits under the yellow hat because all constructive thinking is positive in attitude.

Proposals are made in order to make something better.

It may be a matter of solving a problem.

It may be a matter of making an improvement.

It may be a matter of using an opportunity.

In each case the proposal is designed to bring about some positive change.

One aspect of yellow hat thinking is concerned with reactive thinking.

This is the positive assessment aspect, which is the counterpart of the black hat negative assessment.

The yellow hat thinker picks out the positive aspects of an idea put before him or her just as the black hat thinker picks out the negative aspects.

In this section I am dealing with a different aspect of yellow hat thinking — the constructive aspect.

… To improve the water supply we could build a dam on the Elkin River, thereby creating a reservoir.

… There is abundant water in the mountains fifty miles away.

Would it be feasible to put in a pipeline?

… Normal flushing toilets use about eight gallons every time they are flushed.

There are new designs that use only one gallon.

That could save up to thirty gallons a day per person or nine million gallons a day.

… What about recycling the water?

I have heard there are new membrane methods that make it economical.

Also we would have less of a disposal problem.

Shall I look into this?

Each of these is a concrete suggestion.

Once a suggestion is on the table, then it can be developed further and eventually submitted to black hat assessment and yellow hat assessment.

… Put on your yellow hats and give me more concrete suggestions.

The more we have the better.

… John, what suggestion do you have?

How could we tackle this problem?

Get your yellow hat on.

Experts At this point someone would remark that proposals should come from the "water experts" and that it was not for amateurs to make such suggestions.

It would be the role of the amateurs with their critical thinking to assess the proposals put forward by the experts.

This is very much a political idiom.

The technicians are there to provide the ideas and the politician is there to assess them.

There may indeed be a role for this type of thinking in politics, but it does place the decision makers at the mercy of the experts.

In other areas, such as business or personal thinking, the thinker is his or her own expert and must produce the ideas.

Where do the suggestions and the proposals come from?

How does the yellow hat thinker come up with a solution?

There is no space in this book to go into the various methods of design and problem solving.

I have touched on these subjects in other books of mine.

The yellow hat proposals do not need to be special or very clever.

They might include routine ways of dealing with such matters.

They might include methods that are known to be used elsewhere.

They might include putting together some known effects in order to construct a particular solution.

Once the yellow hat has directed the thinker's mind toward coming up with a proposal, the proposal itself may not be hard to find.

… Take off your black hat.

Instead of assessing the proposals we have so far, put on your yellow hat and give us some more proposals.

… Keeping my yellow hat on, I suggest that we let private enterprise sell water at competitive prices.

… No, we are not ready to switch into black hat thinking.

I do not believe we have exhausted all possible suggestions.

Yes, we do intend to bring in experts and consultants, but let us first establish some possible directions.

So it's more yellow hat constructive thinking for the moment.

So yellow hat thinking is concerned with the generation of proposals and also with the positive assessment of the proposals.

Between these two aspects there is a third.

The third aspect is the developing or "building up" of a proposal.

This is much more than the reactive assessment of a proposal.

It is further construction.

The proposal is modified and improved and strengthened.

Under this improvement aspect of yellow hat thinking comes the correction of faults that have been picked out by black hat thinking.

As I made clear, black hat thinking can pick out the faults but has no responsibility for putting them right.

… If we hand over the water supply to private enterprise, there is a danger of the town being held to ransom by a monopoly supplier who establishes whatever price he likes.

… We could guard against that by putting a ceiling on the price.

This would be related to today's pricing with an allowance for inflation.

I want to emphasize that no special cleverness is required by this constructive thinking aspect of the yellow hat.

It is just the desire to put forward concrete proposals even if they are very ordinary.

 

Speculation

Looking into the future.

The value of "if"

The best possible scenario.

Speculation has to do with conjecture and hope.

Investors are by their nature speculators even if the word tends to be reserved for builders and currency operators.

A speculative builder builds a house without already having a customer.

Then he sets out to find a customer.

Any speculator must have a strong sense of potential benefit.

There also has to be hope.

Yellow hat thinking is more than just judgement and proposals.

It is an attitude that moves ahead of a situation with positive hope.

Yellow hat thinking sets out to glimpse possible benefits and values.

As soon as there is a glimpse of these, exploration takes place in that direction.

In practice there is a big difference between objective judgement and the intention to find positive value.

It is this reaching out and reaching forward aspect of yellow hat thinking that I am indicating with the word speculation.

… There is a new type of fast food that is becoming popular.

It is a sort of flattened chicken cooked in a Mexican style and offered as "pollo."

Put on your yellow hat and tell me what you see in this.

… There are so many different types of insurance that people get confused.

Could we have some sort of "overcoat" insurance that takes everything into account.

Take that idea away and give it some yellow hat attention.

Come back and tell me what you find.

This speculative aspect of yellow hat thinking is pure opportunity thinking.

It goes beyond problem solving and improvement.

People are forced to solve problems but no one is ever forced to look for opportunities.

However, everyone is free to look for opportunities — if they so wish.

Speculative thinking must always start off with the best possible scenario.

That is the way one can assess the maximum possible benefit from the idea.

If the benefits are poor with the best possible scenario, then the idea is not worth pursuing .

… In the best possible scenario, the other store is forced out of business and we take over the whole business for the area.

But I do not see that this would be especially profitable.

As it is, the other store only just struggles along.

… In the best possible scenario, the interest rate rises rapidly and the value of our fixed-rate transferable mortgage makes the house very salable.

If the benefits seem attractive enough in the best possible scenario, it becomes a matter of seeing how likely that scenario is — and how likely are the benefits to flow as assumed.

In its speculative aspects, yellow hat thinking envisages the best possible scenario and the maximum benefits.

Yellow hat thinking can then scale these down in a "likelihood" manner.

Finally, black hat thinking can indicate the areas of doubt.

Opportunities can arise from the extrapolation into the future of the present scene.

Opportunities also arise "if" some particular event takes place or some condition changes.

… Bond prices will rise "if" interest rates fall.

… "If' fuel prices fall, big cars will become more salable.

It is part of the speculative function of yellow hat thinking to explore possible "if" changes.

It is never a matter of basing action or decisions on the basis of an "if" exploration — although defensive action may need to be taken as with the hedging of funds or the taking out of fire insurance.

It is part of yellow hat exploration.

Part of the black hat function was also to explore "if" in the sense of risk and danger.

The corresponding part of the yellow hat function is to explore the positive equivalent of risk, which we call opportunity. …Under what conditions would this hotel chain be profitable?

… If satellite broadcasting gets established, what new opportunities is it going to offer to advertisers?

The speculative aspect of yellow hat thinking is also concerned with vision.

I mentioned the role of vision and dreams in yellow hat thinking in an earlier section.

In a sense vision goes beyond speculation because vision can set a goal which there is little hope of reaching.

In any design there is some sort of vision that comes first.

Just as a good salesman makes a sale by putting forth a marvelous vision which the client is invited to share, so the designer sells himself a positive vision of what he is trying to do.

The vision comes first and then the form and detail follow.

This vision includes both the benefits and the feasibility of the project: it can be done and it is worth doing.

It is very difficult to do anything at all without some sense of achievement and value.

…I have this vision of attractive low-cost housing, and I think I can also see how it could be done.

…I have this vision of a different type of economics which will handle wealth and productivity in a new way.

…I have this vision of thinking being taught as a fundamental subject in every school.

It has already started in some countries.

The excitement and stimulation of a vision go far beyond objective judgement.

A vision sets direction for thinking and for action.

This is a further aspect of yellow hat thinking.

 

Relation to Creativity

Difference between constructive and creative.

Effectiveness and change.

New ideas and old ideas.

Yellow hat thinking is not directly concerned with creativity.

The creative aspect of thinking is specifically covered by the green thinking hat, which we shall come to next.

It is quite true that the positive aspect of yellow hat thinking is required for creativity.

It is true that the positive assessment and constructive aspect of yellow hat thinking is vital to creativity.

Nevertheless, yellow hat thinking and green hat thinking are quite distinct.

A person may be an excellent yellow hat thinker and yet be totally uncreative.

I see a great danger in confusing the two hats because then a person who is not creative would feel that yellow hat thinking is not for him or her.

Creativity is concerned with change, innovation, invention, new ideas and new alternatives.

A person can be an excellent yellow hat thinker and never have a new idea.

The effective application of old ideas is a proper exercise of yellow hat thinking.

The ideas do not have to be new and there does not even have to be an intention to find new ideas.

Yellow hat thinking is concerned with the positive attitude of getting the job done.

Effectiveness rather than novelty is what yellow hat thinking is all about.

Some confusion occurs in the English language due to the very broad meaning of the word creative.

There are two distinct aspects.

The first aspect is that of "bringing something about."

In this sense someone might create a mess.

A carpenter creates a chair.

An entrepreneur creates a business.

The second aspect is that of "newness."

Again this is confusing because there are two sorts of newness.

The first aspect is of something which is new in the sense that it is different from what was there before; for example, a communications system that is "new" to your office even though it might be in use in thousands of others.

The second aspect of "new" is an absolute newness.

That is to say an invention or concept that has not occurred anywhere before.

In regard to artists, there is something of a dilemma.

For example, a painter clearly brings into being something that was not there before.

Since this painting is unlikely to be exactly the same as a previous painting, there is something "new"

Yet there may be no new concept or new perception in that painting.

The painter may have a strong style and then apply that style to one landscape after another.

In a sense there is a production line within a particular style.

Yellow hat thinking is very much concerned with bringing things about.

Yellow hat thinking may be concerned with taking an idea that is used elsewhere and putting it to work.

Yellow hat thinking may be concerned with generating alternative approaches to a problem.

Yellow hat thinking may even define opportunities.

But yellow hat thinking is not concerned with changing concepts or perceptions.

That is the business of green hat thinking.

Setting out to look at something in a positive way may itself create a new perception and that can occur with yellow hat thinking.

… That glass is not haIf empty but is haIf full of whisky.

Just as black hat thinking can pinpoint a fault and leave it to yellow hat thinking to correct the fault, so yellow hat thinking can define an opportunity and leave it to green hat thinking to come up with some novel way of exploiting that opportunity .

… More and more people need to park in cities.

How can we get some value out of that?

… We could raise the room prices if we could attract more business travelers to this hotel.

How could we do that?

Let us have the usual ideas and then let us put on our green thinking hats in order to find some new ideas.

 

Summary of Yellow Hat Thinking

Yellow hat thinking is positive and constructive.

The yellow color symbolizes sunshine, brightness and optimism.

Yellow hat thinking is concerned with positive assessment just as black hat thinking is concerned with negative assessment.

Yellow hat thinking covers a positive spectrum ranging from the logical and practical at one end to dreams, visions and hopes at the other end.

Yellow hat thinking probes and explores for value and benefit.

Yellow hat thinking then strives to find logical support for this value and benefit.

Yellow hat thinking seeks to put forward soundly based optimism but is not restricted to this — provided other types of optimism are appropriately labeled.

Yellow hat thinking is constructive and generative.

From yellow hat thinking come concrete proposals and suggestions.

Yellow hat thinking is concerned with operacy and with making things happen.

Effectiveness is the aim of yellow hat constructive thinking.

Yellow hat thinking can be speculative and opportunity seeking.

Yellow hat thinking also permits visions and dreams.

Yellow hat thinking is not concerned with mere positive euphoria (red hat) nor directly with creating new ideas (green hat).

 

The Green Hat

 

The green hat is the energy hat.

Think of vegetation.

Think of growth.

Think of new leaves and branches.

The green hat is the creative hat.

Under the green hat we put forward new ideas.

Under the green hat we lay out options and alternatives.

These include both the obvious alternatives and fresh ones.

Under the green hat we seek to modify and improve suggested ideas.

The value of the green hat is that a specific time is laid out for everyone to make a creative effort.

Creativity is no longer just the business of the "idea person" while everyone else sits around waiting to pounce on an idea.

When the green hat is in use everyone is expected to make a creative effort — or else keep quiet.

People do not like keeping quiet, so they make a creative effort.

The deliberate allocation of time to creative effort is very important.

It acknowledges that creativity is a key ingredient in thinking.

The "expectation" aspect is also very important.

People are very good at doing what is expected of them.

People are very good at playing the "game" that they perceive to be in progress.

The result is that people who have never thought of themselves as creative start making a creative effort.

Their confidence increases and soon they are as creative as anyone else.

Under the green hat one is permitted to put forward "possibilities."

Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe.

Without possibilities you cannot make progress.

Two thousand years ago, Chinese technology was way ahead of Western technology.

Then progress seemed to come to an end.

The explanation often given is that the Chinese did not develop the hypothesis.

Without this key piece of mental software it was impossible to make progress.

Those who believe that progress arises from the analysis of information and steps of logical deduction are totally wrong.

Without the framework of possibilities we cannot even see the information in new ways.

It is under the green hat that suggested courses of action are put forward: "We could do this, or this, or this."

The green hat is also used to overcome some of the difficulties put forward under the black hat.

The green hat may suggest modifications to an idea to avoid the difficulties.

The green hat may suggest the need for an additional idea.

The green hat includes both "off the top of the head" creativity and "deliberate creativity."

If the green hat has produced lots of ideas and possibilities, there may not be enough time at that session to consider them all.

The red hat may then be used to pick out those ideas that seem to fit a particular frame.

For instance, the frame might be "low-cost ideas" or "ideas that are easy to test."

The other ideas might be dealt with later.

In this way the energy of the green hat may still be used in a practical way.

 

 

Creative Thinking

 

 

New ideas, new concepts and new perceptions.

The deliberate creation of new ideas.

Alternatives and more alternatives.

Change.

New approaches to problems.

The green thinking hat is concerned with new ideas and new ways of looking at things.

Green hat thinking is concerned with escaping from the old ideas in order to find better ones.

Green hat thinking is concerned with change.

Green hat thinking is a deliberate and focused effort in this direction .

… Let's have some new ideas on this.

Put on your green thinking hats .

… We are bogged down.

We keep going over the same old ideas.

We desperately need a new approach.

The time has come for some deliberate green hat thinking.

Let's go.

… You have laid out the traditional approaches to this problem.

We shall come back to them.

But first let us have ten minutes of green hat thinking to see if we can come up with a fresh approach.

… This demands a green hat solution.

We need creativity because nothing else has worked.

We need creativity because we feel that things could be done in a simpler or better way.

The urge to do things in a better way should be the background to all our thinking.

There are times, however, when we need to use creativity in a deliberate and focused manner.

The green hat device allows us to switch into the creative role just as the red hat allows us to switch into the "feeling" role and the black hat into the negative role.

In fact, there may be more need for the green hat than for any other of the thinking hats.

In the exercise of creative thinking, it may be necessary to put forward as provocations ideas that are deliberately illogical.

We therefore need a way of making it clear to those around that we are deliberately playing the role of jester or clown as we seek to provoke new concepts.

Even when they are not provocations, new ideas are delicate seedlings which need the green hat to protect them from the instant frost of black hat habits.

As I have mentioned at various points, the signaling value of the six thinking hats has several aspects to it.

You can request that someone put on a particular hat and then attempt to think in that way.

You can indicate that a certain type of thinking seems desirable.

You can signal to others that you are trying to think in a particular manner — and therefore they should treat your contribution in the appropriate manner.

One of the most important aspects is that you can also signal to yourself.

This is particularly important with the green hat.

You deliberately put on the green hat, and this means that you are setting aside time for deliberate creative thinking.

This is quite different from simply waiting for ideas to come to you.

You may have no new ideas at all while wearing the green hat, but the effort has been made.

As you get better at deliberate creative thinking, you will find that the yield of ideas increases.

In this way the green hat makes creative thinking a formal part of the thinking process instead of just a luxury.

For most people the idiom of creative thinking is difficult because it is contrary to the natural habits of recognition, judgement and criticism.

The brain is designed as a "recognition machine."

The brain is designed to set up patterns, to use them and to condemn anything that does not "fit" these patterns.

Most thinkers like to be secure.

They like to be right.

Creativity involves provocation, exploration and risk taking.

Creativity involves "thought experiments."

You cannot tell in advance how the experiment is going to turn out.

But you want to be able to carry out the experiment.

… Remember, I am wearing the green hat and I am therefore allowed to say things like that.

That is what the green hat is for.

… I thought we were supposed to be wearing our green hat.

We are being much too negative.

Isn't that black hat thinking?

… My green hat contribution is to suggest that we pay long-stay prisoners a decent pension on their discharge.

That could help them get back into society, give them something to lose and prevent them from having to go back to crime.

Treat it as a provocation if you like.

… Under the protection of the green hat, I want to suggest that we fire the sales force.

The green hat by itself cannot make people more creative.

The green hat can, however, give thinkers the time and focus to be more creative.

If you spend more time searching for alternatives, you are likely to find more.

Very often creative people are only people who spend more time trying to be creative because they are more motivated by creativity.

The green hat device allows a sort of artificial motivation.

It is difficult to motivate someone to be creative, but you can easily request someone to put on his or her green hat and to give a green hat input.

Creativity is more than just being positive and optimistic.

Positive and optimistic feelings fit under the red hat.

Positive assessment fits under the yellow hat.

Green hat thinking demands actual new ideas, new approaches and further alternatives.

With white hat thinking we do expect a definite input of neutral and objective information.

With black hat thinking we do expect some specific criticisms.

With yellow hat thinking we would like to get positive comments, but this may not always be possible.

With red hat thinking we do expect to get a report on the feelings involved even if these are neutral.

With green hat thinking, however, we cannot demand an input.

We can demand an effort.

We can demand that time be set aside for generating new ideas.

Even so, the thinker may come up with nothing new.

What matters is that time has been spent in the effort.

You cannot order yourself (or others) to have a new idea, but you can order yourself (or others) to spend time trying to have a new idea.

The green hat provides a formal way of doing this.

 

Lateral Thinking

 

Lateral thinking and its relation to creativity.

Humor and lateral thinking.

Pattern switching in a self-organizing information system.

In writing about green hat thinking, I have used the word creativity because this is the word that is in general use.

Many readers of this book will never have heard of me or my concept of lateral thinking.

I also want to indicate that green hat thinking covers the broad range of creative endeavor and is not limited to lateral thinking as such.

I invented the term lateral thinking in 1967, and it is now officially part of the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary records my invention of the term.

The term lateral thinking needed to be invented for two reasons.

The first reason is the very broad and somewhat vague meaning of the word creative, as I indicated under yellow hat thinking.

Creativity seems to cover everything from creating confusion to creating a symphony.

Lateral thinking is very precisely concerned with changing concepts and perceptions; these are historically determined organizations (patterns) of experience.

The second reason is that lateral thinking is directly based on information behavior in active self-organizing information systems.

Lateral thinking is pattern switching in an asymmetric patterning system.

I know that sounds very technical, and there is no need to understand the technical basis of lateral thinking in order to use its techniques.

The technical basis is there, however, for those who want to know about it.

Just as logical thinking is based on the behavior of symbolic language (a particular universe), so lateral thinking is based on the behavior of patterning systems (also a particular universe).

As a matter of fact, there is a very close relationship between the mechanisms of humor and the mechanisms of lateral thinking.

Both depend on the asymmetric nature of the patterns of perception.

This is the basis of the sudden jump or insight after which something becomes obvious.

The deliberate techniques of lateral thinking (various forms of provocation and "movement") are directly based on the behavior of patterning systems.

The techniques are designed to help the thinker to cut across patterns instead of just following along them.

When cutting across to a new pattern is seen to make sense, we have the eureka effect.

Much of our thinking culture is directed toward the "processing" part of thinking.

We have developed excellent systems including mathematics, statistics, data processing, language and logic.

But all these processing systems can work only on the words, symbols and relationships provided by perception.

It is perception which reduces the complex world around us to these forms.

It is in perception that lateral thinking works to try and alter the established patterns.

Lateral thinking involves attitudes, idioms, steps and techniques.

I have written about these in Lateral Thinking and Lateral Thinking for Management.

This book is not the place to go over them again.

I shall, however, deal with some fundamental points of lateral thinking in the following sections, because these points are also basic to the exercise of green hat thinking.

 

Movement Instead of Judgement

 

Using an idea as a stepping stone.

Where does this take me?

The forward effect of an idea.

In normal thinking we use judgement.

How does this idea compare to what I know?

How does this idea compare to my established patterns of experience?

We judge that it does fit or we point out why it does not fit.

Critical thinking and black hat thinking are concerned directly with seeing how well a suggestion fits with what we already know.

We may call this the backward effect of an idea.

We look backward at our past experience to assess the idea.

Just as a description has to fit what it is describing, so we expect ideas to fit our knowledge.

How else could we tell if they are correct?

For most of our thinking, judgement (of both yellow and black hat types) is vital.

We could not do anything without it.

With green hat thinking, however, we have to substitute a different idiom.

We replace judgement with movement.

Movement is a key idiom of lateral thinking.

It is another term that I coined.

I want to make it absolutely clear that movement is not just an absence of judgement.

Many early approaches to creative thinking talk about deferring, suspending or delaying judgement.

I think this is much too weak, because it does not actually tell the thinker what to do — only what not to do.

Movement is an active idiom.

We use an idea for its movement value.

There are a number of deliberate ways of getting movement from an idea, including extracting the principle and focusing on the difference.

With movement we use an idea for its forward effect.

We use an idea to see where it will get us.

We use an idea to see what it will lead to.

In effect we use an idea to move forward.

Just as we use a stepping stone to move across a river from one bank to the other, so we use a provocation as a stepping stone to move across from one pattern to another.

As we shall see, provocation and movement go together.

Without the idiom of movement, we cannot use provocation.

Unless we are able to use provocation, we remain trapped within past patterns.

… I want you to use this idea for its movement value not its judgement value.

Suppose everyone became a policeman.

It was just such a provocation that led to the concept of "neighborhood watch," which I spelled out in the cover story of New York Magazine in April 1971.

The concept is now in use in twenty thousand communities in the United States.

The idea is that citizens act as extra eyes and ears for the police — in terms of preventing and detecting crime in the neighborhood.

There is said to be a significant fall in crime in areas where the idea is in use.

… Suppose we made hamburgers square.

What movement could you get out of that idea?

… Suppose there were transferable insurance bonds which one person could sell directly to another.

Green hat that idea.

This might lead to the idea that insurance was actually transferable.

People would then be risk rated themselves.

If you were an AAA type risk, you would get certain benefits from the universal insurance bond.

If you were only an AA type, you would get lesser benefits.

Sometimes we take an idea and use it as a stepping stone and end up with an idea that is quite different.

We merely extract some principle from the stepping stone and then apply that principle.

At other times we stay with a "seedling" idea and nurture it until it grows into a stout plant.

It may also be a matter of taking a vague idea and then shaping it into something concrete and practical.

All these are aspects of movement.

The key thing to remember is that we move forward with an idea or from an idea. …Take the suggestion that everyone who wants to be promoted should wear a yellow shirt or blouse.

Put on your green hat and tell me where that idea takes you.

… It leads me to think of the self-image of the person who has chosen to wear a yellow shirt.

He has to live up to that image.

… It leads me to think of some way to recognize those people who have ambition but who would not be noticed for their talent.

Maybe it would make more sense to train ambitious people and give them the skills.

… It leads me to think of the rules of the game.

The yellow shirt would be a defined rule of the game of promotion and everyone would know it.

How many employees know what they need to do to get promoted?

… It leads me to think of those people who do not want to be promoted.

They can show this by not wearing the yellow shirt.

They just want to stay in their jobs.

… It leads me to think of a way of bringing forward the leaders.

A person would need to be pretty sure of his standing with those around before he risked putting on the yellow shirt.

From this sort of movement a number of useful ideas could emerge.

None of these ideas need actually make use of a yellow shirt as such.

… Here is a suggestion for working on Saturdays and having a midweek break on Wednesday.

Can you green hat it for me?

… As no one wants to work the weekend shifts, there is a suggestion that we employ a permanent Saturday/Sunday workforce, which would be quite separate.

It seems an unworkable idea but green hat it.

In fact this last idea was tried out and worked very successfully.

Using some green hat thinking on the idea made it seem attractive enough to be tried (in this specific case yellow hat thinking might have done the same).

Movement should go far beyond the positive assessment of an idea.

Movement is a dynamic process not a judgement process.

What is interesting in this idea?

What is different in this idea?

What does this idea suggest?

What does this idea lead to?

Such questions are all part of the movement idiom.

The key point to remember is that in green hat thinking the movement idiom completely replaces the judgement idiom.

 

The Need for Provocation

 

Use of the word po.

The logic of the absurd.

Random provocation.

Scientific discoveries are always written up as if they had proceeded step by step in a logical fashion.

Sometimes this is what indeed did happen.

At other times the step-by-step logic is only a hindsight dressing up of what actually happened.

An unplanned mistake or accident took place and this provided the provocation that set off the new idea.

Antibiotics arose from the accidental contamination of a culture dish with the penicillium mold.

It is said that Columbus dared to sail across the Atlantic only because he made a serious error in calculating the distance around the world from an ancient treatise.

Nature provides such provocations.

A provocation can never be looked for because it has no place in current thinking.

Its role is to jerk thinking out of current patterns.

The logic of provocation arises directly from the logic of asymmetric patterning systems (see Po: Beyond Yes and No).

We can sit around and wait for provocations, or we can set out to produce them deliberately.

This is what happens in lateral thinking.

The ability to use provocations is an essential part of lateral thinking.

In the preceding section we looked at the movement idiom.

That is how we use provocations.

We use them for their movement value.

We can now look at how we set them up.

Many years ago I invented the word po as a symbolic indicator of an idea that was being put forward as a provocation and for its movement value.

If you like, the letters stand for provocative operation.

Po acts as a sort of white flag of truce.

If a person approached the castle wall waving a white flag, one would be breaking the rules of the game by shooting that person.

Similarly, if an idea is put forward under the protection of po, to shoot it down with black hat judgement would not be playing the game.

In a way — as I mentioned before — the word po acts in the same way as the green hat device.

A person wearing the green hat is allowed to put forward "crazy" ideas.

The green hat is much broader in scope than po but po is more specific.

So it is best to use both . …Po cars should have square wheels . …Po planes should land upside down. …Po shoppers should be paid to buy things. …Po executives should promote themselves. …Po a polluting factory should be downstream of itself.

This last provocation led to the idea of legislating that any factory built alongside a river must have its water input downstream of its own output.

In this way the factory would be the first to sample its own pollution.

The word po may also be regarded as arising from such words as hypothesis, suppose, possible and even poetry.

In all of these, an idea is put out for its forward effect — to provoke something.

By definition an absurd or illogical idea cannot exist within our ordinary experience.

Therefore the idea lies out side any existing pattern.

In this way a provocation forces us out of habitual patterns of perception.

As we move forward from the provocation, three things might happen.

We might be unable to make any movement at all.

We might drift back to the usual patterns.

We might switch to a new pattern.

Just as there are formal methods of getting movement from an idea, so there are formal ways of setting up provocations.

These provide the deliberate techniques of lateral thinking.

For example, one simple way of getting a provocation uses reversal.

You spell out the way something usually happens and then you reverse it or turn it back to front.

… Shoppers usually pay for the goods they buy.

Let us reverse that.

Po, the store pays the customers.

… This could lead to the trading stamp idea, which, in effect, paid shoppers a tiny amount for each purchase.

… This could lead to the idea that the tills are rigged so that at every thousand dollars of input they pay out a jackpot of some sort.

Provocations do not have to be absurd or illogical.

It is possible to treat quite serious ideas as provocations.

If someone brings you an idea which you do not like and which you can instantly dismiss with your black hat thinking, you can instead put on your green hat and choose to treat that idea as a provocation.

It is always possible to make this sort of choice .

… I do not see how your idea of an "honor system" store could ever work because it could so easily be abused.

But I am going to put on my green hat to treat it as a provocation.

That leads to the idea of people adding up their own bills with random checks.

Presumably mistakes would even out in each direction.

A very simple way of getting a provocation is to use a random word.

You can think of a page number in a dictionary and then open the dictionary at that page.

A second number you had thought of could give the position of the word on the page.

For example, you might think of page ninety-two, eighth word down.

Nouns are easier to use than verbs or other types of words.

A list of common nouns is easier to use than a dictionary.

Suppose we wanted some new ideas to do with cigarettes.

The random word turns out to be frog.

… So we have cigarette po frog.

A frog suggests hopping, so we could have a cigarette that went out after a short while.

This might be of benefit in preventing fires.

It could also allow a smoker to have a short smoke and then to use that cigarette later.

This in turn leads to a new brand to be called shorts, which are indeed designed to be very short and give only a two-to three-minute smoke.

… I want some ideas to do with television sets.

The random word is cheese, so television po cheese.

Cheese has holes.

Po the TV screen has holes.

What could this mean?

Perhaps there could be some "windows" which would show what was available on selected other channels.

With logic there should be a reason for saying something before it is said.

With a provocation there may not be a reason for saying something until after it is said.

The provocation brings about an effect, and it is the value of this effect which justifies the provocation.

To many people it may seem unthinkable that a random word could be of value in solving a problem.

The definition of random means that the word has no special relationship.

Yet in the logic of an asymmetric patterning system, it is easy to see why a random word works.

It provides a different starting point.

As we trace our way back from that new starting point, we increase the chance of arriving back along a track we would never have taken when thinking about the subject directly.

Just as movement is part of the basic idiom of green hat thinking, so too is provocation.

When in France you speak French; when wearing the green hat you use provocation and movement as the grammar of creativity.

 

Alternatives

 

Too easily satisfied.

Routes, options and choices.

Levels of alternative.

In school mathematics you work out a sum and get the answer.

You move on to the next sum.

There is no point in spending more time on the first sum because if you have the right answer you cannot get a better one.

Many people carry that idiom over into their thinking in later life.

As soon as they have an answer to a problem, they stop thinking.

They are satisfied with the first answer that comes along.

Real life is, however, very different from school sums.

There is usually more than one answer.

Some answers are much better than others: they cost less, are more reliable or are more easy to implement.

There is no reason at all for supposing that the first answer has to be the best one.

If time is very short and there are a great number of problems to be solved, there might be a reason for being satisfied with the first answer — but not otherwise.

Would you like your doctor to settle for the first thing that came into his or her mind and then to stop thinking about your illness?

So we acknowledge the first answer and note that we can always go back to it.

Then we set out to look for alternatives.

We set out to look for other solutions.

When we have a number of alternatives, then we can choose the best by seeing which one fits our needs and our resources.

We may have a perfectly adequate way of doing something, but that does not mean there cannot be a better way.

So we set out to find an alternative way.

This is the basis of any improvement that is not fault correction or problem solving.

So far in this section I have looked at instances where we already have a way of doing things.

Our search for alternatives is really a search for a better way.

There are also times when we do not yet have a way of proceeding.

In planning any journey we set out alternative routes.

When we have completed the mental map of a situation, we look for alternative routes to our destination.

The notion of alternatives suggests that there is usually more than one way of doing things, more than one way of looking at things.

The acknowledgment that there might be alternatives and the search for these alternatives is a fundamental part of creative thinking.

Indeed, the different techniques of lateral thinking are directed to finding new alternatives.

The willingness to look for alternatives (of perception, of explanation, of action) is a key part of green hat thinking.

… Our rival newspaper has just raised its price.

Put on your green hat and list all our alternatives.

… We have received a demand note saying that if we do not pay a large amount of money, our products in the stores will be poisoned.

Let's go through the obvious options open to us, then let's put on our green thinking hats to find some further ones.

The search for alternatives implies a creative attitude: the acceptance that there are different approaches.

The actual search for alternatives may not require any special creativity until the obvious alternatives have been spelled out.

It may simply be a matter of focusing attention on the subject and listing the known ways of dealing with it.

This is not sufficient.

Just as we need to make an effort to go beyond the first solution, so we should make a creative effort to go beyond the obvious set of alternatives.

Strictly speaking we may need only green hat thinking for this extra search.

The first part of the search could even come under white hat thinking: "Go through the approaches that are normally used in such situations."

In practice it is more convenient to put the whole search for alternatives under green hat thinking.

In business training a great deal of emphasis is put on decision making.

Yet the quality of any decision depends very much on the alternatives that are available to the decision maker.

… We are going to have to decide on a location for this holiday camp.

Put on your green hat and let me have all possible alternatives.

Then we can narrow them down.

… How are we going to distribute these computers?

What are the alternative strategies?

Many people believe that a logical scan will cover all possible alternatives.

In a closed system this may be the case, but it is rarely so in real life situations.

… There are only three possible alternatives.

We can leave the price the same.

We can lower it.

Or, we can raise it.

There is nothing else we can do.

It is true that any possible action on the price must eventually fall into one of these three choices.

Yet there are a huge number of possible variations.

We can lower the price later.

(How much later?) We can lower the price on some of the product.

We can change the product and produce a low price version.

We can change our promotion of the product to justify a higher price (leaving the price the same or even raising it).

We can lower the price for a while and then raise it again.

We could leave the price alone and give special discounts.

We could lower the price and then charge extra for options.

Once we have considered such options (and there are many, many more), we could indeed classify them under one of the three choices.

But listing the three choices does not, itself, generate all these alternatives.

It is a very common fault of rigid thinkers to outline major alternative categories and to go no further.

… What I really want to do is to both raise and lower price at the same time.

We shall create a low price commodity line and a high price premium line.

There are different levels of alternative.

I have some free time.

What shall I do with it?

I could go on holiday.

I could take a course.

I could do a lot of gardening.

I could catch up with some work.

If I decide to go on holiday, we move to the next level.

What sort of holiday do I want?

It could be a sun/sea holiday.

It could be a cruise.

It could be a sporting holiday.

If I decide on a sun/sea holiday, we move to the next level: where do I go?

It could be the Mediterranean.

It could be the Caribbean.

It could be the Pacific Islands.

Then there is the matter of choosing how to get there and where to stay.

Whenever we look for an alternative we do so within an accepted framework, which sets the level.

Usually we want to stay within that framework .

… I asked you for alternative designs for an umbrella handle and you have given me a design for a raincoat.

Occasionally we need to challenge the framework and to move upward to a higher level .

… You asked me for alternative ways of loading the trucks.

I am going to tell you that it would make more sense to send our product by train.

… You asked me to suggest media for the advertising campaign.

I am going to tell you that the money would be better spent on public relations.

By all means challenge the framework from time to time and change levels.

But also be prepared to generate alternatives within the specified level.

Creativity gets a very bad name when creative people always make a point of solving a different problem from the one they have been given.

The dilemma remains a real one: when to work within the given framework and when to break out of it.

We come now to what may be the most difficult point in all of creativity — the creative pause.

The creative pause is not there unless we choose to put it there.

Something is going along very smoothly.

We have looked for alternatives at the obvious points.

We have spelled out different approaches to the problems.

What more could we want from creativity?

I once spent ten minutes trying hard to turn off an alarm clock that was not ringing.

I had not paused to consider that the sound might have been coming from my other alarm clock.

The creative pause arises when we say: "There is no obvious reason why I should pause at this point to consider alternatives.

But I am going to."

In general we are so problem-oriented that when there are no problems we prefer to move along smoothly rather than to pause to create more thinking work for ourselves.

… I don't want to think that we have a problem here because we don't.

But I want you to put on your green hat and to have a little creative pause with regard to our normal habit of painting cars before we sell them.

… Have a green hat pause on this point: salesmen are paid commission on the sales they make.

… Consider the steering wheel of a car.

It does its job well.

Pause and green hat it.

 

Personality and Skill

 

Is creativity a matter of skill, talent or personality?

Changing masks is easier than changing faces.

Pride in the exercise of a skill.

I am often asked whether creativity is a matter of skill, talent or personality.

The correct answer is that it can be all three.

But I do not give that answer.

If we make no effort to develop the skill of creativity, it can only be a matter of talent and personality.

People are much too ready to accept that creativity is a matter of talent or personality, and since they do not have this, they had better leave creativity to others.

So I put the emphasis on the deliberate development of creative thinking skill (for example, through lateral thinking techniques).

I then point out that some people will still be better at it, just as some people are better at tennis or skiing — but most people can reach a competence level.

I do not like the idea of creativity as a special gift.

I prefer to think of it as a normal and necessary part of everyone's thinking.

We are not all going to be geniuses, but then every tennis player does not hope to win at Wimbledon.

I am always being told about people who are natural black hat thinkers.

They seem to take delight in destroying any idea or suggestion for change.

I am asked if it might be possible to soften the personality of such people.

I am asked if they could be made more tolerant of creativity even if they never want to use it themselves.

I do not think it is possible to change personality.

I do believe that if a person is shown the "logic" of creativity, there can be a permanent effect on that person's attitude toward creativity.

There are several instances in my experience where this has happened.

The most practical approach is to use the green hat idiom.

… When you are wearing your black thinking hat you do a superb job.

I do not want to diminish your critical effectiveness.

But what about the green hat?

See what you can do with that.

… Maybe you prefer to be a one-hat thinker.

Maybe you are not an all-rounder.

Maybe you can sing only one tune.

Maybe you will have to remain the negative specialist.

We shall bring you into the discussion only when we need black hat thinking.

No one likes to be considered one-sided.

A thinker who is superb with the black hat would also like to be considered at least passable with the green hat.

The clear separation of green and black hats means that the black hat expert does not feel that he has to diminish his negativity in order to be creative.

When he is being negative he can be as fully negative as before (contrast this with attempts to change personality).

The tragedy mask and the comedy mask are separate.

The actor himself does not change.

He plays each part to the full depending on which mask he is wearing.

Indeed, he takes pride in being able to do both comedy and tragedy.

He takes pride in his skill as an actor.

In exactly the same way, a thinker needs to take pride in his or her skill as a thinker.

This means an ability to wear each of the six thinking hats and to carry through the appropriate thinking in each case.

I did mention this particular point earlier in the book.

I am repeating it again here because of this practical problem of dealing with the negative personality.

… At this point we are doing some green hat thinking.

If you cannot do that, just keep quiet for the moment.

… You can at least try to use green hat thinking.

You will never develop any confidence in it if you do not even try.

Creative thinking is usually in a weak position because it does not seem to be a necessary part of thinking.

The formality of the green hat promotes it to being a recognized part of thinking, alongside the other aspects.

 

What Happens to the Ideas?

 

What happens next?

Shaping and tailoring ideas.

The concept manager.

One of the weakest aspects of creativity is the "harvesting" of ideas.

I have sat in on many creative sessions where a lot of good ideas have emerged.

Yet in the report back stage most of those ideas have not been noticed or picked up by those at the session.

We tend to look only for the final clever solution.

We ignore all else.

Apart from this clever solution, there may be much else of value.

There may be some new concept directions, even though there may be no specific ways of moving in those directions.

There may be half-formed ideas which are not yet usable because they need a lot more work.

New principles may have emerged even though they are not yet clothed in practical garments.

There may have been a shift in "idea flavor" (the type of idea generated).

There may have been a shift in the perceived solution area (where people are looking for solutions).

There may be newly defined "idea sensitive areas" (areas where a new concept could make a big difference).

All these matters should be noted.

It should be part of the creative process to shape and tailor an idea so that it gets closer to filling two sets of needs.

The first need is that of the situation.

An attempt is made to shape the idea into a usable idea.

This is done by bringing in the constraints, which are then used as shapers.

… That is a great idea but in its present form it would be much too expensive.

Can we shape it so that it is less so?

… At the moment the building regulations would not permit us to do that.

Can we shape the idea so that it does not contravene the regulations?

Is that possible?

… That is the right product for a large company.

But we are small.

Is there any way that we can use the idea?

Note that the constraints are brought in as shapers and not as a rejection screen.

The second set of needs that must be met are those of the people who are going to have to act upon the idea.

Sadly, it is not a perfect world.

It would be nice if everyone could see in an idea the brilliance and potential that is obvious to the originator of that idea.

This is not often the case.

Part of the creative process is to shape the idea so that it better fits the need profile of those who are going to have to "buy" the idea.

… At the present moment there is interest only in ideas that save money.

Is there any way this idea can be seen as saving money — now or later?

… To be acceptable an idea must not be too new.

It must be seen to be similar to some old and tried idea that is known to work.

What comparisons can we make?

… There is a great emphasis on being able to test ideas in a pilot fashion.

How could we test this idea?

… High tech is the new fashion.

Would electronic technology improve this idea?

At times this process may seem to border on the dishonest.

Yet there is nothing dishonest in designing a product for the buyer.

So ideas need to be designed to fit the needs of the buyer (within the organization).

In some of my writings I have suggested the role of concept manager.

This is someone who has the responsibility for stimulating, collecting and shepherding ideas.

This is the person who would set up idea-generating sessions.

This is the person who would put problems under the noses of those expected to solve them.

This is the person who would look after ideas in the same way as a finance manager looks after finance.

If such a person exists, he or she collects the output of the green hat thinking.

If not, the output stays with those who have generated it for their own use.

Next is the yellow hat stage.

This includes the constructive development of the idea.

It also includes the positive assessment and the search for supported benefits and values.

Such matters have been discussed under yellow hat thinking.

Black hat thinking comes next.

At any stage white hat thinking can be called upon to supply data required for evaluating whether the idea will work or will be valuable even if it does work.

The final stage is red hat thinking: do we like this idea enough to proceed further with it?

It may seem strange to subject it to an emotional judgement at the end.

It is to be hoped that this emotional judgement is based on the available results of black hat and yellow hat scrutiny.

In the end if there is no enthusiasm for an idea, it is unlikely to succeed no matter how good it may be.

 

Summary of Green Hat Thinking

 

The green hat is for creative thinking.

The person who puts on the green hat is going to use the idioms of creative thinking.

Those around are required to treat the output as a creative output.

Ideally both thinker and listener should be wearing green hats.

The green color symbolizes fertility, growth and the value of seeds.

The search for alternatives is a fundamental aspect of green hat thinking.

There is a need to go beyond the known and the obvious and the satisfactory.

The green hat thinker uses the creative pause to consider, at any point, whether there might be alternative ideas.

There need be no reason for this pause.

In green hat thinking the idiom of movement replaces that of judgement.

The thinker seeks to move forward from an idea in order to reach a new idea.

Provocation is an important part of green hat thinking and is symbolized by the word po.

A provocation is used to take us out of our usual patterns of thinking.

There are many ways of setting up provocations including the random word method.

Lateral thinking is a set of attitudes, idioms and techniques (including movement, provocation and po) for cutting across patterns in a self-organizing asymmetric patterning system.

It is used to generate new concepts and perceptions.

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