• Stimulating innovation, being creative together
• Sharing ideas and criticizing them to tend towards an practical action plan
• Making meetings much shorter and more productive
• Allowing people to take a different role than the one they usually endorse and think in a different way than they usually do
• Envisioning all sides of a situation / proposition
• Reducing conflict among team members.

Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes

Six Thinking Hats of Edward Bono is a simple, effective parallel thinking process that helps people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. A powerful tool set, which once learned can be applied easily after!

To successfully use this method, we encourage you to use it in small groups (6/8 persons) that need to achieve something together.

Present the method and all the hats before beginning the session.

The “6 hats thinking” is a tool that allows everyone to propose their ideas, to make a collective analysis of their strengths and dangers, and finally to see the ideas that motivates most of the members of the group.

6 Hats for 6 different ways of thinking:

1. The White Hat calls for information known or needed (“The facts, just the facts.”)
2. The Yellow Hat symbolizes brightness and optimism. Under this hat you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit.
3. The Black Hat is judgment - the devil's advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; where things might go wrong.
4. The Red Hat signifies feelings, hunches and intuition. When using this hat you can express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves and hates.
5. The Green Hat focuses on creativity; the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It's an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
6. The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking process. It's the control mechanism that ensures the Six Thinking Hats guidelines are observed.

The 6 hats can be used in many ways according to your goal. One of the ways to make the group work on propositions is to use them in a very structured way. By this we mean that all the group’s members will use the same Hat at the same time, in a specific order and for a limited period oftime that will be decided by the facilitator before beginning the exercise.

Concretely, the group will go from a way of thinking to the other in an organized way.

For the purpose of discussing new ideas, the structure can be :

1/ White hat (10’): Expose the facts. The facilitator should take notes on a flipchart so it is easy for everyone to remember what was said. Ex: We need to create an output for day 6. We have no budget for it, we can only use the resources we have here and now…

2/ Blue hat (15’): Summarize what are the resources and remind the frame. Explain on which order you will use the hats. Again the facilitator should take notes so we can always remember the frame. Ex: We have paper, printer, ink etc. to prepare a fanzine. We have to produce it in one day and the topic has to be about conflict management. We can count on a technical expert to help us, etc.

3/ Green hat (20’): Give green post-its to everyone and ask to each person to write ideas on it. The facilitator can decide to put the constraint of a maximum of X ideas per person. These ideas have to be written in a short way, meaning either using a key word or a short sentence. It has to be easy and fast to read by everyone. The facilitator should collect the ideas as soon as they are written; while the group keeps thinking, he/she will organize them, putting the ideas that are similar together. Once the time is finished the facilitator will read out loud all the post-its and present his/her way of associating these ideas. Take time to clarify and modify, if needed, the way the ideas were organized.

4/ Yellow hat (15’): Now it is time to criticize the ideas but in a good way. The group should focus on what are the good aspects of the ideas, it can be the resources they have, the motivation, etc. without any limitation on the number. Again they have to write then in post-its, yellow this time. They have 15 minutes to think about all the positive aspects of all the ideas that were proposed by the group, not only the one’s they put on the table. When the time is over the facilitator will invite someone to start, he/she will read one post-it and will tell to which idea it is related. The facilitator will take it and put it next to the green post-it with the idea that corresponds. Then he/she will ask to the other members of the group to share if they have other positive criticisms of the same idea or association of ideas. When they finish with one of the topics it’s time to go to the next idea and so on, until all the yellow post-its have been shared.

• 1 chair per person
• at least 1 A5 sheet per person + pencils
• A cork board + pins to display participants' findings.