Six Thinking Hat

When I have learned the subject of ‘Critical Thinking’, I only realised there were so many different colors of hat wearers in my office.

In the Accounts and Finance Department, the accounts officer will always wear the ‘Black Hat’ in the office. Every time when I passed the memo to request for payment, she always will throw the same question: ‘Is the Memo being verified? Got attachment? I don’t want to process something that is not approved yet.’ I understand her objective to asking such question but she should know we also know the rules and procedures before passing the request.

While in the other department, for example, Sales & Marketing. The ’Green Hat’ seem like a uniform for them. They always very creative to generate the ideas in order to attract more business flow in to company. Sometimes there will let us have the ‘Green Hat’ being wear to give them the opinion and ideas. For example, what color is the most attractive to put in our corporate website? What is the most suitable name for the new product?

In my department, my boss is always wearing different color of hat when come to different situation and she also insists us to wearing the different hat at different time. If we received an e-mail from her to provide any ideas on the process flow of the department, she wants us to wear the ‘Green Hat’. When the other departments urged us to generate a report urgently without giving us a notice, she always throws the ‘Black Hat’ and reply ‘We are short of manpower and this is payroll time, please allow us a week time to come up the report’. Sometimes the new system is not working in the way that we expected, my boss will always wearing a ‘Red Hat’ and tells the vendor ‘I don’t like the report be generated like this!’

There is so much fun when I know about the Six Thinking Hat and I have learned to switch between the hats all the times. Like the mastermind of this thinking hat, Edward De Bo quotes: ‘The artificiality of the hats is their greatest value; they provide a formal and convenient way to request a certain type of thinking from oneself or others’.