The Six Thinking Hats: How Smart Teams Solve Hard Problems
One simple framework to bring clarity, creativity, and calm to your team’s thinking.
In this issue:
Part 1: Understanding The Six Thinking Hats
What is the Six Thinking Hats Framework?
Understanding The Role of Each Hat
Part 2: Applying The Six Thinking Hats
The 3-Step “Hats On” Method
Real-Life Leadership Scenarios
The Six Thinking Hats Worksheet
Part 3: Going from here
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Recommended Resources
Final Takeaway
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A few years ago, I walked into a brainstorming session with my team. It was pre-COVID (I know, the good old times!), and we gathered in one of the cozy conference rooms in the office with a large whiteboard that filled the wall.
I was excited. I’d brought in donuts, coffee, and what I thought was a killer energy.
The goal of the session was clear: we needed a new approach for a product feature that wasn’t really getting the love we expected from our beta customers.
Thirty minutes and a half-full whiteboard later, I felt like we had stopped making progress.
One team member kept shooting down every new idea (“We tried that already”) while munching on his donut. Another just kept nodding politely but saying nothing while staring into his empty coffee mug. A third went on a rant about why “leadership” hadn’t funded the last proposal, and why we were even here.
It wasn’t going in the direction I had wanted. It didn’t feel like a “brainstorm” anymore, and felt like it was headed into a dead-end.
Was it a waste of our time, the donuts, or the coffee? Maybe not, because I had a major realization out of that experience: for effective brainstorming, you don’t just need your team members to show up in front of a whiteboard. Those are important, of course, but if you’re serious about making progress, you also need some framework or structure to spark and channel those ideas.
In today’s post, I will discuss a simple yet powerful framework that does just that.
You will learn not just the mechanics of the framework, but also how to apply it in your teams for structured problem-solving, ideation, and creative collaboration. And you will also get to practice it with a hands-on worksheet.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Part 1: Understanding The Six Thinking Hats
The Six Thinking Hats is a problem-solving and design-thinking framework developed by Edward de Bono, who is considered the father of lateral thinking. Edward’s book Six Thinking Hats, first published in 1985, first introduced this framework and is considered a classic in this field (and highly recommended reading!)
In this section, we will discuss the background and motivation behind this framework, and understand how it works.
What is the Six Thinking Hats Framework?
The framework gives teams a structured way to think together, and helps to reduce friction and improve collaboration.
The idea is simple but powerful: rather than everyone thinking in different directions at once, the team wears the same “thinking hat” at the same time. Each hat represents a different way of thinking.
The Six Thinking Hats framework, as the name suggests, has six ‘hats’. Each hat represents a certain aspect or angle that you focus on when you ‘put on that hat’.
Here’s what each hat stands for:
⚪ White Hat: Facts & Information: What do we know? What data do we have? What are the gaps?
🔴 Red Hat: Emotions & Intuition: What are we feeling? What’s our gut saying? What feels off?
⚫ Black Hat: Caution & Risk: What could go wrong? What are the obstacles?
🟡 Yellow Hat: Optimism & Benefits: What are the upsides? Why might this succeed?
🟢 Green Hat: Creativity & New Ideas: What else could we try? What’s a wild idea worth exploring?
🔵 Blue Hat: Process & Planning: What’s the agenda? What hat do we need now? What’s next?
Hats are not roles. Everyone wears the same hat at the same time. You’re not labeling people, you’re guiding thinking.
Understanding The Role of Each Hat
Now, let’s explore each hat in a little more detail.
White Hat: Data, Facts & Information
The White Hat is all about what we know, and just as importantly, what we don’t.
This hat strips away opinions, assumptions, and emotions. When your team wears the White Hat, the goal is simple: to surface objective facts, measurable data, and observable trends. It’s the hat of clarity.
A few years ago, I led a team trying to decide whether to sunset a legacy product. Some team members were emotionally attached to it. Others were ready to pull the plug. So we paused and asked: What do we know?
We gathered real usage data. We reviewed customer support tickets, revenue trends, and platform dependencies. It turned out that only 3% of our active user base still used that product, and maintaining it was consuming 15% of our engineering resources. That changed the conversation. Once we saw the facts, the decision almost made itself.
Lesson: When in doubt, pause and reach for the White Hat. Get the data first.
Red Hat: Emotions & Intuition
The Red Hat invites emotions to the table.
Whether you like it or not, emotions may not always be right, but they’re always present. Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away, it just buries them under the surface until they promptly resurface later.
With the Red Hat, your team can express their gut reactions, concerns, fears, and instincts without needing to justify them. It humanizes the discussion.
Recently, during a roadmap review meeting with my team, one of my team leads quietly said, “This roadmap feels like we’re setting ourselves up to burn out again.” He was speaking from his gut, not from data.
It turned out the team had just come off an intense release cycle, and the new plan didn’t build in enough time for the team to recover and rejuvenate. That emotional signal saved us from pushing too hard, too fast.
Lesson: Red Hat time allows you to detect emotional undercurrents early, before they explode.
Black Hat: Caution & Risk
The Black Hat is the voice of caution.
It helps you spot flaws, limitations, and risks before they become real problems. This isn’t being “negative”, but about anticipating and managing risk.
The Black Hat challenges assumptions. It pressures tests your plans. When used well, it helps teams avoid blind spots. But if you stay in this hat too long, it can kill the morale and the momentum. That’s why it works best when balanced with the Yellow Hat.
A few years ago, my team considered migrating one of our cloud services for content delivery to a new cloud provider. The provider’s sales pitch was quite convincing, and we were generally excited about the move, but one of my team members promptly raised a concern:: “What if the provider changes their pricing model next year? We’ve seen them do that before.”
That question led us to do a full cost analysis, and we ended up securing a better deal with more favorable conditions in the contract. That one risk callout saved us from potential budget pain down the line.
Lesson: The Black Hat won’t win popularity contests, but it’ll save you from costly mistakes.
Yellow Hat: Optimism & Benefits
Where the Black Hat sees danger, the Yellow Hat sees opportunity.
It’s the hat of constructive optimism. It means actively exploring why something could work.
Yellow Hat thinking encourages your team to imagine the best-case outcomes, benefits to users, and potential wins. It’s a necessary antidote to skepticism.
I was recently brainstorming some ideas with my team on how we could leverage AI to provide a more seamless experience to our customers. The challenge was that we didn’t have all the data to train the models, just yet, so we almost dropped the idea into the icebox. But one of my team members raised her hand and shared another perspective: “Imagine if we could add the missing data and get this into motion - think about how much our customers will love the new, modern experience.”
That sparked a new angle, a renewed hope, and we decided to rescope and include that capability.
Lesson: Don’t shut down early prototypes. Yellow Hat thinking helps you see the hidden gold.
Green Hat: Creativity & New Ideas
The Green Hat is where the magic happens.
Most teams default to practicality and execution too fast. The Green Hat protects creative space, and encourages ideas and alternative approaches.
We were once debating the design for the “Install Update” feature that would allow our customers to update our product on their desktop. Where to place the buttons, what text to use, when to pop up the dialog, etc. And then, our user experience designer asked, “What if we removed this UI completely, the just update the product in the background without any customer interaction?”
That question triggered a bold idea, an idea we hadn’t even considered. Sometimes, the best experience is no experience!
Lesson: The best solutions often start as wild ideas. The Green Hat gives your team permission to go there.
Blue Hat: Process & Planning
The Blue Hat is the conductor of the orchestra.
When you’re wearing the Blue Hat, you decide which hat to wear next, how long to spend in each mode, and how to summarize outcomes.
The Blue Hat helps you to stay on track, and move closer to your goal. Without that structure and process, you can end up going in circles, from one hat to another, without any conclusion or real progress.
When you’re wearing the Blue Hat, you’re not contributing more ideas, but you’re creating space where ideas can flow and help you move forward.
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Part 2: Applying The Six Thinking Hats
In this section, we will learn how to apply The Six Thinking Hats as a leader.
We will review the simple yet powerful 3-Step “Hats On” Method that you can start using immediately.
We will then review some common real-life leadership scenarios, and how you would apply this framework in each of those.
Finally, we will make it real with The Six Thinking Hats Worksheet to further build our muscle in applying and using this framework in our leadership role.