How To Change Mind

When I lived in a small town on New Zealand’s North Island, a German roommate lent me a book called Lateral Thinking by a Maltese doctor named Edward De Bono. In it he alternated between explaining creative ways to approach problems, and name-dropping the corporate clients he had helped with these techniques. The main premise of the book was that human thought is highly conditioned and tends to follow certain predictable linear patterns that bring us to a limited set of conclusions. There may be superior thoughts just outside of the reach of our normal thinking reflexes, and they may be accessed by using techniques that challenge these common logical pitfalls.

The book’s arrogant tone aside, De Bono’s ideas were fascinating to me and I couldn’t wait to put them to use. The most interesting one was called the Six Thinking Hats, which he later expanded into a book of its own.

You take any problem, and look at it through six distinct modes of thinking, but only one at a time. Each mode is represented by a colored hat. You might spend ten minutes wearing each one, writing down your thoughts as you go.

• The White Hat is concerned with facts, and doesn’t explore possibilities or conjecture — what do you actually know, and what information are you missing that you could use?
• The Red Hat is concerned with intuition and immediate emotional feelings — what are your initial gut reactions?
• The Black Hat is concerned with hazards and potential downsides. Every aspect is to be looked at cautiously and defensively, with the spirit of the Devil’s Advocate.
• The Yellow Hat is concerned with benefit. While wearing this hat, you consider potential gains and positive outcomes.
• The Green Hat is concerned with creativity and possibility. This is where new ideas are brought up and alternative approaches are brainstormed, without discriminating between good and bad ones.
• The Blue Hat is concerned with making sure the other hats have been duly worn. It is put on at the beginning and end of each six hats session.

The exercise is effective because you wear the hats one at a time, so every direction of thought gets a fair chance to develop. Normally, a pessimistic person might, for example, tend to undermine any positive thought with an immediate fear response. Under the six hats approach, downsides are discussed separately from the upsides and alternatives, and so the different directions of thinking are much less likely to interfere with each other.

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