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Benchmark Six Sigma Expert View by Venugopal R ‘The Six Thinking Hats’ is a popular method of getting a team to think about a topic from multiple angles. Any brainstorming exercise needs good planning, facilitation and post-session work to derive the benefits of the time spent by a group of experts. Brainstorming, if allowed to happen as a ‘free for all’ exercise, will never provide any useful outcome. Various methods have been recommended for channelizing brainstorming efforts. The ‘Six Thinking Hats’ by Edward DE Bono is one widely accepted method to overcome some of the issues faced during a traditional brainstorming exercise. Genesis of the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ method. Each individual has got his / her characteristic and habitual way of thinking. Some will be optimistic by nature, whereas some will be cautious, and some others will be intuitive, creative and so on. With such different approaches of mind, based on individual behavioral characteristics, we would face clashes of interest, hurdles and passiveness during a brainstorming session. As per DE Bono’s thoughts, each of these characteristics are important and we need to look at a problem from all these angles before concluding upon the solution. He brought in six perspectives to be considered mandatorily during a brainstorming and related each on to a colour of a hat. These six perspectives are expected to largely cover encompass the variety of perspectives that could emerge from a group of individuals. What each coloured hat represents: White Hat – Facts: Focus on data, facts and information available or needed. Blue Hat – Process: Focus on managing the thinking process, next steps, action plans Red Hat – Feelings: Focus on feelings, hunches, gut feelings and intuitions Yellow Hat – Benefits: Focus on values and benefits; why something may work Black Hat – Cautions: Focus on difficulties, potential problems; why something may not work Green Hat – Creativity: Focus on possibilities, alternatives, solutions and new ideas How does it differ from traditional Brainstorming? In traditional brainstorming, the heterogeneity in the team-thinking at any point of time would cause conflicts on interests and will result in missing out valuable ideas from the multiple thought perspectives. There is bound to be dominance of few individuals and could result in bias towards their ideas. The participants whose perspectives could not be voiced or got overpowered, would feel their morale let down and will tend to have poor ownership on the final solution. By ‘wearing’ a particular colour of hat, all the participants force themselves to approach the problem in the perspective represented by the hat colour, at any given point of time irrespective of their natural inclination. This enables the entire team to address the problem in the same perspective at a given point of time. Room for dominance-based bias is reduced. By going through all the ‘colours’, the likelihood of anyone’s perspective getting left out is significantly reduced. This will enable to build an overall higher level of ownership on the accepted solution. Example case study: Let’s consider a situation, where an organization wants to decide whether they should purchase an expensive RPA tool. They use the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ for discussing and decision making. Please note that the points mentioned here are just for illustration and would not be exhaustive enough for an actual case. With the White Hat on, the team will focus on available data and the data required. They look at the number of automation opportunities, existing and likely to emerge in next couple of years. They look at the data on multiple options for RPA tools available and the comparative costs and features. They also look the past industry trends future prospects based on automation. With the Red Hat, the team will gather the intuitive opinions by the team members on different products available and the pros and cons based on hunches and individual opinions. They will also gather inputs as to what the team ‘feels’ about the need for automation, going for a third-party tool or developing it in-house. Wearing the Green Hat, the team encourages ideas for innovative thinking – alternate approaches to overcome their productivity issues or smartly modifying available software with internal expertise, or simplify the process with creative design thinking that could vastly reduce the number of steps involved. Other thoughts could be to leverage options offered through cloud computing. The Yellow Hat may introduce at this stage and focus on the tangible and intangible benefits of acquiring a RPA tool. They will look at the investment and ROI time frame. Other benefits could include improved accuracies and winning more customer good-will by providing faster and higher quality services. Another factor could be the enhancement in competitiveness. Black Hat may be brought in now – Concerns are raised on the credibility of the projections for automation. What if the technology gets obsolete faster than getting the ROI? Will it result in loss of jobs for employees? The Blue Hat is worn by the person facilitating the thought process, encouraging the ideas to flow and directing the switching of the thought process from one perspective to the next. Had they not followed the ‘Six thinking hats’ method, a few of the above points would have had a biased domination, quite likely around points 1, 2 and 4. Having explored the problem from all the perspectives the summary of the discussion will be comprehensive and would help the management team to take a very informed decision, with higher degree of ownership.