6 Thinking Hats

For our Creativity class we looked at Edward De Bono's thinking tool called the 'Six Thinking Hats'. The idea is that for whatever you're doing such as an idea, you look at it from all angles, you wear the hat to remind you to think in a certain way. Each hat represents a different way of thinking and each member of the group should 'put on' a certain hat and only think from that perspective. 
If you're wearing the white hat, you look at the idea from a factual angle and only focus on the information about the idea such as if you need to make £1000 pound, you make sure this is taken into consideration and made possible.
The red hat is your gut feeling of the idea, do you feel its a good/bad idea. does the idea make you excited or do you not think it will work. what is your hunch on the idea.
The black hat is the negative hat, you criticise the idea and everything that's wrong about it/wouldn't work.
The yellow hat is the positives, you are optimistic about the idea, and look for all the things that are good about it and could work successfully. 
The green hat is the creative hat, and when thinking in this way, you think of how you can improve the idea, make it grow and make it better. finding improvements to create the best possible idea
And finally the blue hat is like the organiser, the person acting as this hat oversees, they keep the idea on task and make sure everyone acts as their hat.

During the session i actually liked using the thinking hats, thinking in a certain way and only looking at the idea from that angle is a really good way at moving the idea forward and looking at it as a whole, being able to constantly improve it. By using the hats it also opens the idea up for critics without fear of sounding negative and criticising of the person who came up the idea, as often people do not say what is wrong with something for fear of causing upset. However saying this, when we all got a try of being each hat, everyone seemed to like the black hat best, we all seemed to gravitate towards being negative, which probably says a lot about us as people!