Difficult meetings? Try Six thinking hats

Do you have problems in meetings because some people always seem to take the same attitude, often negative? Does emotion overcome logic and information content in debates? If so, you may want to try using the Six Thinking Hats approach proposed many years ago by Edward de Bono.

Basic idea and approach

To encourage meeting participants to separate their thinking, you have six coloured hats on the meeting table and when people want to speak they need to wear one of the hats to "focus" thinking. By switching hats you can re-direct your thinking which becomes more definite. Therefore the discussion becomes more focused and productive.

The essence of each hat is:

• White - pure facts, figures and information. Either information introduced into the meeting or a request for some.
• Red - expressing emotions & feelings; also hunches
• Black - devil's advocate, negative judgement, why it will not work
• Yellow - "sunshine", optimism, positive, opportunities, benefits
• Green - fertile, creative, new ideas, 
• Blue - the conductor (cool & control), used to ensure the process is running correctly 

Does it work?

I must admit that I haven't used this technique for over a decade now but I keep in my armoury for circumstances where meetings can't be made productive using more traditional means! For example, if the mood (or particular participants) is particularly bleak in meeting after meeting I believe this can enable you to break out of the situation. It isn't a quick fix as you need to persevere with the approach over several meetings before it becomes more natural but can help force some more positive thinking. Try and encourage more yellow and green hat usage to start with in the meeting.

So if you want to give it a try, go buy 6 cheap party hats, mark the colours in some way (it doesn't have to be fancy), have a one page briefing sheet on the table and off you go. 

If you want to read more about this technique buy the book or look at the website.

Practical challenge with Project teams in different sites

In my (IT focused) experience, Project teams are no longer located in the same building and many meetings have participants joining remotely, typically on voice only. This brings an additional barrier to the success of this technique as the visual act of picking up a hat from the table and wearing it, is important in my experience. All I can suggest that remote participants have to announce the colour of the hat before speaking or you gain access to video conferencing facilities (but don't forget that you need hats in each location).

Other tips on running meetings

You might want to search the Blog (or select the "Meeting" tag) for other tips from me on improving Meetings such as applying Work Package principles from which it is worth a reprise of this cartoon :-)