Six Hats for meetings
Helping managers improve team communication by fixing how meetings work, enabling parallel thinking and reaching faster decisions for measurable productivity.
Six Thinking Hats
Howard will come to your meeting room and, together with your team, demonstrate this fun and innovative method (+/- 3 hours). It will be abundantly clear how Six Hats can shorten your meetings with actionable results, whether with your team, with the board, or with your partners.
Most meetings are:
- too long
- unclear
- lead nowhere
The result?
- wasted time
- frustrated teams
- slow decision-making
The 6 Thinking Hats framework is designed to facilitate creative, collaborative problem-solving discussions and meetings. Instead of the traditional meeting style, where people single-mindedly argue their points back and forth, around in circles, the 6 Hats method showcases parallel thinking — all participants are required to think and discuss — in sync! All thinking styles are involved — one at a time — each hat is a different argumentation style. Everyone wears the same hat at the same time. All opinions are expressed at the right time, and consensus is reached smoother and quicker. The rules are simple and it takes a bit of self-discipline, but you’ll immediately notice the difference as doors open up that you hadn’t realized before.
Many big and small companies — e.g. Prudential Insurance, Siemens, Boeing, IBM, 3M, among many others use this method to reduce meeting times and effectuate more grounded decision making.
Through hands-on workshops and consulting, you’ll learn how to:
- run shorter, focused meetings
- make clear decisions
- turn discussions into action
Now you can lead meetings that lead to real decisions, better collaboration, and less wasted time.
The Hats
White Hat
Neutral information; focus on available information, data, objective facts, what is needed, how can we get it?
Black Hat
Judgmental; criticism; why something is wrong; difficulties, risk assessment; logical negative view.
Red Hat
Fire, warmth; emotions, feelings, intuition, brainstorming, gut instinct; presenting views without explanation or justification.
Green Hat
Creative thinking; possibilities and hypotheses; alternatives, solutions, new ideas.
Yellow Hat
Sunshine; optimism; logical positive view; look for values and benefits, what is good, why it will work.
Blue Hat
Overview; control of process, steps and other hats; chairperson, organizer; thinking about thinking, managing thinking processes, focus, next steps, action plans.
When might you use Six Thinking Hats?
- Anytime there are differences of opinion in a business meeting
- Facilitation of meetings
- Continuous process improvement
- New products / designs
- Conflict resolution
- Decision making and problem solving
- Customer focus groups / interviews
- Personnel and leadership development
- Making difficult decisions at home
People who are comfortable sharing their ideas tend to show:
- confidence that they have the ability to cope with and improve their environments
- opportunity-thinking and problem-solving competencies: spot opportunities, assess usefulness, predict consequences, propose alternative solutions, and evaluate outputs
- cooperative thinking competencies: can articulate another’s point of view, devise an agenda, ensure equal participation
Inquire about Six Hats for meetings
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