You want to think about
You want to think about
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Distributors & Master Trainers
The Six Thinking Hats®
Blue Hat: The Conductor's Hat
Thinking about and managing the thinking process
The blue hat is the control hat. It is used for thinking about thinking. The blue hat sets the agenda, focus and sequence, ensures the guidelines are observed and asks for summaries, conclusions, decisions and plans action.
Green Hat: The Creative Hat
Generating ideas
The green hat is for creative thinking and generating new ideas, alternatives, possibilities and new concepts.
Red Hat: The Hat For The Heart
Intuition and feelings
The red hat is about feelings, intuitions and instincts. The red hat invites feelings without justification.
Yellow Hat: The Optimist's Hat
Benefits and values
The yellow hat is for a positive view of things. It looks for the benefits and values.
Black Hat: The Judge's Hat
Caution
The black hat identifies risk. It is used for critical judgment and must give the logical reasons for concerns. It is one of the most powerful hats.
White Hat: The Factual Hat
Information
The white hat is all about information. What information you have, what information you need and where to get it.
Important points to note
The hats can be used on your own or in a group.
In group discussions, it is essential that everyone uses the same hat (mode of thinking) at the same time. This is to avoid personal preferences and conflicts between modes of thinking.
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The black hat is essential. It is a necessary part of thinking but often overused.
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Training in the use of the hats includes how to structure the hats into sequences to address different situations.
The Six Thinking Hats® GPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that prompts humans to think.
It is a reversal of the normal way of interacting with AI. It will not solve problems for us but instead provides the prompts and guidance to structure our own thinking about any situation that is important to us.
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Developed under licence from Edward de Bono Ltd, and currently available on OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. It guides individual users through authentic hat sequences, using prompts adapted directly from our Instructor Guides, Participant Workbooks, Slide Library, and Facilitation Cards. It has also been trained on the manuscript of Dr. Edward de Bono's original book and to prompt in his writing style. It has been designed to help an individual with their thinking or recommend the use of accredited de Bono trainers and facilitators if the user wants to apply the method in a discussion with others. It is a high-quality individual-use companion.
Many generative AI tools are already being used to simulate the Six Thinking Hats®. Unfortunately, these versions are not trained on the original authorised material and sometimes promote critical errors, such as advising meeting participants to adopt different hats at the same time, or encouraging people to treat hats as personality types rather than changeable modes of thinking. These distortions defeat the purpose of parallel thinking, confuse users and undermine the integrity of the method.