"The Thinking Hats" or "The Six Thinking Hats” is a method developed by Edward de Bono, allowing solutions to be found or decisions to be made. It helps neutralize egos, depersonalize criticism, and create an environment that encourages contributions from every individual, even those who are generally more reserved.

“The biggest obstacle to thinking is confusion. The secret to better thinking is to do one thing at a time.” 

Edward de Bono

According to Edward de Bono, traditional ways of thinking are usually reliant on argument and criticism, which makes them confrontational and negative. To overcome these limitations, he developed “parallel thinking”. The principle is simple: alternate successively and in a conscious and organized way our approach to a given subject.
Each of the six hats represents a different approach and the method invites us to use them successively.
There are six headgear of different colors:

• WHITE : Objectivity > Observe only facts and figures
• RED : Emotion > Listen to your intuition
• BLACK : Caution > Be wary, identify risks, critical thinking
• YELLOW : Optimism > Identify benefits and opportunities
• GREEN : Creativity > Find new ideas
• BLUE : Organization > Define the means and build the action plan

For this new box of our Advent calendar, we suggest you make your own hats to make this workshop even more fun.

Finally at UX-Republic to facilitate the organization of this workshop, we had some sets of caps made, if you are interested let us know via Twitter @UXRepublic !

Jocerand Ducroux, UX-Evangelist @Jocerand    UXLab Foundation @UX-Republic