The Six Hats Method

Speaker: 00:00:00

hello listeners buckle up for a new episode of the science of self where you can learn to improve your life from the inside out today is April 6th. it's the first day of Passover which means it's Monday Thursday most of us engage in very little with regards to our decisions a pros and cons list maybe but this still leaves us victims of our own blind spots from Peter Holland's book The Art of strategic decision making we present the first of several methods to assist in gathering information and making decisions in this episode we take a look at the six hats method It’s one of my favorite decision-making methodologies because it is extremely thorough and focuses on what humans don’t excel at—taking different perspectives. The six hats method presents you with a veritable checklist to run through while you try to make a decision, which ensures that all your bases are covered. We’ve all heard the term that you must wear more than one hat. The six hats method was created by Edward de Bono, and as you might have guessed, it requires looking at a problem or decision from six separate perspectives by wearing six different hats. Common advice for making good decisions is to consult mentors, experts or close friends and leverage their unique perspective on your problem—like getting a second pair of eyes to look at things.

Speaker: 00:01:45

But this technique tries to do the same, and in fact may be more useful since you learn to switch perspectives yourself. Along with the hats themselves, an avatar that embodies the main purpose of each hat will make matters much clearer. It’s like you are making a decision by committee, but all the roles are played by you. The colors of the six hats are white, red, black, yellow, green, and blue. The colors are fairly inconsequential, and it’s probably easier if you categorize them by the avatar.

Speaker: 00:02:17

I’ll go into each of them in depth. “Tell me more. What does this mean, and where did you get that information?" The white hat is Sherlock Holmes. This is the thinking and analytical hat.

Speaker: 00:02:32

You are trying to gather as much information as possible by whatever means possible. Be observant and act like an information sponge. While you’re at it, analyze your information and determine the gaps you have and what you can deduce from what you currently have. Dig deep, fill in the information gaps, and try to gather an understanding of what you really have in front of you. You want to absorb as much of the available information as you can while also determining what you are missing to make a more informed and more perfect decision.

Speaker: 00:03:08

The white hat is also where you should be resourceful about learning. As we discussed earlier, lack of information is one of the worst detriments to your decisions. Make sure you are armed with information and you seek multiple perspectives and not let yourself be influenced by bias. You want an objective view at the entire landscape. Get out your magnifying glass and start sleuthing, Detective Holmes.

Speaker: 00:03:37

Simple phrases and questions you can use include, “is that really true? What is your evidence?” when looking at premises of an argument you’re making, or “what information don’t I have at this moment, and how can I find it?” when you’re weighing up pros and cons or choosing between two options. Basically, you want to get into the perspective of not quite taking your word for it! “And how does that make you feel? Why is that?"

Speaker: 00:04:08

The red hat is Sigmund Freud, the psychotherapist. This is your emotion hat. You are trying to determine how you feel about something and what your gut tells you. Those are not always the same emotion. Combined with the information you collected as Sherlock Holmes, this will already give you a more complete picture than you are used to.

Speaker: 00:04:29

You are asking how you feel about your options and why. Beyond the objective level, decisions affect us on an emotional level. You must account for that—happiness and unhappiness. Emotions are, after all, an indicator of how we are assigning meaning, and how much something is satisfying or violating our deeply held beliefs and values. Emotions add color to our decisions, and feelings are a kind of data that need to be factored into a decision just like any other information.

Speaker: 00:05:04

Ask yourself what you find yourself leaning toward or avoiding and why that might be. You can also attempt to predict how others might react emotionally. Your actions might have consequences beyond your current understanding, and how people will feel is often different from how you think they will feel. What are the origins of your emotions toward each option, and are they reasonable or even relevant, for that matter? Often, our emotions aren’t in the open, so when you can understand them better, you will understand your options better.

Speaker: 00:05:42

For example, you might decide that a new project is too difficult and not worth your time, but when you examine your feelings about it, you find that it’s really just fear and low self-esteem stopping you. Knowing this about yourself, you can make a clearer decision, and look at the project for its own merits. You might find an emotional inventory reveals powerful and accurate instincts, or it simply shows you some hidden bias you were carrying around—either way, it’s good to know about! “I don’t know. I have my doubts.

Speaker: 00:06:19

What about X? Will Y really happen that way?" The black hat is Eeyore, the morose donkey from Winnie the Pooh. If you don’t know who that is, you can imagine the black hat to be the ultimate depressed pessimistic that never believes anything will work out. Indeed, the purpose of the black hat is to attempt to poke holes in everything and to try to account for everything that can go wrong.

Speaker: 00:06:47

They are skeptics who always look on the darker side of life. They believe in Murphy’s Law: everything that can go wrong will go wrong. This is a hat most people never wear because they are afraid to look at their decisions, or reasoning, from a critical point of view. On some level, it probably indicates recognition that their views fall apart under deeper scrutiny, but that is exactly why it’s so important to wear the black hat. It’s essentially planning for failure and the worst-case scenario.

Speaker: 00:07:20

Planning for success is easy and instantaneous, but what happens when things don’t work out and you have to put out fires? How would you plan differently if you thought there was a high probability of failure? Many of us want to be optimistic and hopeful, so we willfully ignore the probabilities of things not going our way. In other words, we tend to have a slight bias in imagining that the thing we want is the thing most likely to happen. Then, naturally, we’re caught off guard when it doesn’t!

Speaker: 00:07:55

You change your approach, look for alternatives, and create contingency plans to account for everything. This is the type of analysis that leads to better planning and decisions because you can objectively take into account what is good and what is not. Wearing your black hat makes your plans tougher and stronger over the long haul, though it can be exhausting to continually reject positivity and hopefulness. “It’s going to be so great when this all comes together. Just imagine how you’ll feel."

Speaker: 00:08:31

The yellow hat is the cheerleader. It is the opposite of the black hat—you are now thinking positivity and optimistically. This is a motivating hat that allows you to feel good about your decision and the value of putting all the work into it. This is where you turn dark clouds into a silver lining. It also allows you to project into the future and imagine the opportunities that come along with it.

Speaker: 00:08:57

If this decision goes well, what else will follow? Where do optimistic projections place you, and what is necessary for you to reach them? Belief in yourself is still one of the concepts that fuels achievement and motivation, so it’s important to be balanced with pessimism and nitpicking flaws. Yes, you need to have both perspectives on your internal decision-making board of directors. Let them talk to each other and hash out probabilities and plans.

Speaker: 00:09:28

This is the best way to get a balanced, robust view. “Call me crazy, but what if we completely change X and try Y?" The green hat is Pablo Picasso, the famous artist. This hat is for creativity. When you wear this hat, you want to think outside the box and come up with creative perspectives, angles, and solutions to whatever you are facing.

Speaker: 00:09:55

It can be as simple as pretending that your current leading option is unavailable and having to figure out what you can do instead. You have to deviate from the current options and discover other ways of solving your problem. Brainstorming is the name of the game here. No judgment or criticism is allowed when you are wearing this hat because you want to generate as many ideas as possible. You can always curate them later, but the more solutions you can think of, no matter how zany or ineffective, there will always be something you can learn or apply from them.

Speaker: 00:10:31

This is also a hat of open-mindedness and not being stuck in one track of thinking, which can be dangerous if you refuse to alter your course in the face of hardships. “Now, now, children. Everyone will have their turn to be heard." The blue hat is Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company and inventor of the modern assembly line. The blue hat is all about coordinating and creating a system to integrate all the information you obtained from the other hats.

Speaker: 00:11:04

You can also look at this hat as the CEO hat: you are in charge of making things happen and putting things in place, though not necessarily in charge of creating anything by yourself. You are in charge of weighing how heavily each hat should be considered and what factors you must take into account when integrating the information. The CEO knows the context the best, so the input from each different hat is synthesized and weighed based on personal priorities and the situation at hand. You are the ultimate decider. that you know how each hat works, it’s time to illustrate how they all work together.

Speaker: 00:11:46

Let’s suppose you are considering buying a new house. Wearing the white Sherlock hat, you would examine all the information you have about the current market. That wouldn’t be enough, so you would conduct far more independent research on the economy and market trends and come up with a clear sense of how much it will cost you, where you will live in the meantime, and if you are okay with the long-term tradeoff. You would want prices on everything, data on past prices, predictions on future prices, and the other benefits and drawbacks to living in the new house. Then you’d take all that data and compare it to your current living situation, as well as to other houses in the area.

Speaker: 00:12:29

Wearing the red Freud hat, you would introspect and determine how you feel about the new house emotionally and intuitively. Will it make you happy regardless of the cost? What does your gut tell you? Money certainly can’t buy happiness, but it can set the stage for it. Is the new house going to help with that?

Speaker: 00:12:49

Are you drained by this process or energized by it? Recall that the red hat suggests you think about the emotional impact your decision will have. Wearing the pessimistic Eeyore black hat, you would try to plan for the worst-case scenario for before and after you buy this new house—for example, if the market tanks and the house drops in value by half or if you lose your job and have to relocate to a new city far away from your new house. In a darker turn, you might lose your job and not be able to find a new one, meaning you’d be saddled with a mortgage that you can’t pay. What other factors inside or outside of your control might make purchasing a new house a terrible decision?

Speaker: 00:13:35

The construction might be faulty, the previous owner might have lied to you, and the neighbors might be horrible. Plan for them so you can account for them. Wearing the optimistic cheerleader yellow hat, what is the best-case scenario for purchasing a new house and how will that affect and benefit your life? Perhaps the house will increase twofold in value in the next three years, and perhaps you will be able to sell it for a huge profit while still living in the area. It might be a house for your family, so you’ll feel stable and secure while in a good school district.

Speaker: 00:14:12

Do these outweigh any potential negatives? Despite all the problems for the new house, it might be nicer than anything you’ve ever lived in, and it represents a dream come true for you. Worst-case scenario, you can always rent a room to your cousin. Wearing the Picasso green hat of creativity, you can think of additional ways to solve your problem of wanting to live in a new place. For example, would you sleep on a friend’s couch to see if you need a big house?

Speaker: 00:14:44

Rent a monthly house in the area first before committing to purchasing? Put in a new stove in your current house and find you won’t have to move? What other areas of the city do you want to explore and live in? How else can you invest the money in a safe and smart way? Do you actually want to live in a new home, or do you have other desires?

Speaker: 00:15:06

When you get to the blue Henry Ford hat, your job is to sort through all the information you’ve uncovered, try to decide what is really important, and use it to make the most informed decision of your life. Perhaps you’ve decided that the money is simply too tight for a new house, and what you really wanted was to have a nicer kitchen. Or perhaps you’ve found that the housing market is at an all-time low, so even if you are low on money, it would be one of the best financial decisions to immediately take the leap. The point of the six hats method is to take a deep dive into a particular perspective and temporarily tune everything else out. Give it free reign and reject all opposition to it for the time being.

Speaker: 00:15:55

That’s just about the only way you will be able to make a compelling argument for something that you don’t wholeheartedly believe in at first. You want to embody the hat you currently wear and have a debate with yourself, moderated by the blue hat. The hats represent your interests. You’ll be able to see clearly which interests of yours you have focused on in the past. They might be interests that you don’t prioritize as much as others, but they are your interests regardless.

Speaker: 00:16:24

It’s all a process to make sure that your top interests win out in the end (if they deserve to). you've just listened to the science of self this is your host Russell thanks for joining us today and don't forget to tune in again next week for another episode from Peter Hollins and the science of self foreign