On Thinking Caps

The Hat Metaphor

Edward de Bono's six thinking hats is an attempt to formalize something that most good thinkers do informally: deliberately adopt a particular cognitive stance for a particular kind of problem, rather than mixing all stances simultaneously.

The metaphor of putting on a hat is about mode-switching with awareness - knowing which mode you are in and choosing it intentionally rather than being carried along by whichever mode happens to be active.

The six hats are a particular scheme. But the underlying idea generalizes: different kinds of thinking require different orientations, and the ability to adopt those orientations deliberately, rather than accidentally, is a learnable meta-cognitive skill.

The Mixing Problem

Most unproductive meetings and most unproductive individual thinking sessions suffer from the same problem: different modes of thinking are applied simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Someone is generating ideas while someone else is evaluating them. Someone is identifying risks while someone else is looking for opportunities. Someone is attending to the emotional reactions in the room while someone else is focused entirely on the analysis.

The resulting conversation is incoherent not because the participants are individually bad at thinking but because they are in incompatible modes simultaneously. Creative generation and critical evaluation make poor companions - the evaluation kills the generation, and the generation prevents the evaluation from being thorough.

What Mode-Switching Requires

Deliberate mode-switching requires three things.

First, a vocabulary for the modes - some way of naming the different stances so they can be distinguished and referred to. Without names, the modes blend. With names, you can say "I am in evaluation mode now" and make the claim checkable.

Second, a shared convention for transitions - an agreed way to signal that the group is moving from one mode to another. This can be explicit ("let's put on the green hat now") or implicit (a facilitator who shifts the question). Without a transition mechanism, mode-switching collapses back into mode-mixing.

Third, the discipline to stay in the current mode even when impulses from other modes arise. The critical thinker in a generation session has to suspend the critique. The optimizer in a risk-identification session has to resist the urge to propose solutions. This is harder than it sounds and requires genuine practice.

The Individual Case

The same dynamics apply to solo thinking. Most individual thinking suffers from the same mode-mixing: generating and evaluating simultaneously, exploring and concluding at the same time, attending to what is true while also attending to what is useful.

The individual equivalent of a shared mode-switching convention is a time or place convention. Writing in a particular physical place or time of day. Using a particular notebook for generation and a different one for evaluation. Creating a physical or temporal signal that marks the mode transition.

These conventions feel arbitrary because they are. Their value is not in the content of the convention but in the function it serves: externalizing the mode so that the mode becomes visible and therefore manageable.