The Six Hats

Aim

To introduce the concept of Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats ©

Objective

By the end of this session the participant will be able to-

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So who is Edward de Bono?

Edward de Bono was born in Malta in 1933. He attended St Edward's College, Malta, during World War II and then the University of Malta where he qualified in medicine. He preceded, as a Rhodes Scholar, to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in psychology and physiology and then a D.Phil in medicine. He also holds a Ph.D from Cambridge and an MD from the University of Malta. He has held appointments at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge and Harvard.

Dr de Bono has worked with many of the major corporations in the world such as IBM, Du Pont, Prudential, AT&T, British Airways, British Coal, NTT (Japan), Ericsson (Sweden), Total (France), etc. The largest corporation in Europe, Siemens (370,000 employees) is teaching his work across the whole corporation, following Dr de Bono's talk to the senior management team. When Microsoft held their first ever marketing meeting, they invited Edward de Bono to give the keynote address in Seattle to the five hundred top managers.

He has written numerous books with translations into 34 languages (all the major languages plus Hebrew, Arabic, Bahasa, Urdu, Slovene, Turkish etc).

About Six thinking Hats ©

People are seeking quality everywhere except in the most important area - the quality of thinking. We need better thinking methods in order to make full use of our available intelligence and experience.

As organisations reduce the number of people employed, they need to get the maximum benefit from those remaining, including the maximum output from their thinking.

Current thinking is dominated by adversarial thinking. The mode of discussion revolves around argument, the purpose being to defeat your opponent and by doing so discover the truth. Adversarial thinking serves a purpose. However, it is not the only way of thinking and in some circumstances it has limitations. Six Thinking Hats© offers a practical alternative. It encourages co-operation, exploration and innovation.

It is often assumed that intelligence goes hand in hand with thinking. In fact, very intelligent people are in danger of becoming poor thinkers. This is because they fall into the intelligence trap. That is, they use their intelligence to entrench themselves in support of one point of view. Even though you have a fantastic sports car you may be a poor driver. Similarly those with excellent minds may use them inadequately. Thinking and driving are skills that can be taught and improved upon.

The Six Thinking Hats© Workshop is a powerful one day 'hands-on' workshop structured to help business executives break out of their 'thinking ruts' using techniques found in Dr Edward de Bono's landmark book, "Six Thinking Hats ©"

What you will learn

Participants will learn to use different approaches to business problems. They will explore all aspects of each situation and generate alternatives that go far beyond obvious solutions.

The process encourages your people to separate fact from opinion, to look fully at both positive and negative opinions and to get hidden agendas that can sabotage any meeting on the table. It stimulates their innate creativity and helps them discover how to turn seemingly insoluble problems into real opportunities.