..the Six Hats is such a very simple concept

 

Edward de Bono’s Message

Again and again, all over the world, I am meeting people who have been using the ‘Six Hats’ method of parallel thinking and finding it useful. What continues to astonish me is that for 2,400 years we have been satisfied with ‘argument’ as a way of getting anywhere. Those who have been using the Hats find that when they go back to the argument mode it is so primitive, slow, crude and full of ego-plays.

Yet the Six Hats is such a very simple concept. Why did it not come into general use hundreds of years ago? It is true that some understanding of brain chemical balances provides the logical basis for the Six Hats method, but the empirical use of the method provides more than ample justification for its use.  The sad answer is that the guardians of intellectual process in society are so enamoured of the critical mode that there has been no effort to develop constructive modes of thinking.