The Six Thinking Hats® Seminar is a powerful one day "hands-on" seminar 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®.

Who Should Attend:

This seminar is designed for business people at all levels who conduct and participate in business discussions and meetings, and whose input is required for problem solving and decision making. It will be particularly beneficial to individual contributors and teams working in highly competitive environments. Many teams can make excellent use of this approach: research and design, sales and marketing, quality improvement, executive planning, recruitment, etc.

Seminar Outcomes:

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 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. 

This practical, skill-building program will help you replace one-dimensional thinking with six-dimensional thinking. Thinking is a skill that is not necessarily correlated to intelligence. As a skill, it can be learned, developed, enhanced, and practiced. There are six types of thinking that you unconsciously use every day. Each metaphorical hat represents one of those six ways of thinking. A person wearing an imaginary White Hat focuses on factual information, a Red Hat on emotions and intuition, a Yellow Hat on positive perspective, a Black Hat on caution and risk, a Green Hat on creativity, and a Blue Hat on control, overview, and organization.

The hats keep your different kinds of thinking separated, focused, and controlled. They enable you to evaluate situations by consciously switching in and out of the six thinking modes (hats). This process teaches an individual to look at decisions and problems systematically. You can use Six Hats alone or with a team.

Seminar Format:

This one-day seminar is most effective when intact workteams meet to address current, real problems. Students work at team tables practicing on company issues while learning to use skills presented in the seminar. The tainer is a certified instructor for Dr. de Bono's Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking seminars.

   1:   Introduction: Workshop overview. goals, introductions, assumptions, ground rules. 

   2:  Better Decisions and Better Support: Discussion of the ideal roles and process of effective meetings.  

   3:  The Phenomena of Creativity: How the brain likes to work creatively, and how we can take advantage of this; pattern making, free association, role of techniques.  

   4:   Practice with the Hats: Using current skills and methods, work through an issue as a team and debrief how your approach works . 

   5:   Introduce the Hats: Introduce and practice how each hat is different, and how they work together. 

   6:   Practice: Use Hats to work through an issue that participants are currently wrestling with. 

   7:  Other Considerations and Practice: Discussion and practice of the variety of ways the hats can be used. 

   8:  Full Length Exercise: Practice what we've learned in a full length meeting.  

   9:  Other Creativity Techniques: Introduction and practice of additional techniques.