Six Thinking Hats

“The Six Thinking Hats method may well be the most important change in human thinking for the past twenty-three hundred years.”

De Bono’s reference to 2,300 years evokes the ideas of three ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates and Plato emphasized dialectic and argument, while Aristotle judged logic by a method of inclusion and exclusion. De Bono suggests that Western thought became concerned with “what is” rather than what can be. The author’s system focuses on the latter. His claim that his method “may well be the most important change in human thinking” for millennia uses hyperbole to present his own work as important and revolutionary.

“The main difficulty of thinking is confusion.”

This straightforward statement is at the heart of the Six Thinking Hats method. Since people can think in multiple ways, including with emotions, information, logic, hope, and creativity, they may try to do too much when they are making decisions. In addition, people may tend to fall into one dominant way of thinking, missing opportunities to make better decisions by using different methods. This is why de Bono emphasizes The Importance of Parallel Thinking instead.