All Thumbs and No Fingers A bucket for all things

Six thinking hats designing and scoping solutions

I've been contemplating this for some time. In fact it dates back to my first trip with my Dad to the local library in North Walsham where I found a copy of Dr Edward De Bono's: Six thinking hats.

Six Thinking Hats is the concept that innovation, judgement and thought can be better managed and facilitated within a group if the group organises their collective thinking processes around a set of specific areas.

Each hat represents a specific area of consideration or thought and for simplicities sake you often see them represented with different colours. I've used this personally over many years and found that with time a. you can become faster but b. it takes time to perfect. The tools are useful for innovation but they can equally be applied to strategy enabling you to flesh out and balance a strategy considering the full range of inputs and therefore logical outputs.

During a recent workshop I attempted to use this model for technical innovation, scoping and design. Much of the work I'm interested in is understanding the real business requirements and desires such that I can translate this into a process and therefore into a software solution. I stress real business requirements because in my experience what I'm presented with at the start often differs from the final needs. In effect there is a part for me to facilitate the discussion and also capturing it as it comes to light.

With any task these days time is money and being swift, focus and accurate are critical during this stage. So using the six thinking hats should work...

Hat 1:

Is concerned with questions and facts. Well that was excellent we started the discussion collecting together the initial facts/needs we had about the solution. The white board was our friend and having allowed our self with 20 minutes we finished feeling like a second pass was necessary but that we'd made a start. The nice experience was the shared concentration, each time something not to do with Hat1 surfaced it was immediately parked.

Hat 2:

Is concerned with the emotional, irrational aspects. This is not so easy simply because of the lack of time we've had to work together (kick off meeting) and that its not immediately obvious that this should have a relevance on our task. However after a short pause we did gather to gather our emotions and it was pleasant to find them largely similar. In this case around the desire for success, daunting hill to climb and concerns over failure to bring the essential elements out.

Hat 3:

Is concerned with judgments. Beneficial but challenging was the outcome here. The problem with this stage is that you need to criticise the solution, need, business case to unpick where there may be logical arguments which challenge the need for it. Our discussion unearthed a number of things which in Prince 2 might go onto a risk register. In our case we decided once again to not try to judge the arguments, if we felt they were valid then onto the whiteboard with the desire to return to each and ensure we had a mitigation in place at some stage during the spec phase.

Hat 4:

Is a pleasant stage where we all dust ourselves off from the previous stage and now focus on the positive points. In effect the positive points indicated a range of needs which weren't focused on in the RFP, some of the more softer aspects such as the user experience, information architecture. As with most software RFP there is typically a lot of focus on the scope of the works with some explanation of the strategy. However its then important to tease out the needs in respect of the structure, and the representation it will take on screen.

Hat 5:

Is concerned with creativity, new thoughts and investigations. In effect this just happens as a outcome from doing each of the other hats. We confirmed in this section that the questions area of the whiteboard captured the unknowns at this point in time and quickly moved on.

Hat 6:

Is concerned with the holistic view. A moment to step back and recheck that the process followed has struct the correct chords and we are moving in the correct direction. Actually it identified that this may well be iterative. With the discussion so far the high-level areas have been considered but there remain holes to fill. Which gave us the drive to create the now and next actions plan. This gave each of us a collection of tasks to go away with and further enable us to cover off some of the more mundane aspects like who is taking on what. Probably not so 'big picture' as is intended but given the discussions to date have always been seeking for the big picture this was seen as no bad thing.

Conclusion:

Does it help, yes is the simple answer. More so for it being a new group of people working together and the need to channel constructive energy in a meeting to leverage a brief. However there are pitfalls and gap in terms of facilitating this as a process. Tangents appear which with excited minds can lead to new tunnels being explored which digress from the intention of this structure approach. Would I use it again - definitely given the right group and challenge.