Six Thinking Hats

I read about the white and red hats from Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono.  The white hat is neutral, like a computer, giving facts and figures, in an objective manner.  Using the white hat is a practice that encourages the thinker to separate clearly in his mind what fact is.  There are believed facts and checked facts.  Your opinion is never allowed with a white hat.  Math is very white to me.  I can see facts and figures; I can see right and wrong.

The red hat is described as warmth, feelings, emotions, intuition, and hunches.  In using the red hat one does not need to justify his emotions.  The red hat gives official permission for the expression of feelings.  There is no attempt to explore or change emotions. 

In doing the exercise to think of a situation at work where I felt I needed to resolve something, I chose a coworker relationship.  I realized that I have a lot of emotion tied up into this relationship from the past 5 years or so, and those emotions were clouding or overriding my judgment.  I was viewing everything that was going on between my coworker and I through an emotional lens.  I see that I was allowing more stress to enter my life than I needed to, and it’s possible the stress I was allowing was the accumulation of years of baggage that I was unwilling to dismiss.  If taking each day on its own, such as today, I would find little to warrant my negative feelings toward my coworker.  Yes, there are bothersome things I see, but no worse than what I might see in others (or what they might see in me).  I think I let myself be ruled by my emotions.  These chapters remind me to wear different hats and see things from different perspectives.  All hats are wanted, at their respective time, to look at a situation or resolve an issue.  I am ready to work on resolving new issues as they arise, because I will be able to do it in a kind manner which will benefit our work relationship and team.