Thinking Tools/Frameworks vs.Discussion

Thinking tools/frameworks improve thinking skill much more than discussion does. One reason is that in discussion it's very difficult to pay attention to the thinking process rather than the content (because the content is interesting).

Understanding vs Use (of the thinking tools)

Understanding will never lead to use. Use can only come from habit and habit can only come from practice.

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Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on March 25, 2010 at 13:15
Go back to the original topic "thinking tools/frameworks". I found many people that I encountered just stopped after "remember" (Here, I refer to everything, not just on using thinking tools). My usual approach is to use the content to cause the person to feel embarrassment (Cognitive imbalance, which was leaned in a course on teaching skills many years ago. During imbalance, the person is forced to think or making associations to his previous memory). But this means I need to use the content each time to deal with the person. With my previous experience, it took ~6 months with many times of embarrassments for a recent university graduate to show a change by understanding the difference between "remember" and "understand".

I used the content. This usually can only be done one-to-one.

If a person has the habit of using 6 hat thinking, he/she can associate a topic to many aspects of information that stored in his memory. This can also be a change from "remember" to "understand". 6 hats can be taught to a class, and so this is a more effective approach than the one-to-one approach using content.
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on March 25, 2010 at 14:31
Further to this topic:

6 hat thinking is an approach to help to associate a topic to many aspects of memory in our brain. [White hat also means the person has the ability to know what is missing and find new information.] The person can quickly response to an issue or in some cases, the person can give an association that no one made before (which becomes creative).

I started using "cognitive imbalance" to push my students to think when I was supervising my master and PhD students (I was a professor in a university in Hong Kong for 11 years). As it is a one-to-one approach, I can feel the change in each of my students. This was not easy to be obtained for teaching to a class of students. With the changes observed in my students, I claimed I taught them to think, not just the supervisor of their research topic.

For teaching 6 hats (sorry, I have not yet started, but intended to use it to a team of engineers), I found that it will go back to the approach of teaching to a class with some roles as the teacher in a case-based learning class. The ability to get feed-back from students will probably less then the one-to-one approach.

When guiding my staff in doing their work, I am actually teaching both content and thinking. Will it be more effective to teach them 6 hats first? I do not like the idea of arranging a course of 6 hats and then assume done. We probably need to continue to push them to practice until thinking habit is formed. During this period, we will still need the one-to-one approach based on issues related to the content. If this is the case, why we need "thinking tools/frameworks"? Why not simply using content to guide the person?

If someone has some experience, please let me know. After reading the book "Think", and the thinking in the last two weeks with the help of this society, I will try using 6 hats at least for one class to the engineers in my current company.
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on March 27, 2010 at 11:16
Before teaching other people using 6 hats, I found it is better to train myself that can turn into a mode of 6 hat thinking. Initially, it is better to use a simple thinking methodology, and add more details later during practice. I suggest the following for thinking any topic: ask feeling, ask benefits, ask disadvantages, ask for any potential new ideas, ask for any missing information and how to find, and finally get a summary. With my previous learning and experience in thinking, I trends to believe it is better to unite the aspects into one. This helps to create a resonance effect for the ideas interacting among the different aspects. Thus, for beginning, I believe simple is good, and do not spend too much time at one hat.

The above was the results of my thinking yesterday after some reading at Graeme's Ning sites. I also ordered the 6 hat CD and CoRT CD, which may allow me to get more details later.

I started the practice today. This was done to my children. I used the above simple sequence to discuss with them on issues they are facing today. The conversions were interesting, but I got one important finding.

I found while discussing with my children, I still need to focus on the content and still need to focus on the one-to-one interaction. Thus, the role of the teacher cannot be simplified from teaching methodology and content to only teaching methodology. But here, similar to teaching my graduate students, I expect my children will develop the 6 hat thinking methodology. I am hoping to see my children will start thinking the 6 aspects while dealing with their day-to-day issues, not just got some more thinking on the topics with my involvement. I am also trying to see how long this will take.

A side finding is that this approach resulted in a good interaction with the children. This may be an area that can be explored to find the values followed by developing the business opportunity.
Permalink Reply by Ryan Chadwick on March 28, 2010 at 1:27
Raymund, you actually got me onto an idea with your statement about the wording needing to be better and the idea that we're going off topic.

I wonder if Mr de Bono intentionally worded the question poorly (and intentionally very to one side) in the interest of sparking more heated debate. I have found that a lot of peoples true feelings on a topic come out when the debate is heated. People go further and further off topic to prove their points and we branch into different perspectives we wouldn't have otherwise done.

And all of this is a beautiful illustration of how brainstorming can work well. And if this was de Bono's intention it was quite elegant as we really did not understand what was happening. In fact, if we did, it would not have worked.

Sometimes understanding leads to not working.
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on March 29, 2010 at 16:14
I agree that this was an interesting thinking process for me through the discussions that initiated from Mr de Bono's statements. Now, I felt that it is probably his own long experience in teaching thinking tools that allowed him to use the word "never".
Permalink Reply by Franis on March 28, 2010 at 12:14
I have also found too that the time spent on any one thinking hat doesn't need to be very long of a time. Also, I have learned from other thinking teachers on this site that the sequence of which hats are selected can be applied effectively in certain situations. I'd like to learn more about effectively applying certain sequences of the Six Thinking Hats.

Keep us posted on your ongoing progress of experimenting to share with your kids the Six Hats Thinking process while you practice doing it for yourself. It's entertaining to read, thanks for your report!

Did you know there is also a website specializing in helping parents to teach their kids thinking skills? http://www.cortthinking.com There is much free content here also that is quite valuable.

Raymund Kwok said:
Before teaching other people using 6 hats, I found it is better to train myself that can turn into a mode of 6 hat thinking. Initially, it is better to use a simple thinking methodology, and add more details later during practice. I suggest the following for thinking any topic: ask feeling, ask benefits, ask disadvantages, ask for any potential new ideas, ask for any missing information and how to find, and finally get a summary. With my previous learning and experience in thinking, I tend to believe it is better to unite the aspects into one. This helps to create a resonance effect for the ideas interacting among the different aspects. Thus, for beginning, I believe simple is good, and do not spend too much time at one hat.
The above was the results of my thinking yesterday after some reading at Graeme's Ning sites. I also ordered the 6 hat CD and CoRT CD, which may allow me to get more details later.
I started the practice today. This was done to my children. I used the above simple sequence to discuss with them on issues they are facing today. The conversions were interesting, but I got one important finding.

I found while discussing with my children, I still need to focus on the content and still need to focus on the one-to-one interaction. Thus, the role of the teacher cannot be simplified from teaching methodology and content to only teaching methodology. But here, similar to teaching my graduate students, I expect my children will develop the 6 hat thinking methodology. I am hoping to see my children will start thinking the 6 aspects while dealing with their day-to-day issues, not just got some more thinking on the topics with my involvement. I am also trying to see how long this will take.

A side finding is that this approach resulted in a good interaction with the children. This may be an area that can be explored to find the values followed by developing the business opportunity.
Permalink Reply by Monika on March 29, 2010 at 0:15
Few days ago together with my colleges from work we have organized for the first time 6 Hats Thinking session. We discovered that we came out with valuable ideas and thoughts. And have to say that the aim of meeting was hard as we had to generate new ideas about the topic we all knew very well and talked about many times. On top of that we knew the current solution of the problem and it was hard to think in a different, constructive way - 6 Hats Thinking hepled us to overcome that barrier.
What I noticed is that it is very hard to keep a group of people to think in one direction. Some people seems to have a "dominant Hat" and without their awareness tried to use it all the time instead of switching Hats.
So lesson learned there is a need to have a moderator of such meetings that will keep the discipline of colors of hats. Perhaps this is a role of Blue Hat. However, that would mean that one person is always wearing a Blue Hat and will be out of the process.
Another lesson learned is to keep in mind what is the aim of the meetings because after the"information" phase I found out that we were slowly loosing the goal of the meeting and trying to get the data to the different problem. Perhaps the solution is to make the "white thinking" not longer than 5 minutes.
Do you have any other experience when waring 6 Hats :)?
Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on March 29, 2010 at 5:44
Hi Monika

Yes! you must have a moderator; a ringmaster if you like - as in a circus, because the animals are still quite wild and will need a bit of discipline so the moderator carries a big leather whip.

The moderator is not out of the process - quite the reverse: the moderator is very much inside the process with everyone and calls time on each Hat. With a bit of shared feedback at the start, or, after a briefing on the issue to be tackled, proposes a Hats Sequence - either "pre-set" (the order of Hats is predetermined) or "evolving" (you switch Hats as you go along - the moderator to decide when and which).

So the moderator is extremely important, especially when more than say, three people are involved.

Note that NOBODY - including the moderator - ever wears the same Hat for the whole session. EVERYONE switches Hats at the same time. Everyone is thus wearing a range of Hats but at any one moment everyone wears the same Hat.

5 minutes for a Hat is indeed a maximum time and I would stick to that or even 3 minutes per Hat. This way, people who are lousy at shifting gears in their thinking get a good challenging workout. The idea is to be brisk and professional.

DO NOT succumb to the temptation to have discussions (warm, fuzzy or otherwise) because this involves ordinary point-to-point descriptive thinking - anathema under the Hats system. People put up (under each Hat colour) or shut up. At the end of twenty minutes or so you should have a mosaic of information on a Parallel Thinking grid. A solution can be easily designed, or it whacks you over the head because it is suddenly so obvious.

For some extra information about the Blue Hat I have uploaded a .pdf file with this post that you can download or read by clicking the icon
Attachments:
Permalink Reply by Monika on March 29, 2010 at 23:44
Kim, thanks a lot for your tips and explanation of the role of Blue Hat. This Hat was for me mysterious, however after your post it is much more clear now for me what to do with it.
On our next meeting at work (because we continue generating ideas on the same topic) I will do as you suggested: 3-5 minutes per Hat. On our previous meeting we stayed with green Hat up to 15-20 min which was not comfortable for most of us and people started to loose interest in the topic.
As I understand from what you wrote we can switch hats and after a while come back once more to the same hat, is that right? For example: White Hat, Red Hat, Green Hat, White Hat, Green Hat.

Thanks once more for help :)!
Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on March 30, 2010 at 11:05
Monika

You have it right now. You might also go to the video section of this website where I have posted movies of de Bono talking this stuff through and giving examples of Hats sequences. You must watch these!

Look for "Parallel Thinking 1 -7" in the videos. I think 7 has no audio track for some reason but 1 - 6 are OK
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on March 29, 2010 at 16:24
Thanks for the web site information. With the trials in the last three days with 1-2 topics per day talking to my children (7 and 11 years), I strongly feel the real results as mentioned in the http://www.cortthinking.com/teach-your-child-think

- Better communication with your child.
- Preparing or dealing with the challenging "teen" years and conflicts.
- Family unit bonding

I believe it will take some more time to build the thinking habit for them, but I like the results so far.
Permalink Reply by Franis on March 30, 2010 at 1:04
I'd love to hear about some specific examples of what happens in lessons with your kids. What examples do you use? What are their ideas? It would be fun to read about these things.

Plus I can imagine relating your experience would help other parents understand how easy it is to introduce and continue with such a subject as teaching thinking skills.

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