Six Thinking Hats

De Bono offers the metaphor of a computer as an example of white hat thinking. It is not emotional; it shows only facts and figures, without an argument. White hat thinking is the opposite of what he regards as Western thinking. The latter prefers to give a conclusion first, then find the facts to support the conclusion. However, his “map-making” type of thinking involves making the map first and then choosing the route. This is why starting with the white hat is important.

The person requesting white hat thinking should be specific, to avoid drowning in information. They should also avoid asking for questions in order to build a certain case. In addition, they must separate “pure” fact from extrapolation or interpretation.

Much of what passes for fact is actually a good-faith comment or a matter of personal belief. This results in a two-tiered system of “believed facts and checked facts” (33).

Believed facts arise from comments made in good faith or personal beliefs. They can be put forward under white hat thinking, but they are “second-class” facts. Believed facts can be useful, but they should then be verified.

Checked facts, in contrast, are those that can be verified. They should not be used to further a point of view, as people sometimes do with believed facts. They should be approached with neutral objectivity.

De Bono claims that the Japanese people never embraced Western-style argument because they were never influenced by the Greek philosophies that were further developed by medieval monks “as a means of proving heretics to be wrong” (36). In Western thinking, meeting participants arrive with points of view and ideas about the conclusion they wish to reach. The meeting then consists of arguing through each point of view to see which one attracts the most adherents.

In contrast, Japanese meeting participants arrive with no preformed ideas. They are there to listen. Each participant provides neutral information, demonstrating white hat thinking. The “map” gets increasingly detailed until the way to proceed is obvious. The white hat is a mechanism for overriding Western habits of argument.

Truth and facts are not the same thing. De Bono gives the example of swans: If the only swans one sees are white, the conclusion that all swans are white can be momentarily truthful and factual. Once a black swan is sighted, the statement becomes untrue, but the fact that many more white swans have been seen than black ones remains true.

For this reason, statements such as “by and large” and “tend to” have value, running on a spectrum from what is always true to what is sometimes true to what cannot be true. However, in white hat thinking, it is important to consider the statistics behind the statements and frame information accordingly.

To answer the question of who puts on the white hat, de Bono says a person can put it on to answer a question, ask someone else to put it on, ask everyone in a meeting to put it on, or choose to answer with the hat on. While hunch, intuition, experience, and other factors have value, the white hat excludes them.

De Bono revisits the metaphor of white hat thinkers behaving like objective computers to obtain or provide information and restates the two-tier system of information that includes believed and proven facts. He also reviews the spectrum of likelihood that a fact is true, and says that levels such as “occasionally” can have value in white hat thinking if they are framed appropriately.