This type of process I find particularly important to use with groups. (Part of what I do in my secret identity is work as a “facilitator”.) If you think individuals tend to “move chaotically from thought to thought”, you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen a group try to work orally on a complex issue. And yet, with some guidance, people in a working group talking to each other can cover a lot of ground quite fast.
A more “primordial” distinction than de Bono’s six, to my mind, is that between a) factual observations, b) what we want to have happen, c) how we might get there. Or in other words Observation, Goal, Solutions. This is partially captured in Eliezer’s “Hold off on proposing solutions”.
Another very basic distinction is between the positive and the negative. In working groups (and teams) people find it very easy to say “what’s not working”, i.e. to gripe and whine, but tend to overlook “what’s working”—this can really have detrimental effects when they implement a “fix” to a minor issue that actually turns out to undermine what was one of their strengths.
To some extent de Bono’s hats have “too many moving parts” for use in groups that have not first been trained to apply the technique, when I’ve tried it people have tended to ask me “Remind me what Yellow is again”, and gotten bogged down in self-consciously applying a technique as opposed to thinking things through.
If you use something that has these many segments, you need to be much more on top of the group. It’s quite doable; I have used this format for group work for instance, with its “past—present—future” structure and a lot of substructure as well; but to use that successfully requires a lot of prep.
I like Morendil’s three-part distinction because it foregrounds b, what we want to have happen. That’s there in the six hats implicitly (especially feelings, critical judgment, and positive aspects), but it seems to be too focused on the particular proposal. What’s good about this proposal, what’s bad about it, how do I feel about it—all are asking secondary questions, when the primary questions should be what’s good, what’s bad, and what might be better—about the whole situation. Foregrounding “what we want to have happen” could be helpful in thinking about cryonics. What kind of future living do I want to have happen—ones in which future experiencers remember my experiences? Ones in which future agents carry out my (present?) goals? Ones in which some future person is me (and what does that mean)? Etc.
But I like the foregrounding of lateral thinking in one of the six hats (green hat). To my mind this is usually the most neglected step in human decision-making. Scott Adams (the Dilbert author) tells the story of a businessman who was notorious for bringing ten new ideas to every business meeting, at least nine of which were incredibly bad. The businessman was Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Having bad ideas costs extremely little—especially in a context where multiplication of ideas is the norm and evaluation of ideas is deliberately postponed. Having ideas in general, i.e. brainstorming, also costs little.
It’s a well-kept secret that having good ideas, i.e. innovation, also lends itself to structured process; one of the ways to do that is to dissociate the idea-generation phase from the idea-selection phase. Brainstorming is one way to do the first, but if you only brainstorm without a way to do the second, you’ll end up nowhere.
There are processes for idea generation other than brainstorming, one that has piqued my curiosity in the past (perhaps in part because of the way its informal name sounds) is the Zwicky box.
This type of process I find particularly important to use with groups. (Part of what I do in my secret identity is work as a “facilitator”.) If you think individuals tend to “move chaotically from thought to thought”, you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen a group try to work orally on a complex issue. And yet, with some guidance, people in a working group talking to each other can cover a lot of ground quite fast.
A more “primordial” distinction than de Bono’s six, to my mind, is that between a) factual observations, b) what we want to have happen, c) how we might get there. Or in other words Observation, Goal, Solutions. This is partially captured in Eliezer’s “Hold off on proposing solutions”.
Another very basic distinction is between the positive and the negative. In working groups (and teams) people find it very easy to say “what’s not working”, i.e. to gripe and whine, but tend to overlook “what’s working”—this can really have detrimental effects when they implement a “fix” to a minor issue that actually turns out to undermine what was one of their strengths.
To some extent de Bono’s hats have “too many moving parts” for use in groups that have not first been trained to apply the technique, when I’ve tried it people have tended to ask me “Remind me what Yellow is again”, and gotten bogged down in self-consciously applying a technique as opposed to thinking things through.
If you use something that has these many segments, you need to be much more on top of the group. It’s quite doable; I have used this format for group work for instance, with its “past—present—future” structure and a lot of substructure as well; but to use that successfully requires a lot of prep.
I like Morendil’s three-part distinction because it foregrounds b, what we want to have happen. That’s there in the six hats implicitly (especially feelings, critical judgment, and positive aspects), but it seems to be too focused on the particular proposal. What’s good about this proposal, what’s bad about it, how do I feel about it—all are asking secondary questions, when the primary questions should be what’s good, what’s bad, and what might be better—about the whole situation. Foregrounding “what we want to have happen” could be helpful in thinking about cryonics. What kind of future living do I want to have happen—ones in which future experiencers remember my experiences? Ones in which future agents carry out my (present?) goals? Ones in which some future person is me (and what does that mean)? Etc.
But I like the foregrounding of lateral thinking in one of the six hats (green hat). To my mind this is usually the most neglected step in human decision-making. Scott Adams (the Dilbert author) tells the story of a businessman who was notorious for bringing ten new ideas to every business meeting, at least nine of which were incredibly bad. The businessman was Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Having bad ideas costs extremely little—especially in a context where multiplication of ideas is the norm and evaluation of ideas is deliberately postponed. Having ideas in general, i.e. brainstorming, also costs little.
It’s a well-kept secret that having good ideas, i.e. innovation, also lends itself to structured process; one of the ways to do that is to dissociate the idea-generation phase from the idea-selection phase. Brainstorming is one way to do the first, but if you only brainstorm without a way to do the second, you’ll end up nowhere.
There are processes for idea generation other than brainstorming, one that has piqued my curiosity in the past (perhaps in part because of the way its informal name sounds) is the Zwicky box.