De Bono's Hats

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When I was a kid there was a show on TV about about a scarecrow called Worzle Gummage. He had the amazing ability to change his heads depending on the type of activity he needed to do. As a child I loved this idea, that you could put your smart head on, or your friendly head, or scary head. When I started to read about De Bono's hats, I thought that maybe at the core there are similarities: that is, within us is the capacity to "put on different heads" to look at a problem in different ways.

So my first exposure to the DeBono's 6 Hats was in the collaborative wiki. Again, the most outstanding observation  was that as I browsed all the different posts, I was amazed that even within the same hat's peoples observations and opinions were both quite varied and also very similar.

What I liked about using the DeBono's Hats was that if the question "should mobile phones be used in schools" had been asked using a behavioral approach then a simple answer of yes or no would have done the job.

Using a cognitive approach that was structured to use 6 slightly different ways of answering the question meant that a much more comprehensive argument could be structured. I also liked that different people did more research or took a more creative approach.

I would enjoy the same task repeated with individuals aligned with a specific hat, I think that this would be a really productive way to get to excellent outcome.