Red Hat Explained: The Six Thinking Hats [Book Summary 3/7]
This is the 3rd part of the book summary series on the Six Thinking Hats.
The Red Hat is an incredibly important hat. The red color stands for fire đ„ and emotions. It is mainly concerned with feelings and emotions.
When we conduct a business discussion, weâre not supposed to let emotions sip in. They end up doing so anyway, but we disguise them as logic.
âI sense that this is not the right person for the job.â
âI donât feel like you will make the deadline.â
With the Red Hat, people are given a chance to
- express their true feelings.
- say things that they donât have to validate.
- make critical statements seem less personally attacking.
The Red Hat is the opposite of the fact-based White Hat.
Emotions in decision-making
There is some impressive research done by Antonio Damasio and others on patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). While the patients still have normal attention, memory, learning and language capabilities, they perform significantly worse in every-day decision-making. They are hardly able to decide what to eat and how to behave socially.
The vmPFC is an integral part of emotion processing and can help us predict how the future will look like. In other words, without emotions, we become indecisive and erratic.
Feelings, hunches, and intuitions arenât always right. They can introduce any of a long list of mental biases.
But they are based on the entirety of our past experiences.
They help us make sense of a situation very quickly. Emotions are also able to give us a sense of how specific scenarios might play out in the future. As such, they are critical to our decision-making process.
You feel uneasy about a new person you meet. You might not be able to put it into words, but something seems off. This is your intuition at work. Itâs best to be on guard and proceed very cautiously until you either can confirm your suspicions or they get dispelled by evidence refuting those suspicions.
The Red Hat allows these emotions, hunches, and intuitions to be voiced with a clear label.
Some basic rules for the Red Hat
- They should always be applied to a specific idea or situation. âGive me your Red Hat thinking on calling up our competitors customers and asking them to switch to us.â
- Not allowed to say âpassâ. You can say âneutral, mixed, confused, doubtful, undecidedâ. If described as âmixedâ, the facilitator may ask âWhat goes into the mix?â
- Donât justify or explain your feelings
When to apply the Red Hat?
There are two major ways you can use the Red Hat.
- In a planned sequence of hats: At the beginning and the end.
- Single-use: For important emotional topics
Planned use of The Red Hat within a sequence of Hats
The Red Hat aims to capture the feeling that is present towards a situation right now. Itâs ok if the feeling changes and we feel different in 20 minutes.
Hence it is often useful to apply at the beginning of a discussion and towards the end. So we can also feel if the feelings have changed at all?
Imagine the decision is on whether we should go ahead with a risky marketing campaign. In the beginning, some people may say with their Red Hats that they donât like it (a legitimate use of the Red Hat).
But after all the facts (White Hat), chances (Yellow Hat) and dangers (Black Hat) have been pointed out, maybe some feelings will shift. The Red Hat is used again and everyone now agrees to go ahead with the decision.
Every decision must be emotional in the end. With an emphasis to the âin the endâ. After drawing the map with our thinking we chose the route with our values and emotions.
Feelings will lurk around anyway. Best to give them a clear outlet and label them as such.
âDonât ask me why, but this is a terrible deal.â đââïž
âI do not like him and do not want to do business with him.â đ ââïž
âThat design is hideous. It will never catch on and is a huge waste of money.â đ ââïž
âI donât think itâs fair to withhold this information until after the deal is signed.ââđŒ
Single use of the Red Hat
- Use it if itâs an important matter.
- You want to get someoneâs Red Hat thinking formally.
- You say something that is potentially strong emotionally.
- Donât use it every time you want to express a feeling, this might seem absurd.
âI want to make a Red Hat statement. I feel like we are being bullied into an agreement we donât want.â
âPlease stop using the Red Hat now for the next 20 minutes.â
Once emotions have surfaced, we can work with them.
How can the Red Hat be used?
There may be fear, anger, jealousy or love at play when making decisions. The Red Hat allows for our unspoken background feelings to appear.
- Pointing out feelings towards othersâ motivations
- Putting forward feelings about an upcoming decision
- Admitting emotions such as jealousy
Pointing out feelings towards othersâ motivations
Once we see a person in a certain light, itâs hard to change our perception of them. We ought to point out these feelings as soon as they arise.
âIf I were to put on my Red Hat, it seems to me that you want to oppose the merger in order to preserve your own job rather than benefit shareholders.â
âYou are hesitant about this deal. You donât want in, but you also donât want to be left out. You want to be in an antechamber, waiting to be called in whenever it suits you.â
Putting forward feelings about an upcoming decision
After the map of the situation has been laid out with facts, ideas, evidence, and threats, itâs important to include our emotions to paint a full picture.
âIf I put on my Red Hat, I feel like we shouldnât end the strike yet. We arenât ready to start negotiations; both parties arenât hurting enough to be willing to make real concessions.
Admitting emotions such as jealousy
âI will put on my Red Hat and state that I am opposing Anneâs promotion because I am jealous of her and her quick rise to power.â
Most of us probably wonât manage to be that honest.
However, we can soften the statement as follows:
âWith my Red Hat, I can sense that my opposition is in part based on jealousy.â
Alternatively, we could also say:
âI am going to take cover under my Red Hat and say that I am opposed to Anneâs promotion. Itâs just a feeling that I have.â
How to deal with intuitions
Intuitions are the system 1 response to a specific situation that has built up over time, through experience in dealing with this type of situation.
âI strongly feel most vegans wonât like GMO vegan food.â
Treat intuitions like an advisor. They can be very, very valuable.
The more someoneâs (including your own) intuitions have been right in the past, the more you should trust them.
However, they are not the only source of truth.
Pro Tip: Check intuition for believability on a particular subject.
Good intuition in one area does not translate into good intuition in another, unrelated area.
Just because someone has made a ton of money selling real estate, doesnât mean theyâll be specially qualified to call a presidential race.
Use the Red Hat with a focus
Emotions can be fickle. A questionnaire asked Americans whether they generally favored an involvement of US troops Central America. The majority favored the involvement. But for each proposed interventions, there was a majority opposed to it.
This doesnât make sense rationally but makes sense emotionally.
So make sure to use the Red Hat on a specific question or issue.
Examples
âCan you please give me your Red Hat thinking on selling vegan salmon burgers?â
âMy Red Hat tells me that this offer is not going to be accepted.â
Additional ways of using the Red Hat idiom
- Voice critical thoughts without appearing attacking.
- Ask for feelings
- Reframe
- Bring to awareness
- Negotiate
Voice Critical Thoughts without appearing attacking.
One strength of working with the Six Thinking Hats is that introduces a certain playfulness. This can render statements seem less personally attacking.
âSandra, it is my Red Hat view that you never listen to anyone else.â
âIâm going to reach for my Red Hat and say that I donât like how this meeting is being conducted.â
See how now I donât have to point out specific examples who could lead to debating whether they are accurate or not? I can simply state what I feel.
At first, the hat feels artificial. Should we really âput on our hatsâ all the time just to voice a feeling?
But artificiality is its key strength: Switch in and out of the emotion mode
- Usually, emotions can take a while to build up and to simmer down. Offense is taken, and offense is given.
- Can reduce the amount of bickering. If you have to put on the red hat every time something mildly insults you, you might stop bothering to respond and thus keep the unproductive back-and-forth to a minimum.
- By creating a formal channel for feelings and emotion, there is no longer a need to intrude at every point.
Simply ask for feelings
Another significant benefit is that you no more need to guess the feelings of others. Simply ask them directly.
âI suspect you donât like me. Is it true? I want a Red Hat answer.â
âCan we just have one overall Red Hat view from you on this subject Michael?
Reframe
A powerful way to use the Red Hat is to let people access their feelings with new points of view.
âDonât look at like a defeat, but an expensive way to learn an important lesson.â
âIf this proposal were to come from your side, would it be agreeable to you?â
âThere is a feeling that everything is outside of our control. Letâs imagine for a while that this isnât so and that we can very well influence the situation.â
Bring to awareness
Itâs also really good to voice and acknowledge critical circumstances.
âLetâs be aware of the anger in the background that is present.â
âThe restriction on your ability to work with competitive companies is a sensitive point. Letâs leave that aside for now and come back to it later.â
Negotiate
Declare what is important to you for emotional reasons.
âItâs critical to us that we can have a say in product development.â
âWe must insist that those procedures are followed. Thatâs very important for safety.â
Things have a different value for different people. These things can be expressed directly under a Red Hat.
âWhat is most important to you in this deal Jonas?â
âThe ability for our team to set their own vacation times is critical.â
Only by expressing those items can we maximize the outcome of negotiations by expanding the pie.
Summary of Red Hat
- With the Red Hat, youâre allowed to say âThis is how I feel about the matter.â
- Acknowledging feelings as feelings is better than keeping them as supposed logic.
- The Red Hat allows people to switch on & off the feeling mode.
- Within the Red Hat, you donât have to justify anything.
- It allows you to ask other people how they feel.
- Can be used both to cover strong emotions such as fear and jealousy but also to cover more subtle hunches and intuitions.
Your Turn
Training
- When can you apply the Red Hat next?
- What difficult decision do you have to make soon? Can you lay out what you see under the Red Hat?
- What is your Red Hat thinking about this article? Let me know in the comments below!
Next Steps
Next time weâll dig into the Black Hat!
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Overview of the Six Thinking Hats
Flavio Rump is an entrepreneur and investor. He shares decision-making models from the worldâs best decision makers. You can read his articles, watch his YouTube Videos or join his free newsletter to learn how to make better decisions.