“Six Thinking Hats” towards naming our newborn baby girl
As a family of “Brainstormers”, who are used to come up with new product ideas in their day-to-day work we faced a new and unknown challenge to us — picking a name to our expected baby girl. Looking for the right method to do it, we (Yulia Goldenberg ❤) decided to play with the “Six Thinking Hats” method:
Six Thinking Hats is a system designed by Edward de Bono which describes a tool for group discussion and individual thinking involving six colored hats. “Six Thinking Hats” and the associated idea parallel thinking provide a means for groups to plan thinking processes in a detailed and cohesive way, and in doing so to think together more effectively. (Wikipedia)
In de Bono’s methodology six distinct directions are identified and assigned a color. The six directions are:
- Managing Blue — what is the subject? what are we thinking about? what is the goal? Look at the big picture.
- Information White — considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
- Creativity Green — statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes. Thinks creatively, outside the box.
- Emotions Red — intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification).
- Discernment Black — logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative. Practical, realistic.
- Optimistic response Yellow — logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony. Sees the brighter, sunny side of situations.
Applying those techniques on selecting a name for our future baby girl, made the process more pragmatic, systematic, creative and most important — fun :)
Thus, we decided to start with the Blue Hat — Why do we need a name, what constraints do we have? By being two Israelis originated from Russia, we had already an initial list of requirements:
- The name should be easy spelled and pronounced in Hebrew, Russian and English — so our friends, parents (and maybe even baristas at Starbucks) won’t break their teeth saying it.
- We want to pick a female-only name, and avoid many of the unisex names that are very popular in Israel.
- The name should be too long (2–3 Syllables are enough) but also not too short (3 letters is a good start - which is not obvious in Hebrew).
Thinking about it practically, we already created a common ground for both of us, by knowing where to aim and what to avoid.
Next, we moved to the White Hat — let’s use the information and facts. At this point Google became our best friend and we didn’t believe how many websites are dedicated to the task of choosing a name to our baby. Even baby stores were providing lists of names to expecting parents. We took a look at year-over-year statistics, names origins, classifications, alphabetical lists and came up with a list of few dozens of names.
Using the Green Hat brought the best of our creativity — we improvised, made up names of different combination of letters (kind of brute-forcing the ABC), converted the names of the things around us to baby-girl names (but rejected some of them later, since “Electra” sounds like a cool brand but might be tricky for a girl). The list kept growing more and more, and reached to almost a hundred names.
By reaching to the Red Hat stage, we naturally became very emotional. We started to discuss which sounds we like more (anything with A’s Y’s and L’s) what rhymes better with the last name, what associations we have with each of the names in the list and how do we feel about them. A nice part of this stage was that we didn’t need any explanations — just the facial expressions we made when hearing the name was enough to make a valid argument.
Dealing with the Black Hat was surprisingly fun. Now, when we have a huge list of baby names, we can start to eliminate them one-by-one. Up to this point names came up to the list with no much judgement, but now is the time to criticize:
Too short, too long, sounds weird, too complicated, reminds me someone that I don’t like, badly spelled, too masculine, too popular and many other reasons we could come up with. We even tried to mock and bully some of the names by looking for possible funny meanings, rhymes or interpretations that “evil kids” may find one day (but didn’t let those mean kids to stop us). We crossed out few more names every day, and rewrote the list of remaining candidates. Then only 5 candidates made it up to the finals.
And finally we left with the Yellow Hat and few more days to the expected birth. Thinking about our future daughter, wearing the hat of positivity melted us with warm feelings and tons of excitement and expectation. We started to imagine her future, how she will look, behave, think and talk. We were dreaming of her future friends, hobbies, professions and style. Many of our friends kept reminding that every baby has its own personality from day-one, and that the name we’ll pick will become another piece of her personality. Therefore we decided that the final decision will be made right after we’ll finally meet her in person.
In a middle of another casual medical examination, the doctor surprisingly stated, that the next time we’ll leave the hospital, will be together with our daughter. This was a first shot of a 14-hours longing marathon, at the end of which the nurse placed our newborn baby on my wife’s belly and attached a wrist-band to all of us. The wrist band said “Yulia’s Daughter” and the clever, tricky smile on the tiny face of its owner helped us to decide…
Welcome to our world, Aya :)
