Productivity Hack: Super-Charge Team Meetings Using the 6 Thinking Hats Technique
Discover the power of parallel thinking and save your team from avoidable decision-making pitfalls.
This posting expresses the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yext and its affiliates, employees, officers, directors or representatives.
Do your team meetings go off topic and struggle to accomplish unanimous alignment in the time allotted? Are they often clouded by disagreement or biased thinking? How can you be sure you are exploring all possible outcomes?
Our team was experiencing a bit of these meeting woes as our Consulting Department swelled from ten people to almost seventy people in under four years. My leadership peers and I knew we needed to narrow in on areas of our business to provide stability and strength as we continued to scale at such a rapid clip. We seized the opportunity to address this concern at our Consulting offsite last spring and doubled down on three main areas:
- Trust
- Communication
- Decision-Making
We were hearing our team attempt to communicate facts, feelings, and pros/cons all in one statement. It was thwarting our ability to achieve group buy-in and eroding trust for one another.
Making group decisions was a pain point in all three of these areas. Sure, we could get a group together to discuss a problem and potential solutions, but we were hearing our team attempt to communicate facts, feelings, and pros / cons all in one statement. Simultaneously exploring the benefits of an existing idea, proposing alternatives, challenging ideas and conveying emotional attachment resulted in convoluted conversations and scattered alignment. Not only was this approach thwarting our ability to achieve group buy-in, it also was eroding trust for one another as people perceived those complex statements as personal attacks.
Sound familiar? Enter the power of parallel thinking.
What is parallel thinking?
I’m a frequent meeting facilitator so I thirst for activities or frameworks that will help drive results in a short period of time. Author (and genius) Dr. Edward de Bono explains in his book, Six Thinking Hats, that the essence of parallel thinking is that at any moment everyone is looking in the same direction. According to Dr. de Bono, the main difficulty of thinking is confusion. We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope and creativity all crowd in on us and we diminish our ability to make good decisions. By shifting the WHOLE GROUP into a methodical and shared progression of thinking, we create a comfortable space for the group to think factually, emotionally, creatively, negatively, and positively TOGETHER.
The Six Thinking Hats
You can read about how to conduct the Six Thinking Hats methods by purchasing the book, but here is a summary of the fundamental tenets and how we’ve used them.
Important Tenets
It is key to remember that each hat is related to its function and, in practice, the hats are referred to by their color—never their function. Also, the hats are not descriptions of people but modes of behavior and they are not a description of what happened — they represent a shared direction in thinking. When using the Six Thinking Hats approach, everyone in the group is “wearing” the same hat together. The only exception is the blue hat, which is the organizer hat.
Key Things About the Exceptional Blue Hat
Elect one person to lead as the blue hat. This person acts as the moderator ONLY when the group is in the blue hat mode or when the group needs redirected back to the hat. All other times, this person participates alongside the group according to whatever color hat mode they are in together. They jump back into blue hat mode when the group has completed each hat phase and helps the group stay on track according to the Six Thinking Hats methods.
The blue hat person is the one who clarifies the meeting objectives and the proposed process of moving through the hats. There are different progressions through the hat colors based on what you are trying to accomplish.
Common Hat Progression Patterns
The traditional progression for most decisions goes as follows:
Other arrangements of the hats may be used based on situational cases where time or topic may be of importance. Here are a sampling of the progressions patterns we’ve drawn upon and why they are useful:
Brief Review:
This progression is good for in-flight projects where fundamental features and scope have already been defined and new ideas are not needed. This progression usually happens when a project is at a good stopping point for a group review of quality against a set of facts or data specifications.
Deciding Between Two Things:
This progression is good for making quick decisions between two defined options as it focuses the discussion on the facts, allows team members’ emotional reactions to be heard and come to a consensus based on facts and logic.
Quick Feedback:
Yes, you can even use the 6 thinking hat method for delivering feedback to the group, in one-on-one performance meetings, or for constructive peer critique. This progression forces the person giving feedback to strip emotion out of the delivery, allows recipients of the criticism to clearly hear the logical impact of their actions, and both parties to brainstorm together on ideas for how to handle things better going forward.
Comprehensive Decision:
This formula allows participants to experience a progression of before and after emotional response as they take in facts, new ideas, potential benefits and risks. Usually this helps cleanse clouded thinking, re-aligns the group around common goals, and detoxifies any pent-up personal attachment to ideas.
The Consulting Design team at Yext regularly turns to the power of parallel thinking and have been met with many successes. Within our DC-based design team, we’ve used parallel thinking to make decisions on everything from what base mobile screen sizes to design for (360px, if you must know), whether our team should be provisioned laptops or iMacs (Macbook Pro’s 4 EVR), and defining major process shifts. It’s been a wonderfully positive tactic to bring the team closer to alignment and move towards progressive action. Give it a try — you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain!
