Techniques to stimulate creativity: six hats for thinkingIn this post, María José Cuetos, professor of the International Online Master's Degree in Business Administration and Management at Bureau Veritas Centro Universitario, talks to us about the technique for stimulating creativity known as "Six Hats for Thinking."
In competitive business environments, and even more so in times of crisis, two elements have become the protagonists of organizations: innovation and creativity , which, although they have been in the business environment for a long time, play a fundamental role in achieving competitive and differentiating advantages that allow them to maintain and progress successfully.
Innovation can be defined as the transformation of an idea into a new marketable product, into new or improved processes and services to be recognized in the market , where ideas are the basic "raw material" of companies and the trigger of the innovative process.
Both innovation and creativity work together to facebook data achieve solutions and changes in organizations that allow them to meet the needs of society and achieve customer satisfaction. One of the problems that often arise is that organizations are not prepared for change or to face unforeseen events , since their rigid structures oppose breaking the stability achieved until now. The process must begin from the top, from Senior Management, so that an innovative and creative management philosophy is generated that allows the organization's human team to be encouraged, committed to certain values and allows horizontal and vertical development, achieving a viable project, and generating a value chain and its own philosophy .
Creativity can be managed and stimulated through various techniques that try to reproduce the right conditions for generating ideas. Among the existing techniques with proven utility, the best known are:
Brainstorming is a widely used technique where a group of people try to find solutions to a specific problem, generating ideas spontaneously .
Synectics is used to try to solve problems by solving others with known solutions .
Or less widespread as:
The scamper , which guides us to make permutations of ideas between elements that we have at our disposal
The Da Vinci technique , generating new perspectives and ideas through clusters of images .
«Six hats for thinking»
But the technique that will be analyzed in this post is the “six hats for thinking” technique that analyzes a problem from different perspectives to achieve its resolution by incorporating lateral thinking. Its author Edward de Bono in his book Thinking hats establishes 6 ways of thinking and approaching decisions , assigning each hat a color:
White hat, represents neutral and objective thinking. It is the thinking that is based on available data and figures .
Red hat, represents intuitive thinking, exposing feelings and emotions .
Black hat, represents a critical and cautious position, manifesting the negative aspects of the topic being discussed, the possible errors and inconveniences .
Yellow hat , positive and optimistic thinking. Constructive position that seeks the benefit and values of the topic discussed.
Green hat, is a vision for creativity, asks for ideas, possibilities and alternatives , to discover your creative potential.
Blue hat, is the hat that controls the thought process. Whoever wears this hat acts as a moderator of the process, summarizing and specifying the conclusions obtained.
This technique can be applied individually or in a group and allows for different types of thinking in the same session, since each participant will adopt a different role depending on the hat they are holding . The duration of possession of each hat must be the same for each participant and the order in which the hats are placed is not in an established order.