Parallel thinking for strategy questions

Six Thinking Hats tool for team workshops, and a six perspective AI workshop

A Six Thinking Hats tool helps a team look at one question through six separate modes of thinking, one at a time, instead of arguing from fixed positions. Brainstormer runs a related format: an AI workshop where six standing perspectives answer one strategic question, and the results feed straight into an idea challenge.

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01
What each hat asks of the room and the usual running order
02
Why facilitated hats sessions are hard to sustain
03
How the six AI perspectives overlap with the hats, and where they differ
04
How workshop output becomes ideas in a challenge with a decision

What the six hats do in a company meeting

Edward de Bono's method rests on one observation: meetings go badly when each person holds one position the whole time. The optimist sells, the skeptic blocks, the analyst recites numbers, and nobody moves. The hats make everyone think in the same mode at the same time, so the whole room does risks together, then benefits together, then new options together.

In plain words: White is facts and data, Red is feelings and gut reaction, Black is caution and risk, Yellow is benefits and value, Green is new options, and Blue manages the process and the next steps. Most facilitators open and close with Blue, and put Yellow before Black so an idea gets a fair hearing before it is attacked.

It is a strong format for decisions with real stakes: entering a market, changing pricing, reorganizing a team. It surfaces the risks people were too polite to raise and the upside people were too cautious to claim.

Six Thinking Hats and the six AI workshop perspectives, compared honestly
Aspect	Six Thinking Hats session	Brainstormer AI workshop
The six lenses	White facts, Red feelings, Black caution, Yellow benefits, Green creativity, Blue process	Optimist, Skeptic, Customer, Engineer, Marketer, Visionary
Closest overlap	Black hat, Yellow hat, Green hat	Skeptic, Optimist, Visionary
Not covered	No customer or technical role as such	No facts hat and no process hat as separate roles
Who runs it	A trained facilitator keeps the order	You type one question, all six answer
Where the output goes	Flip charts and notes	Sent into a challenge as ideas, then scored and decided

Six Thinking Hats sequences that work

You rarely need all six hats in equal measure. De Bono meant the hats to be assembled per problem, and four sequences cover most company meetings.

Evaluating a proposal. Blue, White, Yellow, Black, Green, Blue. Yellow before Black keeps the room from killing the idea before it understands it.
Generating options. Blue, White, Green, Green, Red, Blue. Two Green rounds with a short break between them produce a second wave of less obvious ideas.
Unsticking a conflict. Blue, Red, White, Black, Yellow, Green, Blue. Red first drains the emotion, so the facts get a fair hearing instead of being read as ammunition.
Quick decision check in 15 minutes. Blue, Black, Yellow, Blue. A deliberate risk and benefit pass over a decision that is already mostly made.

Two rules keep any sequence honest. Timebox every hat to between 2 and 8 minutes, because open-ended hats sag. And close with Blue: who owns which option, and when the decision is due. A hats session without that close is a well-organized conversation that nobody acts on.

A worked example on a churn decision

A 12-person SaaS company sees monthly churn creep from 4% to 6%, and someone proposes annual-only billing. A 40-minute hats session runs like this.

Blue, 3 minutes. Frame the question: should new customers move to annual billing to cut churn?
White, 7 minutes. Churn is concentrated in months one and two, annual customers churn at a third of the rate, and there is no data on price sensitivity.
Red, 2 minutes. Two people feel annual-only is hostile to buyers. The founder feels the monthly plan leaks.
Black, 8 minutes. Annual-only raises the purchase barrier and may cut signups more than it cuts churn, and competitors all bill monthly.
Yellow, 6 minutes. Prepaid revenue funds runway, and one renewal conversation a year replaces twelve.
Green, 10 minutes. Keep monthly but default the pricing page to annual, offer a pause instead of cancel, and add a 60-day onboarding sequence where churn actually happens.
Blue, 4 minutes. Decision with owners, revisited in one quarter.

The binary proposal dissolved. White located the real problem, Black killed the extreme version and Green produced the plan. In Brainstormer, those three Green options would go into a challenge as ideas, get scored against the goal of reducing churn, and move through the pipeline with an owner on each, so the quarter-end review has a record of what was decided and why.

Why hats workshops are hard to run often

The method needs a facilitator who keeps the order, stops people slipping back into their usual hat and time boxes every round. That takes preparation, a free afternoon and the right people in one room. As a result, many teams learn the method once and rarely use it again.

The second problem is what happens afterwards. A good hats session fills flip charts with risks, benefits and options, and then the notes sit in a shared folder. Nothing connects them to how the company decides what to fund. If you run hats regularly, it helps to plan the follow up before the session, with an owner for each option and a date for the decision.

For a structure around the whole day, our pages on strategic planning workshops and facilitation tools cover agendas and roles.

How the AI workshop with six perspectives compares

To be straight about it: Brainstormer does not run the six hats, and its six perspectives are not de Bono's hats. The AI workshop gives one strategic question to six standing perspectives at once: Optimist, Skeptic, Customer, Engineer, Marketer and Visionary. Each answers from its own seat, so you get disagreement by design rather than twenty versions of the same idea.

The overlap is real in places. The Skeptic does the cautionary work of the Black hat, the Optimist covers much of Yellow, and the Visionary pushes for new options like Green. The Customer, Engineer and Marketer have no direct hat, while the hats' facts mode and process mode have no dedicated perspective. If you specifically need the full hats method, run it with a facilitator. If you need a fast, varied first pass on a strategy question before a meeting, the workshop does similar work without anyone preparing it.

Each plan includes a monthly number of workshops: 20 on Team, 100 on Business and 500 on Enterprise. Details are on the pricing page.

From workshop output to a decision

The part that matters most for a company is what happens next. Results from the AI workshop can be sent into a challenge as ideas, where they sit alongside what employees submit. From there they go through the same steps as any idea: AI expansion into problem, solution, first step and success measure, scoring against your strategic goals, duplicate merging and voting.

The pipeline moves each idea from submitted to in review, shortlisted, approved, in progress and implemented, or rejected, and every change records who moved it, when and with what note. At the end, the board report for the challenge shows the ranking, themes, stage counts and a recommendation, ready to print to PDF.

A practical pattern: run the AI workshop before a live hats session to seed the room with options, then run the hats on the three strongest. Read how it works, or start your workspace and try it on your next strategy question.

Questions

Who invented the Six Thinking Hats?

Edward de Bono, the physician and psychologist who also coined the term lateral thinking, published the method in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats. His argument was that meetings inherit an adversarial habit, and that a group thinks better when everyone looks in the same direction at the same time, then changes direction together.

Which hat represents new and unusual ideas?

The Green hat. It covers alternatives, provocations, workarounds and deliberately unusual suggestions. It gets its own slot because new ideas tend to die the moment someone evaluates them, so while Green is on, nobody in the room is allowed to judge.

What do the red hat and black hat mean?

The Red hat is feelings and intuition, stated without any need to justify them. The Black hat is caution and risk: what could go wrong and which assumptions the plan depends on. The test is whether a reason is required. A feeling is Red, a checkable claim about a risk is Black.

Does the white hat come before the red hat?

Usually yes. The standard order runs Blue, White, Red, then the evaluation hats, so gut reactions land after the room shares the facts. Flip it when the room is already emotional, because running Red first lets the pressure out and the facts then get a fair hearing.

How do the Six Thinking Hats help resolve conflict?

They remove fixed positions. When the whole room wears the Black hat at once, the usual skeptic is doing the assigned task rather than opposing anyone. For a session that has already turned adversarial, run Blue, Red, White, Black, Yellow, Green, Blue, and always close with Blue so everyone leaves with the same account of the decision.

Does Brainstormer run the Six Thinking Hats?

No. There is no hats mode. Brainstormer has an AI workshop with six standing perspectives (Optimist, Skeptic, Customer, Engineer, Marketer, Visionary). Some overlap with the hats, some do not, and we do not present them as the same method.

What are the six hats?

White for facts and data, Red for feelings, Black for caution and risks, Yellow for benefits, Green for new options, and Blue for managing the process and next steps.

Can workshop results go into our idea challenge?

Yes. Workshop output can be sent into a challenge as ideas, where it is expanded, scored against your strategic goals, merged with duplicates and moved through the decision pipeline like any other idea.