I was in Barnes & Noble last night and read (most of) a book there called Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono. De Bono is an expert in teaching on thinking and creativity, and is also the author of Lateral Thinking and I Am Right, You Are Wrong.
The ideas in Six Thinking Hats are very simple, and it’s pretty easy to see how they could easily be a great aid. It discourages our normal paradigm of argument/debate, critical thinking, and focusing solely on "pros vs cons" of an idea, and encourages a group of people to think "in parallel". That is, instead of people defending their individual ideas, and basically arguing through things (to the point where simply the best arguer wins), the group uses the concept of six "thinking hats" representing different styles of thinking, and each person attempts to approach the problem in the same way at the same time. For example, instead of one person focusing on "pros" and another on the "cons" of an idea, the group would decide to "wear" the yellow thinking hat (which is the positive thinking hat) and all come up with all the possible positive, beneficial, good things about an idea; no negative ideas allowed. Then, after, they might adopt the "black hat" (cautious, the "devil’s advocate" hat) and everyone together would think of all the things which could possibly go wrong with the idea.
And so in turn with the other "hats" — the white hat for "just-the-facts", neutral, objective thinking, the red hat for emotional, "gut-feeling" thoughts, the green hat for crazy, creative, zany ideas, and the blue hat for "big picture" (think sky), organizational thinking.
The end result is that you attack a problem or situation from many different sides, and instead of debating at each turn, everyone is trying to think in the same way at any given time (hence the associated term "parallel thinking"). It’s a cool idea, easy to see how it could be a useful tool for creativity and productive meetings.
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