Six Thinking Hats

By: Edward De Bono

Narrated by: Mike Fraser

Used successfully by thousands of business managers, educators, and government leaders around the world, Six Thinking Hats offers a practical and uniquely positive approach to making decisions and exploring new ideas.

Your success depends on how you think. The main difficulty of thinking is confusion, writes Edward de Bono, long recognized as an international authority on conceptual thinking and on the teaching of thinking as a skill. We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope, and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls. The solution? De Bono unscrambles the thinking process with his six thinking hats:

• WHITE HAT: neutral and objective, concerned with facts and figures
• RED HAT: the emotional view
• BLACK HAT: careful and cautious
• YELLOW HAT: sunny and positive
• GREEN HAT: associated with fertile growth, creativity, and new ideas
• BLUE HAT: cool, the color of the sky, above everything else-the organizing hat

Through case studies and real-life examples, Dr. de Bono reveals the often surprising ways in which deliberate role playing can make you a better thinker. He offers a powerfully simple tool that you can use to create clearer thinking, improved communication, and greater creativity. This audio edition of his timeless book is an instructive and inspiring text for anyone who makes decisions, in business or in life.

This audiobook is skillfully narrated by Mike Fraser, an Audible listener favorite. Published with permission from Edward de Bono Ltd. Information on training in the Six Thinking Hats is available at deBono.com.

This audiobook was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

©1985 Edward de Bono Ltd. (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Everyone needs to read this.

Whether you are in meetings for work or making group decisions at home, you need to read and apply the six thinking hats. De Bono makes it painfully obvious that the argumentative style of most meetings is counterproductive and demoralizing. The Six Thinking Hats gives you a new way to think about thinking.

A method for tackling complexity in thinking

I have been trying to figure out how to get my leadership team to be better organised in both strategic and operational-type meetings. Of course, there are plenty guides and tips like Patrick Lencioni’s “Death by Meeting” that I have embraced with reasonable success. The 6 hats method is remarkable in its depth of dissecting thinking, itself, and doing so in a very straightforward manner that is not encumbered by technical jargon! I now have additional tools to make these meetings more constructive and productive!

Outstanding method!

I will definitely come back to this book again and again until i learn to think in 6hats myself, very useful method for collaboration!

First timer

Nice production and immensely interesting 🌺 some of the HATS overlap I surmise. Interesting that in BLUE the author mentioned that some people proceed this way when thinking alone.

Excellent book

I will listen to this book again for reference. His teaching of the color of the hats and the reasons behind them were easy to follow.
Well worth your time

I really liked how simple it was to understand and how useful it can be for many things

I really like this tool that I can use for school or for anything in life I am looking forward to using the strategies it has and I think it’s a tool that everybody can use the book. I’m not someone typically reads books and I read this in two days.

The concepts help navigate difficult conversations

I can better diffuse situations.
This has helped me… a lot!
I hope it helps you too.

Meh

The view point was okay. But too much Christianity. Also nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary. Kind of a waste of time imo.