Edward De Bono's Creative Thinking Hats Throughout the course of human history one unique aspect of the human brain has allowed our species to survive and thrive on an unprecedented scale: the creative faculty. The power of original invention, the artistic spirit and the astounding ability of man to claim supremacy over the natural world are all functions of the brain's propensity to create. While decades of rigorous scientific study of the brain's chemical composition and neural pathways has resulted in a greater understanding of the cognitive, behavioral and learning processes, research regarding the origin of creativity and the creative process itself has lagged behind. One of the world's foremost authorities on the topic of creative thinking is Edward de Bono, a physician, inventor and author who coined the phrase "thinking hats" to describe his own theories describing the creative process. This novel contribution to creativity research gave rise to the notion that individual humans are capable of thinking more efficiently by compartmentalizing their thoughts into distinctive perspectives (de Bono, 1986). These individualized creative perspectives were described by de Bono as "thinking hats," an image which is based on the ability of people to shift seamlessly within a range of creative faculties, from the mental processing of purely factual information to the "gut-feelings" of intuition and perception which form our natural instincts. The six thinking hats conceived by de Bono are color coded and include the...

When wearing the white hat, for example, a person focuses their attention on verifiable facts and concrete evidence, while shifting to the red hat signals a willingness to explore one's emotional perception of an issue. The black and yellow hats predict and analyze the range of positive and negative effects which will potentially result from a given solution. The green thinking hat is reserved for creative approaches to problem solving and relies predominantly on unconventional thinking. Finally, de Bono's blue hat is reserved for reviewing the creative process itself and is typically worn after a creative thinking exercise has been completed (Runco, 2007).
According to de Bono's conception of people-centric or "soft" thinking aids, as encapsulated in his overall thinking hats theory, an individual's ability to assess challenges and devise creative solutions to overcome them is directly correlated to their choice of a particular thinking hat or creative strategy. Proof of de Bono's theories is made evident throughout our modern society by the sheer scope of technological, artistic and creative innovation. As new products or services are devised and introduced to address existing social necessity, the solving of one problem inevitably results in an entirely new set of circumstances which must be addressed. An example of the problem/solution/problem cycle can be witnesses through the development of social…