The Seventh Hat for Wisdom
Posted on June 24th, 2007 by MichaelIn a recent interview I was asked to add one more thinking hat to the original ‘6 thinking caps’ developed by SOT in 1983.
I suggested the Seventh Hat for Wisdom, the Grey Thinking Hat.
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Survival is clever and requires intelligence. Long term survival endows broad experience and knowledge and is a very clever thing, indeed. It cannot be taught.
The Grey Thinking Hat is for Wisdom.
The experience of surviving for a complete generation through childhood, adolescence and adulthood endows knowledge and perspective that a young brain cannot match.
To achieve 50 years of survival, through two or more generations, allows the brain to build a database of experience which offers a perspective of history, an understanding of long term consequences, a faculty for prediction and a wisdom that cannot be acquired in any other way. It takes half a century!
(Master Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with Grey Hat, Paris, 1887)
Grey Hat Thinking is the ability to see consequences, immediate, short term and long term. It is the ability to look back over history and to see forward into the future. To understand cycles, passages of time, the passing of fashions, eras, eons and the many possible futures including extinction, the possibility of no future at all.
Grey Hat Thinking also means the wisdom to see other points of view. It includes the sagacity of patience to see beyond one’s own immediate viewpoint and the wisdom to see the viewpoints of others involved in situations: your partner’s viewpoint, your children’s, your children’s children, your neighbour’s, your customer’s, your enemy’s.
The wisdom of Grey Hat Thinking comes from long term survival.
It is the wisdom that emerges from the hard won, labour-intensive experience gained from having to solve life’s wide range of problems through multi-changing environments over several generations and for an extended period of time.
One of the well-known paradoxes of wisdom is expressed by Mark Twain’s admission: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years”.
Even though we may not be able to teach children to do Grey Hat Thinking we can still teach them to understand what it is–to recognise it–to appreciate it, to consult it, and to seek it our wherever it can be found.
Of all the original Thinking Hats–White, Black, Yellow, Red, Green, Blue–the Grey Hat is also the Senior Hat.
See also: The Original 6 SOT Thinking Caps
March 10th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I would suggest that Edward deBono was the originator of the CoRT thinking tools and therefore would be entitled to lay sole claim to the Six Thinking Hats.
Albert Einstein said “The secret of creativity is hiding your sources”!
February 25th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Ah Katie, but Wisdom would say, we have tried that before and it failed, let’s see how we can do it differently to make sure it works.
We have seven staff in our office the youngest being 20 the eldest being 62 and every decade in between, it works well and we all listen to each others ideas.
There is an old saying and it goes; “No idea is a bad idea, it is just not suitable for this issue”, or something to this effect.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:57 am
[…] At SOT we used a number of methodologies including Edward’s CoRT Thinking syllabus and The Scheyville Method (distilled from Australian Army leadership training). We also explored, developed and pioneered a range of innovative training and thinking methodologies. For example, at different times, Edward suggested the idea of ‘Thinking Spectacles’ as a way of teaching parallel thinking; I developed the idea of X10 Thinking; and then SOT developed the idea of using ‘Six Thinking Caps’ which is now used widely around the world. Recently, I’ve added a seventh–The Grey Thinking Hat–the only one which cannot be taught. […]
June 27th, 2007 at 10:54 am
The Wisdom Hat is not ageist.
It’s not an ‘old thinking’ hat requiring a ‘young thinking’ hat to balance it out. It is for a very specific kind of thinking that requires long term perspective which we call Wisdom.
Of course, there are people, young and old, that are ageist in their thinking but that is a different issue.
We have all seen examples of people making comments like Katie points out–“In my experience, this idea will never work and it’s worthless for us to pursue it further.”–but this is not an example of wisdom in action nor of Grey Hat Thinking.
I think Katie’s concern is an important one but it is well-covered by the already available Black and Green Hats.
What we need here is the kind of thinking not already dealt with by the existing 6 hats.
There is a need for Wisdom.
June 25th, 2007 at 2:14 am
If adding a wisdom hat is necessary, wouldn’t it also be a good idea to add a hat for “young” thinking? My concern is that older thinkers will use the wisdom hat to overrule younger thinkers and use their “grey hat” to veto any ideas/thinking that they don’t like. It would be very easy for people to say something like, “In my experience, this idea will never work and it’s worthless for us to pursue it further.”
“Young” thinking on the other hand could be used to say “This idea sounds improbably, but also new, different and exciting. What would it take to make it work?”
I realize that this is a more black hat assessment of the grey hat, but I’ve seen how much people gravitate towards black hat thinking. They might see grey hat thinking as an opportunity to give more authority to black/red hat statements.