In one workshop, we tackled a question almost everyone knows: how can you start going to bed earlier? The answer seems obvious. Yet between “I should” and an actual change of habit lies a whole territory of circumstances, feelings and excuses.
I suggested exploring that territory with Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. Each hat gives us a different way to look at the problem. While wearing one, we resist the urge to argue about everything else at the same time.
Six brief changes of perspective
- White: what do we know about sleep and evening habits, and what are we only assuming?
- Red: how do we feel when we miss out on sleep again?
- Black: what are the risks of keeping the same routine?
- Yellow: what might improve if we change it?
- Green: what unexpected options could we try?
- Blue: which ideas become a concrete next step?
The discussion produced ideas ranging from sensible to wonderfully improbable. That is fine: the green hat does not have to deliver a finished plan at once. Its job is to open a space that “that will never work” tends to close very quickly.
The point of the exercise
In the end we reached an answer we could have given in the first minute: go to bed earlier. But this time it was not floating in the air as useless advice. We understood what stood in the way, what worried us and which step we could test.
The method does not turn a simple task into a complicated one. It helps a group arrive honestly at a simple answer, without confusing agreement with the moment when everyone is merely tired of arguing.