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Gregor Gatej
Gregor Gatej

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Six Hats of Thinking and Design Thinking Techniques

#design #ux #agile #creativity

In this post, we explore how structured creative processes help overcome common barriers to innovation, such as poorly defined problems, attachment to bad ideas, and lack of employee support. We also review several practical design thinking techniques that enhance user understanding and foster more effective development cycles.

Why Six Hats of Thinking in the Title?

Six Hats of Thinking is the name of a technique developed in 1985 by the Maltese psychologist Edward de Bono that helps with group decision-making, decision conclusion, and creative problem solving. Within a work environment, it provides a special structure to meetings by allocating a specific time block to each of six different thinking styles:

  • focus on facts
  • expression of emotions
  • critical thinking
  • positive thinking
  • creativity
  • reflection

Each participant in the meeting must address the given topic during the assigned time block exclusively from the perspective of the thinking style in turn (an exception is the role of reflection, which mostly belongs to the person leading the whole process).

During ordinary, unstructured meetings, it often happens that each participant stubbornly tries to focus the entire discussion on just one perspective, i.e., the one closest to themselves. In this way, individuals spend most of the meeting talking past each other, and the confusion about how to tackle solving a specific problem only increases.

They are not to blame — although thinking is an activity accessible to everyone, that does not mean it is evenly distributed among all. When we also consider the different experiences from which individuals derive their thoughts, it is natural that within larger groups conflicts and the aforementioned confusion arise quickly.

The Six Hats of Thinking technique helps alleviate this disorder by limiting the possibility of thinking in too many ways at once. For de Bono, this represents the main obstacle to clear thinking:

“Emotions, information, logic, hope, and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls” (de Bono, 1999).

The main goal of the technique is to teach its practitioners to differentiate between different ways of thinking and to give each of them proper recognition. This leads to a more equitable consideration of various viewpoints on the given topic and enables joint idea development.

De Bono first introduced the Six Hats of Thinking technique in 1985 in a book of the same name. Since then, quite some time has passed, yet many business environments still suffer from the same symptoms of confusion that this technique helps resolve.

Many things can cause this — it could be rigidity in leadership, selfishness that employees do not want to give up, simply ignoring the technique altogether, conformism, etc.

The fact is that today, with growing awareness of the importance of ecological use of environmental natural resources, there is also an increasing awareness of the importance of effective utilization of organizational resources within companies, whether we like it or not.

More and more companies are beginning to realize this and are turning to de Bono’s Six Hats of Thinking or alternative forms of creative problem solving related to product development. These alternative approaches present the main focus of our post — more specifically, we will address techniques or methods of design thinking.

Although from this introduction onward we will no longer deal directly with the Six Hats of Thinking, all the techniques we will address further are its heirs in their fundamental mission of clearing mental clutter.

Design Thinking

The goal of design thinking is successful innovation. Let’s look at what usually holds companies back from reaching their innovation potential:

  • Defining problems in conventional ways
    If our question is not well formulated (i.e., not original enough), we cannot expect to get good answers.

  • Inability to discard bad ideas
    The longer we get stuck on an idea, the more attached we become to it and the harder it is to let go (even if the idea is bad). The ideas companies tend to keep are usually the less risky ones. This is because it’s easier to assess their scope and they often require less time and effort to come up with.

  • Employees do not support the innovation proposal
    This often happens in environments where not all employees have equal opportunities for their proposals to be heard in the final solution. Such a mode of operation is common in companies with strongly hierarchical leadership relationships. The focus of such companies is on stable product development, which they try to achieve through “efficiency, rationality, and centralized control” (Liedtka, 2018).

All of the above points are related to our prejudices about how people should behave within a business environment.

In the article titled Why Design Thinking Works, author Jeanne Liedtka presents ways in which design thinking addresses these challenges.

At its core, it involves changing human habits. This goal is obvious, but how to achieve it is not always clear.

Liedtka’s advice, quoting the product design director at Facebook, is contrary to what one might expect: first, she believes we should ensure that people can rely on a sufficiently structured and linear sequence of events when changing their habits.

We can better understand this advice if we imagine the innovation process in a team that has already embraced the design thinking mentality: they meet customers personally and conduct direct research with them,

“getting deeply immersed in their perspectives, cocreating with stakeholders, and designing and executing experiments” (Liedtka, 2018).

These are all things that experienced designers take for granted, but for team leaders trying to change established routines, this can be unfamiliar.

If it’s up to them to devise the steps to transition from one operating system to another, it can cause significant stress.

Without external support, it is very difficult to come up with effective ways to achieve this goal, let alone implement and present ideas to the team.

Here the role of the aforementioned structure and linearity comes into play:

“Organized processes keep people on track and curb the tendency to spend too long exploring a problem or to impatiently skip ahead. They also instill confidence. Most humans are driven by a fear of mistakes, so they focus more on preventing errors than on seizing opportunities. They opt for inaction rather than action when a choice risks failure. But there is no innovation without action—so psychological safety is essential. The physical props and highly formatted tools of design thinking deliver that sense of security” (Liedtka, 2018).

Introducing design thinking into a company consists of a series of interconnected activities:

  • Step into the customer’s shoes
    To identify what matters to the company’s customers, more is needed than just collecting data via surveys. When interpreting data, we too often rely on our own perspective. Moreover, established data collection methods (e.g., survey questions) may not touch on the needs of the people for whom they are most relevant. Design thinking overcomes these limitations by gaining deeper understanding of challenges through identification with customers’ experiences. This often replaces our prejudices about them with a more accurate picture—one that is much more vivid and different from the one we started with.

  • Produce meaning
    By delving into customer experiences, we obtain data we can immediately begin working with, but we must realize these are still rough. Working with a large amount of unstructured data is challenging because it is often difficult to find a basis for any deeper insight at first. Design thinking helps here with its structured approaches to processing raw material, making it easier to discover the meaning of the research.

  • Align different design criteria
    Meetings that enable individuals to collaboratively address ideal innovative solutions are a very important part of the design process. The focus on finding solutions is set without excessive consideration of constraints that would prevent realization. Such thinking less limits debate and collaboration among team members. It is important that the team reaches consensus on the final solution during the innovation process, without which they have little chance against more conservative ideas.

  • Generate ideas
    Once the group sets the criteria for evaluating ideas, it is time to identify and select specific solutions that are most suitable. Each idea first grows in the individual’s mind, who then presents it to others. Design thinking encourages sharing ideas among individuals and contributes to their creative development (merely compromising when differences in perception arise is not enough).

  • Articulate ideas
    When several apparently equivalent, competing ideas have been generated, it is necessary to separate those that are actually feasible from those that are not. At this stage of the entire process, it is important to again put aside various prejudices such as excessive optimism and fixation on the first presented solution. Otherwise,

“discussions around what will or won’t work become deadlocked, with each person advocating from his or her own understanding of how the world works” (Liedtka, 2018).

  • Test solutions At this step, the design team already has a set of solutions that all participants consider well-conceived. Now it’s time to test the proposed solutions. Prototypes are usually discussed in terms of making small product refinements that are nearly finished. In design thinking approaches, prototypes are considered much less mature forms of products, which allows for testing more radical changes to the basic design.

The main idea of using such rougher prototypes is that

“what these artifacts lose in fidelity, they gain in flexibility, because they can easily be altered in response to what’s learned by exposing users to them. And their incompleteness invites interaction” (Liedtka, 2018).

By sending concrete products into the world, we test them more concretely and gain valuable insight into how to change them to be truly useful.

Moreover, this approach enables participants in testing to be more open to a variety of potential solutions (the assumption here is that if solution proposals are given through speech or written word, testers are less willing to “risk” changing their views than when they are actively involved through live interaction with the prototype).

As we see, the design thinking process consists of a series of mutually connected steps, where the result of one part of the process is used as a building block for the next. Each participant is differently invested in these steps, so the process is structured to encourage as much collaboration, idea exchange, learning, and shared emotional expression as possible.

By involving potential customers in the solution-seeking process, employee motivation and commitment to achieving the common goal are increased.

Design Thinking Techniques

Now that we have gained a deeper insight into the design way of thinking, let’s look at some techniques related to it (the techniques we will discuss can be applied to the development of entire brands, events, products, etc. Here, in presenting most of these techniques, we will assume that we are dealing with the development of computer applications).

Love / Breakup Letter

Our relationships with software applications are similar to the relationships we have with people. When we like an application, we speak about it fondly; to our friends, we talk about how much we like it, how it helps us with everyday tasks, and how we can rely on it. When we dislike an application, we tend to avoid it because it feels like a waste of time.

The goal of the first technique we discuss is to find out the positive and negative aspects of our application. The participants in the experiment are members of a group already familiar with the use of it. They are instructed to write a letter to the given application, which can be a love letter, a farewell letter, or a hybrid (e.g., a farewell letter with feelings of regret). It is important that the format allows participants to sincerely express their emotions.

The time allocated for the task should not be too long (approximately 10 minutes), as a longer time might cause participants to overanalyze their feelings. After writing, participants read their letters aloud. If they agree, it is good to record this reading, since nonverbal cues can be a more important indicator of emotion than what is written on paper (Martin, 2012).

All impressions gathered are synthesized into categories of the application’s functionalities that need improvement. Based on the collected information, a plan for further activities can be created to check whether:

  • Some positive functionality can be extended to other parts of the application?
  • Negatively perceived functionalities can be fixed, or is it better to discard them altogether?

Sorting Concepts

After completing activities such as the letter-writing exercise described above, we end up with a collection of concepts that need to be organized in some way. This can be done through several steps:

  • Normalize all concepts
    Since concepts are expressed with varying levels of detail, they need to be transformed and placed at the same level of abstraction (Kumar, 2013).
    Concepts expressing the same thing, even if in slightly different ways, should be merged under one of them or a new concept should be introduced.
    Titles and names of concepts should be renamed to be grammatically uniform.

  • Sort concepts
    The group agrees on a sorting criterion, usually similarity between concepts. First, all concepts are grouped into a larger number of smaller groups. Then these smaller groups are merged into larger groups representing a higher level in the concept hierarchy.

  • Refine existing concepts and introduce new ones if needed
    During the group collaboration dynamics, attention must be paid to discussions that may lead to improvements of existing concepts or, in some cases, to the introduction of new ones.

In certain cases, it is useful to delegate concept sorting via cards also to our clients, that is, the users of the app. For example, if we are preparing a website, we can present potential site visitors with cards containing concepts or topics that will appear on the site. By having clients sort concepts into groups that make the most sense to them, we gain valuable insight into what kind of information categorization is relevant for the given website (Tankala, 2025).

How to Make Toast?

Describing complex systems can be very time-consuming, especially when the individuals involved have quite different ways of describing processes. As preparation for this activity, innovation manager Tom Wujec developed a technique called “How to Make Toast?”. This technique helps participants more easily realize how their descriptions differ and eventually agree on what is important and what is not in producing the descriptions.

The first part of the process goes roughly like this:

  • Participants are asked to draw a picture of the process of making toast on a sheet of paper, without using any words. The illustration should be understandable to someone who has never made toast before.
  • Each participant shows and explains their drawing. It is expected that the drawings will not be very similar, which demonstrates that each person can have their own perspective even for a relatively simple process like making toast.
  • The entire group tries to answer questions such as “How are the illustrations similar? In what ways do they differ? Which are clearer? Which contain surprises? Which would actually do the best at explaining how to make toast?” (Wujec, 2015).

Even if the drawings are very different, they are alike in that everything can be represented as a graph: a network of nodes (tangible objects like toaster, bread, people, etc.) and relations that show how the nodes are connected. The combination of nodes and connections forms a model of how each participant thinks about the nature of processes. It is interesting how this thinking differs among people. Although much of this difference can be attributed to varying drawing abilities, we all intuitively know how to break down a problem into parts and connect them (Tom Wujec, 2025).

The toast-making drawing exercise is then to be repeated twice:

  • Using sticky notes (or smaller cards)
    This results in illustrations that are usually clearer and more logical. While building their model, participants rearrange the notes in different sequences. Iteration of expression, reflection, and analysis is the only way to reach clear ideas, says Wujec. Connected to this is also a finding from systems theorists that “the ease with which we can change a representation correlates to our willingness to improve the model” (Wujec, 2025).

  • Using sticky notes (or smaller cards), in a group
    Multiple iterations of model improvement are carried out, usually resulting in a richer and more complete model. The reason can be found in the synthesis of different viewpoints of participants, who build on each other’s ideas through iterations.

When the group of participants in the experiment reaches consensus on how to describe processes, it is the right time to begin addressing more complex projects.

Story Mapping

The love / breakup letter and concept sorting techniques help us extract the core concepts related to the use of our app. But what if we want to gain a deeper understanding of users’ experiences? The answer lies in the story mapping method. This method attempts to present stories about how the application manifests in users’ lives. It helps us understand what users experience and what challenges they face.

At the start of the process, all participants (i.e., the design team and / or client stakeholders) are explained how the experiment will unfold. As mentioned above, it basically consists of storytelling about the impact the given app has on users’ lives. From these stories, we can then derive a rich set of functionalities suitable for implementation in the application.

In the first step of the main experiment, we imagine a story that represents the basic way a user interacts with our application. Participants begin by describing all the steps or activities that make up the interaction. First, using one sticky note on a board, we present the theme of the story (e.g., “Order a meal”). Under this note, which represents the goal the user wants to achieve, we stick in sequence other notes representing subactivities or a series of steps that occur when the user wants to perform the task (e.g., “Set current location,” “View list of nearby restaurants,” “Choose restaurant,” “View menu,” “Select dish,” “View shopping cart,” “Choose payment method,” “Confirm payment”).

Once we believe all the steps are covered, we try to think of alternative event flows (e.g., what happens if there is a major delivery delay, or if after placing the order the customer wants to add something extra). These alternatives are simply added as additional steps under existing basic steps (e.g., the note “Customer changes content of the order” can be added under “Confirm payment”).

When satisfied with the description of the basic steps and their alternatives for the first type of user, we can try imagining what an additional set of steps would look like for another type of user (e.g., a food delivery person – again, first we ask what activities constitute their primary interaction with the application). Usually, each user type is given a different space on the board where their activities are shown (e.g., each in their own row) or different color-coded sticky notes can be used.

The more stories we map, the more overlaps we will find among them (e.g., “Confirm payment” will likely appear in many stories). It’s wise to mark duplications, as this helps us identify the key functionalities of our app (Crawford, 2025).

At the end of the activity, useful information can be synthesized into a backlog or project plan, to which new stories and requirements can be added later, and which can be shared with clients or investors.

Conclusion

We found that unstructured thinking often hinders the clarity of ideas, while de Bono’s method offers an equal consideration of different thinking approaches, enabling more effective problem solving.

The main part of our blog post focused on design thinking as a creative process aimed at developing successful innovations. In doing so, we identified several key obstacles that prevent companies from reaching their innovation potential:

  • poor problem definition
  • inability to discard bad ideas
  • lack of employee support for innovative proposals

Design thinking addresses these obstacles through a deep understanding of user needs, structured data processing, alignment of different criteria, and fostering group creativity by creating and testing prototypes.

We also examined several specific design thinking techniques: the love / breakup letter, concept sorting, Wujec’s “How to Make Toast?” technique, and story mapping. Each contributes in its own way to clearer understanding of user experiences and effective design of solutions that are closely tailored to the end user.

For those interested in learning more about design thinking techniques I encourage you to check out this curated list from Atomic Object: https://spin.atomicobject.com/what-is-design-thinking/

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