Six Thinking Hats Persona Exercise

Community college leaders need to be able to appeal to different stakeholders (and their style of thinking) on campus. This tool will help community colleges lead an exercise to discover the six different "thinking hat" styles to help change the way leaders structure the planning process.

This toolkit will help community colleges lead an exercise on campus about adopting different thinking styles for strategy planning. Participants will be assigned a “thinking hat” style and build a persona for that style. Then, based off the persona, participants will practice creating persuasive and compelling arguments for change that appeal to that thinking style.

Use these exercise tools from the Community College Executive Forum to familiarize participants with the variety of stakeholder perspectives on campus. By the end of the exercise, participants should be able to:

Identify the various stakeholders/situations on campus that display different kinds of thinkingUnderstand the personas (including priorities, fears, concerns) typically exemplified by each type of thinkingCraft a persuasive argument for a data-driven decision that resonates with the Six Thinking Hats personas

Download the full exercise or explore each of the six thinking styles below.

Yellow hat thinkers look for the benefit, value, and potential positive outcome in everything and provide deliberate constructive thinking as a counterweight to critical thinking. They also think about opportunities, are willing to explore remote possibilities of success, and make concrete proposals and suggestions for what to do.

Black hat thinking prevents groups from doing overly risky things, introduces caution and skepticism to the conversation, and identifies why something may not work. These thinkers also point out how something does not fit available resources, policy, strategy, or mission and question the strength of the evidence and conclusions.

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