Skip navigation
Tool

Six Thinking Hats Persona Exercise

45

minutes needed to conduct the thinking hat exercise
minutes needed to conduct the thinking hat exercise

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 thinking
  • Understand the personas (including priorities, fears, concerns) typically exemplified by each type of thinking
  • Craft 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.

White hat thinkers collect available information, focus on objective facts and figures, and separate facts from interpretation and belief. They also prevent distortion of information and ideas and exclude hunches, intuition, judgment, feeling, impression, or opinion from their decision-making.

This type acts as the “conductor of the orchestra,” organizes and manages thinking of the different hats, and provides an overview of the conversation. They make sure people stick to their hats, break up arguments, and ask for an outcome at the end—a summary, conclusion, decision, or solution.

This thinking style generates new ideas and ways of looking at things, suggesting multiple courses of action. Green hat thinkers are invested in making changes and innovating and are interested in thinking through all the alternative ways to solve a problem or launch a new initiative.

Red hat thinkers acknowledge the hidden emotions that affect every conversation and decision, bringing them to the surface. They insist that feelings have a right to be made visible, and they give voice to gut reactions, intuition, hunches, intuitions, and impressions.

Want more on strategic thinking?

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 resource requires EAB partnership access to view.

Access the tool

Learn how you can get access to this resource as well as hands-on support from our experts through Strategic Advisory Services for Community Colleges.

Learn More

Already a Partner?

Partner Log In