Solution
De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats
The six thinking hats in decision making gets individuals to look to a workplace problem or people practice issue in six different ways (Gill-Simmen, 2020). The table below shows the six hats:
| Hats | Explanation |
| Blue | Control the discussion, cheer and manage the situation |
| White | Information gathering |
| Green | Creative thinking, explore innovative ideas |
| Yellow | Consider merits of ideas from the green hat |
| Red | Intuitive, express feelings lie dislikes and fears |
| Black | Assess risks associated with ideas |
This approach can be used in the workplace to solve people practice issues such as higher employee dissatisfaction and low morale due to lack of better pay and benefits. The HR manager will encourage different members to wear the hats or take different roles in a group discussion. Wearing these hats, employees can think of alternative reward systems to help them meet their needs and stay satisfied for the value they create. Each member will be allowed to participate, for example, some will generate ideas (white and green hats) and others assess the benefits of those ideas (black hat) and express feeling about a possible solution (red hat). This will improve the quality of decisions as well as support members with better thinking skills, inclusivity and creativity (Gill-Simmen, 2020).
Future pacing
Future pacing is a technique commonly applied in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NPL), but it has become prevalent in modern workplaces (Edwards, 2020). It involves getting employees to imagine about the future (Edwards, 2020). For example, an HR manager may get employees to imagine getting profit sharing as a reward at the end of each financial year. As a result, the manager will be able to get responses from employees about what they would feel by getting a profit share. These insights are then used to decide whether to implement profit sharing or not. A positive future pacing can help people professionals to run through an entire event process and get the practice or clue of what will happen in real life, when the decision is implemented.
Decision matrix
Decision matrix works by getting decision makers to list alternative solutions on a matrix, assign those costs, benefits and risks, weigh them and select the best option (Kutlu Gündoğdu and Kahraman, 2020). Using six thinking hat, employees generate many ideas and decision matrix can help choose the best possible option. For example, if an organisation wants to introduce a training programme, it will need to make a decision by considering technology, legislation, resources and benefits and other factors. The best training programme can then be selected using a decision matrix.
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