I know what you’re thinking (and not necessarily because I’m wearing a colored hat): this is about six things and not four. But wait, notice how the six thinking styles form three pairs of opposites:

Creative (Green) pairs with Process (Blue)

Positive (Yellow) pairs with Negative (Black)

Facts (White) pairs with Emotion (Read)

Then the three pairs of opposites can be arranged into a tetrahedron, where the opposite edges are the three pairs. A tetrahedron has four vertices and four faces, where each vertex is the opposite of its opposite face.

The vertices are Creative + Positive + Emotion, Creative + Negative + Facts, Process + Positive + Facts, and Process + Negative + Emotion. The faces are Creative + Positive + Facts, Creative + Negative + Emotion, Process + Positive + Emotion, and Process + Negative + Facts.

The first link below lists the same opposites for the Six Hats as I found. And there are also a huge number of links out there devoted to the Six Thinking Hats, so I can’t list or summarize them all, or even a small portion.

Further Reading:

http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/sixhats.htm

http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php

Edward de Bono / Six Thinking Hats

… and many more.

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