THE GREEN HAT: CREATIVITY (TP)

Typical Green Hat Questions

"How can we do that?"

"What's another way of looking at this issue?"

"Given our resources, what are our options?"

"What if...?"

The green hat allows the generation of new ideas and perspectives.

In a sense, putting on the green hat is a license to smash old ways of thinking. While blue hat thinking calls for the imposition of stability on information in order to understand and control it, green hat thinking is about altering the structure of information in order to generate new patterns. (This freedom of thought leads me to consider green hat thinking equivalent to the combined Myers-Briggs type preferences of "Thinking" and "Perceiving.")

Thus, the green hat is not used to obtain new information; that is the role of the red and white hats. Rather, green hat thinking is used to consider existing information in new ways. As the blue hat tries to create order, the green hat tries to create change. By breaking old patterns of understanding and reassembling them in new ways, new possibilities for action can be discovered. Change, in the form of destruction and creation, is the hallmark of green hat thinking.

Not all ideas will work, of course, just as not all changes are beneficial. The new perspectives and ideas generated by green hat thinking will need to be analyzed to determine their value. For every idea that works, there will be nine (or ninety-nine) that don't... but green hat thinking is still worthwhile for the sake of that one insanely great new idea.