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An image of a white hat

THE WHITE HAT: DATA (S)

Typical White Hat Questions

"How much will it cost?"

"What color/weight/shape is it?"

"What resources are available?"

"What are the requirements?"

The white hat's function is to describe objective data about something.

Where red hat thinking is highly personal, the white hat allows one to be highly impersonal. White hat thinking is where facts, data, and raw information are laid on the table. Other kinds of white hat thinking include statistics, news reports, test outcomes, poll results, and other research results.

The point of white hat thinking is always to provide the unbiased data that are necessary for making sound decisions. Such data are necessary because good decisions require not only an individual's subjective belief of how the world should be (the red hat function), but objective information describing reality as it actually is. Unlike red hat thinking, beliefs and wishes are excluded from white hat thinking; only externally validated information is accepted in this mode. (This emphasis on external validation is why I consider white hat thinking to be closely related to the Myers-Briggs "Sensing" type preference.)

Also unlike red hat thinking, the white hat is good for drilling down into things, for getting the details. Sometimes it's useful to see the forest as the red hat can, particularly when trying to determine the scale of a problem or opportunity. Other times it's important to be able to see the individual trees. That's white hat thinking, which gets to the roots of a situation to describe the nature of a problem or opportunity.

Again, though, the white hat is not for analytical thinking. White hat thinking is strictly for providing information. Assessing the value of a particular piece of information is a job for the yellow or black hat.



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