Red Hat Explained: The Six Thinking Hats [Book Summary 3/7]

This is the 3rd part of the book summary series on the Six Thinking Hats.

The Red Hat is an incredibly important hat. The red color stands for fire 🔥 and emotions. It is mainly concerned with feelings and emotions.

When we conduct a business discussion, we’re not supposed to let emotions sip in. They end up doing so anyway, but we disguise them as logic.

“I sense that this is not the right person for the job.”

“I don’t feel like you will make the deadline.”

With the Red Hat, people are given a chance to

express their true feelings.
say things that they don’t have to validate.
make critical statements seem less personally attacking.

The Red Hat is the opposite of the fact-based White Hat.

Emotions in decision-making

There is some impressive research done by Antonio Damasio and others on patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). While the patients still have normal attention, memory, learning and language capabilities, they perform significantly worse in every-day decision-making. They are hardly able to decide what to eat and how to behave socially.

The vmPFC is an integral part of emotion processing and can help us predict how the future will look like. In other words, without emotions, we become indecisive and erratic.

Feelings, hunches, and intuitions aren’t always right. They can introduce any of a long list of mental biases.

But they are based on the entirety of our past experiences.

They help us make sense of a situation very quickly. Emotions are also able to give us a sense of how specific scenarios might play out in the future. As such, they are critical to our decision-making process.

You feel uneasy about a new person you meet. You might not be able to put it into words, but something seems off. This is your intuition at work. It’s best to be on guard and proceed very cautiously until you either can confirm your suspicions or they get dispelled by evidence refuting those suspicions.

The Red Hat allows these emotions, hunches, and intuitions to be voiced with a clear label.

Some basic rules for the Red Hat

They should always be applied to a specific idea or situation. “Give me your Red Hat thinking on calling up our competitors customers and asking them to switch to us.”
Not allowed to say ‘pass’. You can say ‘neutral, mixed, confused, doubtful, undecided’. If described as ‘mixed’, the facilitator may ask ‘What goes into the mix?’
Don’t justify or explain your feelings

When to apply the Red Hat?

There are two major ways you can use the Red Hat.

In a planned sequence of hats: At the beginning and the end.
Single-use: For important emotional topics

Planned use of The Red Hat within a sequence of Hats

The Red Hat aims to capture the feeling that is present towards a situation right now. It’s ok if the feeling changes and we feel different in 20 minutes.

Hence it is often useful to apply at the beginning of a discussion and towards the end. So we can also feel if the feelings have changed at all?

Imagine the decision is on whether we should go ahead with a risky marketing campaign. In the beginning, some people may say with their Red Hats that they don’t like it (a legitimate use of the Red Hat).

But after all the facts (White Hat), chances (Yellow Hat) and dangers (Black Hat) have been pointed out, maybe some feelings will shift. The Red Hat is used again and everyone now agrees to go ahead with the decision.

Every decision must be emotional in the end. With an emphasis to the ‘in the end’. After drawing the map with our thinking we chose the route with our values and emotions.

Feelings will lurk around anyway. Best to give them a clear outlet and label them as such.

“Don’t ask me why, but this is a terrible deal.” 💁‍♂️

“I do not like him and do not want to do business with him.” 🙅‍♀️

“That design is hideous. It will never catch on and is a huge waste of money.” 🙅‍♂️

“I don’t think it’s fair to withhold this information until after the deal is signed.”✋🏼

Single use of the Red Hat

Use it if it’s an important matter.
You want to get someone’s Red Hat thinking formally.
You say something that is potentially strong emotionally.
Don’t use it every time you want to express a feeling, this might seem absurd.

“I want to make a Red Hat statement. I feel like we are being bullied into an agreement we don’t want.”

“Please stop using the Red Hat now for the next 20 minutes.”

Once emotions have surfaced, we can work with them.

How can the Red Hat be used?

There may be fear, anger, jealousy or love at play when making decisions. The Red Hat allows for our unspoken background feelings to appear.

Pointing out feelings towards others’ motivations
Putting forward feelings about an upcoming decision
Admitting emotions such as jealousy

Pointing out feelings towards others’ motivations

Once we see a person in a certain light, it’s hard to change our perception of them. We ought to point out these feelings as soon as they arise.

“If I were to put on my Red Hat, it seems to me that you want to oppose the merger in order to preserve your own job rather than benefit shareholders.”

“You are hesitant about this deal. You don’t want in, but you also don’t want to be left out. You want to be in an antechamber, waiting to be called in whenever it suits you.”

Putting forward feelings about an upcoming decision

After the map of the situation has been laid out with facts, ideas, evidence, and threats, it’s important to include our emotions to paint a full picture.

“If I put on my Red Hat, I feel like we shouldn’t end the strike yet. We aren’t ready to start negotiations; both parties aren’t hurting enough to be willing to make real concessions.

Admitting emotions such as jealousy

“I will put on my Red Hat and state that I am opposing Anne’s promotion because I am jealous of her and her quick rise to power.”

Most of us probably won’t manage to be that honest.

However, we can soften the statement as follows:

“With my Red Hat, I can sense that my opposition is in part based on jealousy.”

Alternatively, we could also say:

“I am going to take cover under my Red Hat and say that I am opposed to Anne’s promotion. It’s just a feeling that I have.”

How to deal with intuitions

Intuitions are the system 1 response to a specific situation that has built up over time, through experience in dealing with this type of situation.

“I strongly feel most vegans won’t like GMO vegan food.”

Treat intuitions like an advisor. They can be very, very valuable.

The more someone’s (including your own) intuitions have been right in the past, the more you should trust them.

However, they are not the only source of truth.

Pro Tip: Check intuition for believability on a particular subject.

Good intuition in one area does not translate into good intuition in another, unrelated area.

Just because someone has made a ton of money selling real estate, doesn’t mean they’ll be specially qualified to call a presidential race.

Use the Red Hat with a focus

Emotions can be fickle. A questionnaire asked Americans whether they generally favored an involvement of US troops Central America. The majority favored the involvement. But for each proposed interventions, there was a majority opposed to it.

This doesn’t make sense rationally but makes sense emotionally.

So make sure to use the Red Hat on a specific question or issue.

Examples

“Can you please give me your Red Hat thinking on selling vegan salmon burgers?”

“My Red Hat tells me that this offer is not going to be accepted.”

Additional ways of using the Red Hat idiom

Voice critical thoughts without appearing attacking.
Ask for feelings
Reframe
Bring to awareness
Negotiate

Voice Critical Thoughts without appearing attacking.

One strength of working with the Six Thinking Hats is that introduces a certain playfulness. This can render statements seem less personally attacking.

“Sandra, it is my Red Hat view that you never listen to anyone else.”

“I’m going to reach for my Red Hat and say that I don’t like how this meeting is being conducted.”

See how now I don’t have to point out specific examples who could lead to debating whether they are accurate or not? I can simply state what I feel.

At first, the hat feels artificial. Should we really “put on our hats” all the time just to voice a feeling?

But artificiality is its key strength: Switch in and out of the emotion mode

Usually, emotions can take a while to build up and to simmer down. Offense is taken, and offense is given.
Can reduce the amount of bickering. If you have to put on the red hat every time something mildly insults you, you might stop bothering to respond and thus keep the unproductive back-and-forth to a minimum.
By creating a formal channel for feelings and emotion, there is no longer a need to intrude at every point.

Simply ask for feelings

Another significant benefit is that you no more need to guess the feelings of others. Simply ask them directly.

“I suspect you don’t like me. Is it true? I want a Red Hat answer.”

“Can we just have one overall Red Hat view from you on this subject Michael?

Reframe

A powerful way to use the Red Hat is to let people access their feelings with new points of view.

“Don’t look at like a defeat, but an expensive way to learn an important lesson.”

“If this proposal were to come from your side, would it be agreeable to you?”

“There is a feeling that everything is outside of our control. Let’s imagine for a while that this isn’t so and that we can very well influence the situation.”

Bring to awareness

It’s also really good to voice and acknowledge critical circumstances.

“Let’s be aware of the anger in the background that is present.”

“The restriction on your ability to work with competitive companies is a sensitive point. Let’s leave that aside for now and come back to it later.”

Negotiate

Declare what is important to you for emotional reasons.

“It’s critical to us that we can have a say in product development.”

“We must insist that those procedures are followed. That’s very important for safety.”

Things have a different value for different people. These things can be expressed directly under a Red Hat.

“What is most important to you in this deal Jonas?”

“The ability for our team to set their own vacation times is critical.”

Only by expressing those items can we maximize the outcome of negotiations by expanding the pie.

Summary of Red Hat

With the Red Hat, you’re allowed to say “This is how I feel about the matter.”
Acknowledging feelings as feelings is better than keeping them as supposed logic.
The Red Hat allows people to switch on & off the feeling mode.
Within the Red Hat, you don’t have to justify anything.
It allows you to ask other people how they feel.
Can be used both to cover strong emotions such as fear and jealousy but also to cover more subtle hunches and intuitions.

Your Turn

Training

When can you apply the Red Hat next?
What difficult decision do you have to make soon? Can you lay out what you see under the Red Hat?
What is your Red Hat thinking about this article? Let me know in the comments below!

Next Steps

Next time we’ll dig into the Black Hat!

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Overview of the Six Thinking Hats

Flavio Rump is an entrepreneur and investor. He shares decision-making models from the world’s best decision makers. You can read his articles, watch his YouTube Videos or join his free newsletter to learn how to make better decisions.