I would submit that even today the basic idea remains useful. That idea is that the work of thinking can be broken into parts, represented symbolically by hats.
The Blue Hat is the control hat. It is why a meeting is being held, and what the problem is that you want to solve. It controls how long the meeting/interaction happens, and how you decide if a solution or solutions have been reached. [I continue to believe, by the way, that setting up intranet project sites by Hat would be an interesting and useful approach. You give a group a week or month or on-going access to add anything to any Hat regarding any problem. This could not but be cumulative, and would represent a more or less standing meeting which would be highly efficient. Setting up such software would be a good business venture for someone, I think. OH: an APP. That’s where things are going.]
The Green Hat is generative. It is throwing out all sorts of ideas, without evaluating them first for value. It recognizes that quite often bad ideas lead directly to good ideas which could not have happened without the bad ideas.
The White Hat is all the information, objective knowledge, that can be spoken about a given topic. In a political discussion, this would include things like “overall tax receipts went up after both the Reagan and Bush tax cuts”. This is an empirical fact, even if one can argue whether or not the two are linked. One could dig quite deep in information here if one wanted. And in most cases, this is likely the quickest and best path to take, particularly in mature areas of human knowledge, like economics.
The Red Hat is how you FEEL about something, a discussion, even about the people conducting the discussion. It is a way to recognize, evaluate, and take into account your gut reactions, which can be both helpful and obstructive.
The Black Hat is all the possible problems with a given idea. It is the worst case scenarios.
The Yellow Hat, the reason for this post, is all the possible POSITIVES.
Here is an interesting idea when doing visioning work, which I have been doing: write out a Best Case Scenario. If everything works PERFECTLY, or nearly perfectly, what will happen? Where will you be? THIS is what you should be working for. By definition, it is possible, even if it requires everything working perfectly.
Now, we all know things rarely if ever work perfectly, but here is the value of this: you establish in doing this a baseline ideal, and can view all imperfections as problems which can be dealt with, which can be handled, solved, in order to return to the Best Case Scenario. This makes problems delays, not deadly.
For me at least, this is proving a hugely beneficial approach.