Six Thinking Hats

This Six Thinking Hats framework, based on De Bono's work which is described on Wikipedia, can be used effectively for a retrospective. Directions: According to Wikipedia the order of hats most suited to process improvement is Blue, White, White (Other peoples views), Yellow, Black, Green, Red, Blue but for this exercise we will use: Blue, White, Yellow, Black, Green, Red Blue (5 min) - Use the blue hat to discuss the objectives for the session White (10 min) - Participants raise and discuss anything from the last iteration which can be said to be a fact or information. Hunches and feelings and any discussion of reasons or other non-information based output should be left for the appropriate hat. Yellow (10 min) - Participants can only talk about the good things that happened in the last iteration. Gray (10 min) - Participants can only talk about the bad things that happened, any negative criticism they have or worst case scenarios they can think of. Green (10 min) - The discussion moves on to any ideas people have about solving problems or things that may add more value to the business or help in any way. Outside of the box helicopter view blue sky thinking is encouraged. Red (5 min) - Emotive statements. These could be the issues that have stood out for them the most or an idea for solving a problem. These statements should be instinctive which is why you will give them very little time to do this. Spend a little time as a group having a look at the Red Hat output. Are there any themes? Do any of them have relationships to each other. Do any particularly stand out? From this get the group to decide on a couple of actions to take away. As always ensure the actions are very easy to execute (so nothing like “write more unit tests” or “refactor the database”) Note: Instant Start mode starts a forum without a time limit and room for an unspecified number of participants who join via a forum URL. In order to change forum time limits, guests lists and verification levels, use the Forum Scheduler rather than Instant Start mode. [Source} http://blog.robbowley.net/2009/08/29/6-thinking-hats-retrospective-plan/