Introduction

Using the red hat gives you an opportunity to express feelings, emotions, and intuition without any need to explain or justify them.

Intuition may be based on a lot of experience. Intuition is not necessarily always right.

There is no need to explain or justify the feelings.

The red hat is always applied to a specific idea or situation. It is important that what the red hat is being applied to is made very clear.

Individuals should not be allowed to say “pass” when they are asked for their red hat feelings. They can use terms like neutral, undecided, confused, doubtful, or mixed. If feelings are mixed, questions may be asked regarding what goes into the mix.

Emotions & Feelings

• The opposite of neutral, objective information.
• Hunches, intuitions, impressions.
• No need to justify.
• No need to give reasons or the basis.

Red hat thinking is all about emotions and feelings and the non-rational aspects of thinking.

The Place of Emotions and Thinking

• Do emotions muck up thinking, or are they part of it?
• At what point do emotions come in?
• Can emotional people be good thinkers?

The traditional view is that emotions muck up thinking. The good thinker is supposed to be cool and detached and not influenced by emotion.

Emotions give relevance to our thinking and fit that thinking to our needs and the context of the moment.

There are three points at which emotion can affect thinking:

1. Strong background emotion (e.g., fear, anger, jealousy, or love) that limits and colors all perception – the purpose of red hat thinking is to make visible this background so that its subsequence influence can be observed.
2. Emotion is triggered by the initial perception (e.g., insult, self-interest, advertisement) – red hat thinking provides an opportunity to bring such feelings directly to the surface as soon as they arise.
3. Emotions can come in after a map of the situation has been put together – emotions are brought in to choose the route on the map.

Intuition & Hunches

• How valid are intuitions?
• How valuable are intuitions?
• How are intuitions to be used?

Two ways to use the word intuition:

1. Intuition can be used in the sense of a sudden insight.
2. Intuition can be used to describe the immediate apprehension or understanding of a situation. It is a complex judgment based on experience.

A hunch is a hypothesis based on intuition. Feelings can range from a sort of aesthetic feeling to a defined judgment.

How do we treat intuitions and hunches? Red hat thinking gives them legitimacy. The red hat permits us to ask for feelings and also to express them as a proper part of thinking.

If intuition has been right on many occasions, we may be more inclined to listen to it.

Where do intuition and opinion meet? Opinions are not allowed in white hat thinking because opinion is based on judgment, interpretation and intuition. Opinions may be expressed under red, black or yellow hats. When the red hat is used, it is best to express an opinion as a feeling.

Moment to Moment

• Reacting and getting upset.
• This is what I feel about this meeting.
• To show or to hide feelings.

Red hat feelings can be shown at any time in the course of a meeting, a discussion or a conversation.

Normally emotions take some time to well up and even longer to die down. There is resentment and there is sulking. Offense is taken and offense is given.

Views expressed under the red hat are less personal than views expressed without it, because it is recognized as being a formal idiom. The very need to “put on” the red hat reduces the amount of bickering.

Anyone who feels the need to be emotional has a defined way of doing so. It is no longer necessary to try and guess the feelings of others. There is a means for asking them directly.

The Use of Emotions

• Can thinking change emotions?
• The emotional background.
• Emotions as bargaining positions.
• Emotions, values and choices.

Once emotions have been made visible by means of the red hat idiom, then an attempt may be made to explore and even change them. Thinking can change emotions. If we see something differently than we did before, our emotions may alter with the altered perception.

Difficulties arise on three counts:

1. Does the proposed course of action really work out to satisfy the expressed desires?
2. When the satisfaction of the desires of one party is at the expense of the other party.
3. Conflict between short-term satisfaction and long-term satisfaction.

Emotions are part of both the method of thinking and the matter to be thought about. It is no use hoping they will go away and leave the field to pure thinking.

The Language of Emotions

• Emotions do not have to be logical or consistent.
• Emotions can be fine-tuned with language to match.
• Resist the temptation to justify emotions.

The most difficult thing about wearing the red hat is resisting the temptation to justify an expressed emotion. We are bought up to apologize for emotions and feelings because they are not the stuff of logical thinking.

Are we therefore free to have and to hold any prejudices we like? There may be danger in prejudices which are apparently founded in logic rather than in those which are acknowledged as emotions.

Without the red hat we tend to be limited to the stronger words supplemented with tone and facial expression.

Summaries & Conclusions

The red hat legitimizes emotions and feelings as an important part of thinking. There should be no justification of the feelings expressed.

The red hat allows a thinker to explore the feelings of others by asking for a red hat view.

There are two types of feeling:

1. Ordinary emotions – range from strong emotions (e.g., fear) to more subtle ones (e.g., suspicion)
2. Complex judgments – hunches, intuitions and other not visibly justified types of feelings.