Critical Incident Stories + Six Hat Thinking = Powerful Learnings
Critical Incidents
Broadly defined, a ‘critical incident’ is an incident that makes a significant contribution – positively or negatively – to an activity or event. Stories are a useful means of gathering and sharing critical incidents in workplace experience. The Critical Incident Technique (CIT) is an investigative process that usually relies on exploring five major areas:
- Determining a review of the incident
- Fact-finding (collecting details of the incident from participants)
- Identifying the issues
- Looking at various solutions to help decide how to resolve the issues
- Evaluating whether the solution selected addresses the situation root cause and stops futher incidents from occuring
Six Hat Thinking
De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is an analytical or problem-solving technique. A bit like the Five Whys technique, it enables exploring a decision or situation through a range of lenses, points of view, or perspectives. Examining a problem with Six Thinking Hats facilitates arriving at a solution that combines factual, emotional, critical, positive, creative, and rational or process control elements.
- White — Objective facts and figures; historical data
- Red — Emotions, feelings, and attitudes
- Black — Negative thinking; cautious and careful; pessimism and limitations
- Yellow — Positive thinking; mission possible; on time and on target; what-if
- Green — Creativity; exploring the situation from fresh, new angles
- Blue — Process control; understanding and management; logistics of organising, leading and supporting
Viewing Critical Incident Stories through Six Hat Lenses
This technique can also add variety to project after action reviews, or post-completion reviews. I like to adapt it by providing updated picture concept cards instead of the hats.
Here’s a downloadable example: Six Thinking Concepts. The steps involved are:
- Explain the concept of critical incidents
- Share a critical incident story
- Reaffirm the gist of the Six Thinking Hats methodology and provide each participant with a hat through which to view the critical incident
- Participants lead discussion of the critical incident, trying to see it through the lens of the colour/concept they are hosting; the discussion is chaired by the Blue Hat, who also summaries the process and any discussion outcomes and learnings