4. Yellow Hat Thinking

• Yellow hat thinking is positive and constructive. The yellow color symbolizes sunshine, brightness and optimism.

• Yellow hat thinking is concerned with positive assessment, just as black hat thinking is concerned with negative assessment.

• Yellow hat thinking covers a positive spectrum ranging from the logical and practical at one end to dreams, visions and hopes at the other end.

• Yellow hat thinking probes and explores for value and benefit. Yellow hat thinking then strives to find logical support for this value and benefit. Yellow hat thinking seeks to put forward soundly based optimism but is not restricted to this — provided other types of optimism are appropriately labeled.

• Yellow hat thinking is constructive and generative. From yellow hat thinking come concrete proposals and suggestions. Yellow hat thinking is concerned with efficiency and with making things happen. Effectiveness is the aim of yellow hat constructive thinking. Knowledge (scientia) is a word that may define the conditions under which actual understanding of what is true and what is false takes place; it may also define the act of pure speculation (speculation as thinking, considering).

• Yellow hat thinking can be speculative and opportunity seeking. Yellow hat thinking also permits visions and dreams.

• Yellow hat thinking is not concerned with mere positive euphoria (red hat) nor directly with creating new ideas (green hat).

5. Green Hat Thinking

• The green hat is for creative thinking. The person who puts on the green hat is going to use the idioms of creative thinking. Those around are required to treat the output as a creative output. Ideally both thinker and listener should be wearing green hats.

• The green color symbolizes fertility, growth and the value of seeds.

• The search for alternatives is a fundamental aspect of green hat thinking. There is a need to go beyond the known and the obvious and the satisfactory.

• The green hat thinker uses the creative pause to consider, at any point, whether there might be alternative ideas. There need be no reason for this pause.

• In green hat thinking the idiom of movement replaces that of judgment. The thinker seeks to move forward from an idea in order to reach a new idea.

• Provocation is an important part of green hat thinking, and is symbolized by the word po. A provocation is used to take us out of our usual patterns of thinking. There are many ways of setting up provocations, including the random word method.

• Lateral thinking is a set of attitudes, idioms and techniques (including movement, provocation and po) for cutting across patterns in a self-organizing asymmetric patterning system. It is used to generate new concepts and perceptions.

6. Blue Hat Thinking

• The blue hat is the control hat. The blue hat thinker organizes the thinking itself. Blue hat thinking is thinking about the thinking needed to explore the subject.

• The blue hat thinker is like the conductor of the orchestra. The blue hat thinker calls for the use of the other hats.

• The blue hat thinker defines the subjects towards which the thinking is to be directed. Blue hat thinking sets the focus. Blue hat thinking defines the problems and shapes the questions. Blue hat thinking determines the thinking tasks that are to be carried through.

• Blue hat thinking is responsible for summaries, overviews and conclusions. These can take place from time to time in the course of the thinking, and also at the end.

• Blue hat thinking monitors the thinking and ensures that the rules of the game are observed. Blue hat thinking stops argument and insists on the map type of thinking. Blue hat thinking enforces the discipline.

• Blue hat thinking may be used for occasional interjections which request a hat. Blue hat thinking may also be used to set up a step-by-step sequence of thinking operations which are to be followed just as a dance follows the choreography.

• Even when the specific blue hat thinking role is assigned to one person, it is still open to anyone to offer blue hat comments and suggestions.

2.2. Make a resume of all color styles (types) of thinking using key words. Say what hat the moderator of the Round Table should wear.

2.3. Read texts 1 – 6 on pp. 134–135 once again, define the color of the hat that could be given to each of the students speaking on their university experience.

2.4. Have a special look at text 2 on p.138 using the Yellow Hat style of thinking and give advice to its author.

2.5. Read your own text that you wrote in task 1.9. on p.136 and say which hat you wore when you were writing about yourself and your university studies. Would you like to change the color of your hat now and do it all over again?

2.6. While reading the text you have come across abstract nouns with different suffixes (brightness, likelihood, fertility, growth). If you need to refresh your knowledge about abstract nouns, go to Supplementary Material. Abstract Nouns.

2.7. There are a lot of phrasal verbs in the text above which are used with postpositions out, off, in, out and others (put on, take off, switch in, switch out). If you need to refresh your knowledge about them, go to Supplementary Material. Postpositions in Phrasal Verbs.

2.8. In the text there are such words as seek and search, which have the same meaning ‘искать’. Do you know the difference between these similar words? If not, go to Supplementary Material. Words with a Similar Meaning.

 Thinking scientifically ‘in a university way’

At university both teachers and students are engaged in research. We are researchers. It means that we observe the world around us in a special way making its elements the objects of our research. We’ll show you what is a researcher’s way of thinking, and give you seven steps to acquire this way of thinking and apply it in your research activities: in writing course papers, diplomas and … dissertations of different kinds.

3.1. Look at Figure 1 ‘An Hourglass: a researcher’s starting point’. Read and translate the words. Explain in your own words how you understand the activity that is inscribed into this hourglass (build a hypothesis).

Use verbs: find, choose, set, define, carry out.

Field

Object

Subject-matter

Goal

Tasks

Methods

Topicality/Significance

Figure 1. An hourglass: a researcher’s starting point.

3.2. Let us study the upper part of the hourglass. Read the definitions and in accordance with the examples of the object and the subject matter state an approximate goal and name the field.

The field of my research (investigation field) – the research context (the discipline or, if a research is interdisciplinary, a set of disciplines engaged; research school, people who work in the field).

The object of my research (research object) – the phenomenon studied (in humanitarian disciplines it may be particular texts, one’s activities or experiences etc.).

The subject-matter of my research (research subject-matter) – what precisely I study (investigate, research) in my object. For example, my object of research is some texts, so the subject-matter can be its structure, or vocabulary, or some particular information in it, some themes, etc.

The goal of my research (research or investigation goal) – a central (crucial) part of the hourglass. If you don’t consider it, the hourglass won’t work (there’s no reason to work). Here one answers the questions: why and what for the research is taking place? What’s the point in doing it? The research is definitely to help to solve some (research) problem.

 As you see with each new term following, the meaning of the research is more and more specified. With the help of these terms a researcher (a student) is following the path of self-identification:

1. where s/he is (the field)

2. what s/he studies (the object)

3. where the focus of attention is (the subject-matter)

4. why the activity is carried out (the goal)

3.3. Read the text about a university subject and define its field, object, subject-matter and goal; in this way you cover the path of both a teacher and a learner: you’ll formulate what the teacher teaches and what the student studies in the framework of a particular discipline.

Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information. It also develops its own conceptual and theoretical foundations and utilizes foundations developed in other fields. Since the advent of computers, individuals and organizations increasingly process information digitally. This has led to the study of informatics that has computational, cognitive and social aspects, including study of the social impact of information technologies.

(Informatics (academic field). (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics (academic field)

3.4. Study the lower part of the hourglass. Read the definitions of four terms and explain them by the example of the text in task 3.3. on p.142. Thus you will know what you will do, how you will do it, and, what is most important, should you do it at all or not.

Term 1. Tasks (steps) – the outline of a step-by-step realization of the goal;

Term 2. Method (also methodology, perspective, theory – everything that predetermines the way we define and develop our research categories) – a choice of a research matrix according to which we choose categories for analysis and methods, techniques, ways of their analysis which we consider proper for our goal realization. There exist three groups of methodologies (methods), i.e. the ones within logical, philosophical, and pure professional thinking. All three can be regarded by researchers as a basic matrix:

 Three kinds of methodologies: Within the basic methods, first, the logical ways of thinking are named, such as deduction (from general to particular), induction (from particular to general) and abduction (hypothesis production); Another group of an basic matrix represents general philosophic perspectives. Among them there are such research perspectives as positivism (the priority of factual data), interpretativism (the priority of interpretational data), criticism (the priority of attitudinal and evaluative data), postmodernism (the priority of semiotics and semiological data), synergetic perspective or other integrative approaches (e.g., casual-genetic perspective – the priority of interdisciplinary, synthetic, cluster-type of data); The third group of methods changes the focus of a researcher’s attention from general basic ways of thinking to particular ones (though for the discipline itself the methods of this group are still characterized as the basic ones). This group of methods has, obviously, a certain time and space limit, while the 1st two seem to be relatively profound.

Term 3. Topicality – the acceptance of a research project with its set of approaches (i.e., field-object-subject matter-goal-tasks-methods) as necessary for the society in the framework of ‘here and now’;

Term 4. Significance – the acceptance of a research project with its set of approaches as necessary for the science, its development and/or its further revision (or approaches and/or data verification).