Practitioner Perspective Section

Six Thinking Hats Approach South Asian Journal of Human

Resources Management
to HR Analytics 3(2) 191–199
2016 SAGE Publications India
Private Limited
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2322093716678316
http://hrm.sagepub.com
Smruti Patre1

Abstract
Historically, the human resources (HR) function and functionaries have struggled
to establish their credibility and value in the eyes of key stakeholders, including
the top management and line managers. Arguably, one of the reasons for this
struggle for acceptance is their inability to present data-driven, business-oriented
proposals, requiring urgent attention to elevate the analytical capability of the
HR function. This paper focuses on the role and significance of HR analytics
to organizations through a Six Thinking Hats approach. It presents a holistic
understanding of HR analytics encompassing the concept, benefits, limitations,
and likely solutions.

Keywords
Six thinking hats, HR analytics, strategic HR performance

Introduction
“In God we trust. All others bring data.”
—Edward Deming
The highly competitive, uncertain and often paradoxical business environment
today poses complex problems forcing organizations to make critical decisions
on how best to capitalize their precious resources and maximize productivity.
Accordingly, most of the functions are tied to a standard set of performance
metrics that allow them to design, implement, monitor and improve their
business performance across varying business cycles. The human resources
(HR) departments crave to gain a seat at the senior leadership table. But the
root cause of the problem is that HR today is mostly doing descriptive analysis
by presenting transactional measurements of HR functional tasks which
lacks analytical insight. This calls for urgent attention to elevate the analytical
capability of the HR function.

1
Department of HSSM, NIT, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India.

Corresponding author:
Smruti Patre, Department of HSSM, NIT, Jamshedpur 831014, Jharkhand, India.
E-mail: smruti.patre@yahoo.in
192 South Asian Journal of Human Resources Management 3(2)

HR professionals have readily available, rich data of their workforce and also
the required tools and techniques to take on predictive and further prescriptive
analysis. Using the immense power and potential of HR analytics, they can provide
predictive and prescriptive insights by using its knowledge and experience of
the workforce demographics, skill, competency and performance profiles. It not
only helps the hiring managers to source the right talent but also identify employees
who are at risk of leaving, especially the key performers.
According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016, 77 per cent of
executives researched rate HR analytics as a key priority, and 6 out of 10 organi-
zations are planning to implement HR analytics in next 5 years. Forty-four per
cent of companies are using workforce data to predict performance today as
against 29% in 2015. As a result, 51 per cent companies are now correlating
business impact with HR progress as against 38 per cent in 2015 (Deloitte,
2016). This shows how more and more companies are now connecting their HR
data to business outcomes.
This article aims to examine the critical role of HR analytics in organizations
through the Six Thinking Hats method (De Bono, 1985). It is a powerful and
proven technique emphasizing parallel or lateral thinking instead of adversarial
thinking such that when practising six hats thinking, everyone is using the same
tool at the same time on the same challenge and thus many brains think together
creatively and collaboratively. Thus, this method promises to be one of the most
effective techniques to provide a holistic understanding HR analytics as it promotes
supportive and collaborative thinking from six different perspectives.

What is Six Thinking Hat?

Six Thinking Hats® is a practical and effective management tool developed by
Edward De Bono (1985), one of the pioneers of brain training. For over 50 years,
he has presented new and interesting ideas through his books, courses, games and
speaking engagements. Dr De Bono invented the L Game (1968), coined and
introduced the concept of Creativity Step by Step (1970), Lateral Thinking for
Management (1971), Po: A Device for Successful Thinking (1972), Textbook of
Wisdom (1996), Simplicity (1999), New Thinking for the New Millennium (1999),
How to Have A Beautiful Mind (2004), Six Value Medals (2005), and H+ (Plus):
A New Religion (2006), among others. Of these, Six Thinking Hats is considered
to be one of his greatest literary works.
Six Thinking Hats is a simple and effective “parallel thinking” process that
helps people to walk outside the limits of small-mindedness, unidirectional
thinking and fixed positions (De Bono, 1985). It is a practical and systematic
process for individual and team thinking, predominantly helpful in problem-
solving, decision making, generating innovative solutions. The traditional
method of thinking, also known as adversarial thinking, results in too many, too
stretched, non-productive meetings which are dominated by ego and promote
more status quo than bringing any change or innovation. On the other hand, the
Six Thinking Hats method includes the fundamental elements of efficient thinking
focusing on a specific virtual colour “hat,” thinking in one particular direction at
Patre 193

a time instead of switching from one idea or thought to another. These thinking
elements include the following:

• Blue hat thinking: The Planner—managing and controlling thinking

• White hat thinking: The Prober—focusing on the facts
• Red hat thinking: The Partner—using intuition and feelings
• Yellow hat thinking: The Provider—generating positive ideas
• Black hat thinking: The Preventer—evaluating the risks and potential
problems and
• Green hat thinking: The Proposer—searching for solutions to overcome
barriers

As a result, each person contributes his/her unique thinking on a particular

challenge, resulting in a much better and impactful solution. When teams
engage in Six Hats Thinking, they practise “parallel thinking,” thus speeding
up the discussion, reducing meeting time by up to 50 per cent and increasing
their productivity manifolds. This has been proven over the years by many
top-ranked organizations operating in different sectors and located in different
countries across the globe. A few to mention are as follows: IBM, Prudential,
GM, BT (UK), NTT (Japan), Nokia (Finland), Mondadori (Italy), Total (France),
Siemens (Germany), Bosch (Germany) and Ericsson (Sweden).

HR Analytics and Six Thinking Hats

Being a relatively new concept, HR analytics is more often poorly understood by
organizations including its benefits and impact on business results. A Six Thinking
Hats approach may enable HR professionals understand this better. Since this
technique encourages the most pessimistic people to think of positive outcomes
of a given situation, resulting in those who have not yet started with analytics to
give a start and those who have started but are stuck midway because of lack of
clarity, to get a boost to move ahead.
In order to have a Six Thinking Hat discussion with clarity, let us consider a
hypothetical situation where the top management is quite disappointed with the
business value of HR deliverables. After having a microscopic view of the situation,
the head HR realizes that they are just doing descriptive analysis by presenting trans-
actional measurements of HR functional tasks which lack analytical insight. For a
collaborative discussion on the matter, he/she decides to experiment with the Six
Thinking Hats approach on the role and relevance of HR analytics to the organi-
zation’s business value and the readiness of the organization for its implementation.
So, let us put on different hats to examine if and how HR analytics is the solution.

Blue Hat Thinking: The Planner

Wearing a blue hat, the head of the HR team who acts as a facilitator opens the
discussion, explaining the agenda. He/she expresses the desire to make a clear and
194 South Asian Journal of Human Resources Management 3(2)

convincing business case for the value that the HR function can deliver to achieve
strategic objectives. Hence, he/she proposes implementing predictive analytics in
HR and asks everyone to wear different hats and express their views.
The HR head decides the sequence of hats to be worn. Putting on the blue hat
he/she opens the discussion with white (to present background information on HR
analytics), followed by red (to gauge the feelings of the participants), yellow
(to capture positive aspects of HR analytics), black (to study barriers and limitations
of applying analytics), green (to develop new alternatives to overcome barriers),
once again red (to assess the final views of participants) and finally, concluding the
discussion with blue hat thinking. Accordingly, the different thinking approaches
are mentioned below.

White Hat Thinking: The Prober

It attempts to answer few questions on the basis of facts and available information:

• What is HR analytics and its role?

• What are the required HR analytical capabilities in the organization?
• What is the future of HR analytics or predictions of HR analytics?

HR analytics can be defined as

a methodology for understanding and evaluating the causal relationship between HR

practices and organizational performance outcomes (such as customer satisfaction,
sales or profit), and for providing legitimate and reliable foundations for human
capital decisions for the purpose of influencing the business strategy and performance,
by applying statistical techniques and experimental approaches based on metrics of
efficiency, effectiveness and impact. (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2006; Lawler, Levenson, &
Boudreau, 2004)

Seven types of collected data are used for carrying out HR analytics,

Workforce statistics, financial ratios relating to people and productivity, measures of

people’s values; measures of people’s engagement, measures of efficiency of the HR
function, measures of effectiveness of people processes and measures of investment in
one-off initiatives and programs. (Mayo, 2006)

The success of any business depends on the level of expertise and skill of the
workforce. Coolen and IJselstein (2015) introduced the HR analytics capability
wheel and argued that “only those organizations that manage to create and main-
tain a balanced blend of different relevant capabilities will be successful in HR
analytics.” These “relevant capabilities” were described as perspectives and
include the business perspective (e.g., proper understanding of business challenges
and strategy), the HR perspective (e.g., knowing about HR processes, available
HR data and ethics of analyzing employee data), the consultant perspective
Patre 195

(e.g., “selling HR analytics to business” and presenting results in a convincing

manner), the data scientist perspective (e.g., conducting statistical analyses and
also being able to work with more cutting edge development, such as machine
learning algorithms), the IT architect perspective (e.g., understanding of the HR
IT landscape and data warehousing) and the software perspective (e.g., in-depth
knowledge of working with analytical software, depending on whether outsourced
or conducted in-house). Organizations equipped with analytical capabilities have a
great potential to generate better quality decisions by using advanced analytics.
In terms of the future potential and trends in HR analytics, it is predicted that

• Companies will seriously focus more on data quality and its validity rather
than data quantity.
• Leaders at all levels will have HR data at their fingertips, to view, analyze
and make decisions instantly.
• Instead of individual analysts, analytics teams will take over the task to
mine data, unearth patterns and provide high quality recommendations.

Thus, HR analytics will have a major influence on decision making in organiza-

tions and on the composition and role of HRM as a function. It can help to ensure
lean and agile organizational structures that are based on an optimal combination
of people characteristics and skills on the one hand and strategic business targets
on the other hand. Thus, HR analytics may have the potential to transform organi-
zational models.

Red Hat Thinking: The Partner

The red hat on HR analytics focuses on the emotions and feelings towards the HR
analytics implementation of all those involved in the discussion.
The typical positive emotions associated with it are as follows:

• People analytics sounds great.

• Other companies are successfully using it, so it’s possible for us to do the
same.
• It has become very common; hence, getting proper guidance won’t be a
problem.
• It will supplement human efforts and not replace them.
• HR decisions and also the judgments, are based on both proven metrics and
intuition, hence a sense of elation.

The negative emotions might include the following:

• A fear of the unknown.

• HR analytics will take away jobs.
• Implementing HR analytical model brings with it a big change making
people feel insecure, anxious and nervous.
196 South Asian Journal of Human Resources Management 3(2)

• To meet new expectations of the analytics driven jobs, training will be

required and hence demand more efforts by employees which may not be
forthcoming.
• Applying data in the right context is tricky and challenging.
• Right way of looking at data requires lot of trial and errors and lot of
patience to get the outcome.
• HR analytics in business can be risky and dangerous if the models designed
fall in wrong hands posing a security threat.
• Implementing HR analytics will require a change in the business model and
requires support from top management which may be quite difficult to
secure, resulting in discouragement, demotivation and disappointment.

Yellow Hat: The Provider

The yellow hat thinking focuses on benefits of implementing HR analytics in an
organization. The most alluring feature of data-driven decision making is the ability
to predict trends and likely threats and opportunities. Trends and data will provide
managers with the opportunity to make more informed and accurate decisions
about what is likely to happen in the future. It will help them

• Determine if existing approaches are working: Metrics allow HR execu-

tives to see if their existing programmes and tools are working. Analytics
can also be used to assess the effectiveness of new talent programmes by
having a microscopic view on the issues that may arise in future.
• Identify hidden causes of problems: It’s difficult to improve weak-performing
programmes without knowing the critical success factors that make them
effective. By using forward-looking data analysis, HR can discover the latent
root causes of HR problems.
• Continuous improvement: The unearthing of suboptimal performance
data can motivate leaders to realize that there is a scope for improvement,
although on the surface, everything may appear to be running fine. Since
data highlight process errors, proper use of data reports can notably
reduce the number of major errors and weak decisions within the HR
function.
• Speed up talent decisions: By gathering and reporting data on best practices,
companies may see more consistent and accurate workforce management
decision making across the organization.
• Opportunity to be strategic: By implementing analytics, HR can contribute
to a large extent to the corporate business plan by forecasting, assessing risk
and preparing for the future.
• Justifying investments in human capital: Employee-focused investments will
result in tangible outcomes which will benefit shareholders, customers and
employees themselves and can also be quantified. Few specific areas where
analytics can be applied are employee retention, employee engagement, talent
acquisition and performance management.
Patre 197

Black Hat: The Preventer

Organizations are most likely to face tough challenges and barriers in the course
of implementation of HR analytics programmes which may include

• Lack of infrastructure: Poor infrastructure is a serious hindrance for scale

and speed.
• Insufficient and inappropriate data governance: Proper data governance
ensures that people are using analytics as it is intended. The absence of this
can result in chaos.
• Lack of analytic capability: Scarcity of talent with analytical capability is a
major barrier to success.
• Cultural readiness: Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is meaningless
unless it is put into action, resulting in a creative solution or output. The key
here is to integrate analytics to decision making. This calls for organizations
to have analytics-driven culture to leverage its power.
• Fear of failure: If we overcome the fear of using analytics, HR analytics can
truly be leveraged to deliver enhanced results contributing value to business
performance.
• Lack of skills: HR analytics demands certain specific skills in the employees
such as domain knowledge, communication, presentation, inquisitiveness,
problem solving, business analysis and pattern recognition. These skills are
in short supply.
• Security, privacy and confidentiality of data: HR analytics poses a serious
risk of information being used in a destructive and damaging way.
• Complexity: Various sources of truth (validity) of data, dirty data and poor
legacy human resources information system in the organizations create
complexity in implementing HR analytics.

Green Hat: The Proposer

Some of the solutions to address the barriers to implementing HR analytics are as
follows:

• Increase visibility of HR data: Creating a common view of all relevant

workforce data to various internal stakeholders is the key to correctly
aligning talent with the fluctuating needs of the business.
• Improving analytical skills of HR function: Data literacy training can be
incorporated in employee development programmes. A better strategy may
be to hire people with analytical backgrounds in HR, rotating employees from
line functions such as finance and marketing into HR, analytics to be part of
every job descriptions and encouraging employees to apply analytics in their
work by boldly experimenting with new ideas without fear of punitive actions
resulting from failures.
• Data security: HR professionals need to be trained regularly in data security,
privacy and identity protection to ensure the maintenance of data privacy.
198 South Asian Journal of Human Resources Management 3(2)

• Frame the right questions: It is very important to frame proper business-

centric questions.
• Selecting the right tools for analytics: Look at the technology market for
investing in self-service, customized data analytics tools.
• Robust analytics infrastructure: The analytics infrastructure should be
broad and deep enough to accommodate every important aspect of HR
that impacts business outcomes, including absence rates, fraud, theft and
customer satisfaction.
• Social analytics: This can make the leaders aware and alert them in advance
by providing warnings on the employees’ social activities which may be
professionally objectionable. By monitoring blogposts of employees about
company, we may gauge the trends from the social media and hence antici-
pate employee engagement scores and labour unrests and accordingly
respond in time.
• Understanding legal and ethical complexities of employee monitoring:
HR analytics can offer critical insights to organizations to understand
and predict ethics and compliance problems by developing a tool which
can accurately forecast which employees are most at risk of committing
ethical transgressions.

Conclusion
If used strategically, HR analytics is a powerful tool for organizations in optimi-
zing their workforce decisions for best business results. Hence, HR and other
departments need to have an understanding of the purpose and execution of
workforce analytics. It is not only about using advanced techniques but also about
reducing human bias and creating new insights. HR can successfully contribute as
a strategic function by implementing analytics aptly. While this article explored
the concept and contribution of HR analytics from the perspective of the Six
Thinking Hats technique, future studies may examine how HR analytics can predict
the economic value of human capital investments to demonstrate the impact of
people on performance.

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