I was catching up with some news and came across Aaron Wall's post about Lateral Thinking Skills which led me to another post about Lateral Vs Traditional SEO. Aaron's post reminded us of Edward DeBono, who wrote a book called Six Thinking Hats. DeBono's hats are now a standard framework for creative - "lateral" thinking which you should be using for your SEO and general webmaster work.

The hats are really just a means to force you to think about the different aspects of a problem. They are colored hats, with the color being symbolic for the approach/aspect you're thinking about now. Think of them as the modes of attacking a problem.

So what are the six hats?

• The White Hat, symbolizing facts and hard data. For example, we state that our conversion rate is low. We state that the number of users is dropping. What we're stating here is mostly the question we're trying to answer. Why is the conversion rate so low? Why are visitors not coming or not returning?
• The Red Hat, symbolizing emotions. Here we start making hypotheses about what's going on, but only on an emotional level. Continuing with our examples, our conversion rate is low because we're not connecting to the needs of the visitors. For our decreasing traffic, perhaps our visitors do not feel part of a community. This will be important if you run a forum or a very social Web 2.0 site.
• The Black Hat, which is the color of a judge's robe. Think negatively and critically here. Perhaps our sever is overloaded or the sales page takes too long to load. Our low conversion rate could be to bad targeting, perhaps we're using the wrong keywords. Our visitors are leaving because there are bullies in our community. Again, we state facts and implications of our original question, but as suggestions for potential answers.
• The Yellow Hat, where we talk about sunny, happy, positive things. Hey, we're converting badly but at least it's not costing us much. Too many conversions mean we'll need a much bigger tech support group. Perhaps the drop in traffic means we're left with the most loyal and vocal user base. A smaller community is easier to manage. The point here is to think of the good things coming out of your problem, but try to find an angle that you can exploit.
• The Green Hat, where you let your mind roam wide and free in endless pastures looking for solutions. Here is when you relax and explicitely think about solutions, ideally using a creative idea generation technique. What happens if you ask your dwindling community to redesign your site? What can we do differently? MUST we use these keywords? Are our moderators part of the problem?

  One technique that I love is the random word association technique. While thinking about your problem, flip through a dictionary and randomly pick out a word. Now try to incorporate that word into your thinking. By forcing yourself (your brain) to create unexpected links, you're more likely to find a creative solutions. The whole point here is to create a new association. There are many more techniques and you have to explore a few to decide which one works best for you. The search engines are your friends

• Finally, the Blue Hat, your sky-high big-picture view of the problem. What did we learn? What can we do? Where do we go from here? Write up a little summary of this exercise. Engage with those who you think are part of the problem or are potentially part of the solutions.

So this is it in a nutshell. The examples I used are simple and do not do justice to the framework, but you get the idea. Try it out. You just may come up with something special!

Bonus two hats: for fun

• The Propeller Hats are the techies who think the best technical solution wins. They moan when we talk about website usability.
• The Tinfoil Hats are those that believe that Google is evil.

Technorati Tags: six hats, creative thinking, seo