The Six thinking hat model : a tool for participation in community development, the experience of an NGO in Cambodia

This paper documents the experience of the NGO Christian Outreach, working in Cambodia on a programme of community development. The programme is focussed on awareness change and works with a number of participatory techniques to animate change.
The paper draws attention to some of the difficulties of a truly open-ended conversation. It picks up on a simple model for describing thinking, called the "six thinking hat model", created by Edward De Bono. This model has been widely used in both adult and child education in the USA and Europe, and in management workshops for multinational companies. The paper describes the adoption of the model for community development in Cambodia. It describes the basic model, it's use for staff capacity-building, and its use in rural village communities as a framework for open-ended conversations. It concludes that the model is a useful tool for ensuring comprehensive analysis of problems, creating a framework for conversations and preventing conflict.