By Rachael Simoes

You can and should rush art

At long last, children, I have found a way to create effectively. This technique will solve all of your problems. No more painful explaining why your partner’s idea is terrible as soon as it comes out of their mouth. Nor not seeing what could possibly be wrong in your very flawed idea until you present it and the mentors tear you a new one in front of everyone. The former days have passed away.

Here we are, honies. Is this the first SCAB about Six Hat thinking? I wouldn’t know. I don’t read others’ SCABs. I have better things to be doing with my life than learning from and finding solidarity in my peers. Anyway, for all of my future fans who are reading this because you want to be inspired by my early work, here is a lil sum on Six Hats.

You want to start with the blue hat, so you can layout what other hat’s you’re going to put on in what order. I find it helpful to end on it too, to organise all of the ideas, feelings, and questions that came off the session. At the end, I’d list everything I need to research (usually already in the list in the white hat, sometimes jotted around the place if a question comes to mind while wearing another hat) and make another list of all of the creative executions we thought of. These creative executions tend to be more thought-through than ones I make while recklessly scamping because they’ve been through the black and red hat too. The longest I’ll wear at hat is for 10 minutes and I’ll always set a timer. I only ever do 10 minutes for green hat, and 7-3 minutes for the rest. Six Hat sessions can/should be 20-40 minutes long. You’ll be surprised how much you can think of in that time.

It’s important that I mention Six Hat’s work best when you have a route. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just a solid backbone in the strategy. It’s not really for art direction or copywriting either. Or at least I don’t use it for that. Stuff like poster ideas and straplines I like to create piles of to get to the right one. 

The importance of Six Hats is to take a critical and freely creative approach to your work that you naturally don’t. We’re all stuck in one or two of those hats constantly and don’t come out of it, putting our work at risk of developing very slowly and painfully. For example, I’m usually in green and black hat when I make work. This sucks because instead of coming up with multiple ideas, my partner or I will say one and I’ll pick at it until it dies. A bit like my love life. I also rarely ever put on the white hat to consider doing research, or red hat to consider what my gut be really feeling about our idea. Now, we put all of the ideas out in the green hat, then when it gets to the black hat and the red hat we say everything that does and doesn’t sit right.

So, my juicy caterpillars, organise your creative time. Set an uninterrupted 30-minute slot. I can’t wait to organised my days at SCA like this so I can, by the grace of God, feel less stressed about deadlines. I also want to try it on all of my scripts that I started but never finished because, although they have a good story, I felt there was something wrong but didn’t know how to go about it. Anyway, au revoir and happy Hatting.