A Meeting Fix That Gets Everyone on the Same Page

August 29, 2026

Read Time - 4.5 minutes

“The main difficulty of thinking is confusion. We try to do too much at once.”

Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats (1985)

Imagine this. Your leadership team convenes for its weekly meeting. Everyone is seated with coffee in hand, and you're excited to share a new internship program you've been working on.

Students would be placed with local nonprofits for experiential learning and degree-related work and the placements could be integrated into the curriculum instead of bolted on as something extra. You have talked informally with three partners and all three are interested. You think some version of it could be running as soon as next fall and now you need to run it by your leadership team.

You take ten minutes to walk everyone in the room through it. Then, you lean back, look around the table, and ask, “So...what are your thoughts?”

• Person #1 loves it, and she is already describing what it will do for the unit's community engagement profile.

• Person #2 focuses on the costs. He wants to know what a coordinator position costs, whether there is grant money behind it or whether it comes out of operating, and how many students you are actually talking about in year one.

• Person #3, on the far side of the table, says he has watched this movie before. Service learning came through in 2016 with the same energy, the supervision landed on four overworked faculty members and it's not worth the hassle.

• Person #4 asks whether it would be smarter to pilot this in one program instead of launching across the college, and whether the community college should be at the table from the start so transfer students are included.

• Person #5 says he likes the idea, but this is the fourth new idea since January and he is at capacity right now.

  
  

Twelve minutes later the room is arguing about 2016, someone has pulled up a budget spreadsheet, and pilot vs. launch has become the actual topic. Nobody has mentioned the internship program itself since minute two.

The meeting ends without a decision. You walk back to your office disappointed.

Sound familiar? I've been on both sides of this conversation multiple times and it took me a long time to see what was going on.

Good information, bad process

“Why can't they see it?”

“Why do they have to pick everything apart?”

The truth is, everyone around the table had great contributions. They were just approaching the discussion from five different directions at once.

Optimism. Information. Risk. Alternatives. Emotion.

When sequenced, this can add up to a good decision. But at the same time? It's noise.

Notice what was missing from the conversation. Nobody was running it.

“So, what do you think?” feels generous. It's open-ended and free of structure. Which is also what makes it a weak question directed toward a group of people with different backgrounds who think differently.

Six hats, one at a time

Edward de Bono called the solution to this parallel thinking. Instead of six people arguing from six positions, everyone thinks the same way at the same time, then switches together. He gave each mode a colored hat so a group could name it without naming a person.

• White is information. What do we actually know, and what are we missing? Numbers, dates, precedent. No opinions.

• Red is the gut. Hunches, reactions, and feelings. The rule is what makes it work: no justification permitted. You don't need to defend a red-hat comment.

• Black is caution. Risks, weak points, and problems. De Bono called it the most valuable hat and the most overused, which will sound about right if you've sat in enough leadership meetings.

• Yellow is upside. The benefits, feasibility, and exploring the value of the idea.

• Green is creativity. What are other alternatives, new ideas, or different approaches?

• Blue is process. Who's running the thinking. What we're doing now, what's next, what we decided.

Look back at that meeting and you can hand out the hats. Yellow, white, black, green, and red. Every hat is present except blue, and that's the hat we should be prepared to wear in these situations.

Putting it to work

You don't have to run all six hats every time. De Bono mapped different sequences to different jobs. Here are four that come up frequently in campus leadership:

1.) A new idea on the table. Blue, white, green, blue.

This is the internship meeting described at the beginning. Notice what is missing. No yellow, no black, no verdict of any kind. A first conversation about a new idea is for establishing what is known and generating ideas. Diving into the weak points and criticism too early can kill good ideas before they get off the ground.

2.) Finding solutions. Blue, white, black, green, blue.

An enrollment decline, a course sequence students keep failing, a process everyone complains about. Black comes early here because the problem is the subject. What matters is pivoting to green before a decision is made.

3.) Strategic planning. Blue, yellow, black, white, blue, green, blue.

Yellow first is the counterintuitive one, and it is deliberate. Planning conversations that open with constraints produce plans that are only about constraints. Name what you are trying to become, stress-test it, then go get the facts.

A few practical suggestions I've learned from experience:

• Announce the rounds at the beginning. Say it plainly. “Let's start with ten minutes on what facts we know. Then ten on what could go wrong.” Nobody needs to know a man wrote a book about hats.

• Give permission to share without justifying. “What's your gut reaction to this in one or two sentences? No explanation necessary.” Keep this brief. The time limit is not there to cut people off, but to communicate this is a check-in, not a conversation. That's how you know whether you need to slow down or if you can forge ahead.

• Say what was decided. The closing blue hat is the one people skip, and skipping it is what creates confusion after a productive conversation. Name the decision, the owner, and the next due date.
  

One caution - structure is not a ban on criticism. Jared Curhan and colleagues at MIT found that criticism boosts creativity when a group believes it is working cooperatively, and kills it when the room feels competitive. Rounds do not fix meetings by controlling when people argue. They fix meetings by making the room feel like one team working the same problem rather than six people defending six positions.

Try this before Friday

Take an idea you're planning to float this year and try these two moves:

1.) Send the facts ahead. What we know, what it costs, what's already decided. Don't try to persuade.

2.) Rewrite the agenda line. Replace “Discussion: [your idea]” with a timed, structured sequence through a few of the thinking hats. What we know. What could go wrong. What we'd gain. How do people feel about it.

Then sit with this: You're not running the meeting to find out whether your idea is good. You're running it to build the conditions under which anyone would tell you.

The bottom line

Great discussions rarely happen by accident. The person who structures the conversation to ensure you get the best out of the room is you, and it's a different job than having the best idea in the room.

Do this once and you get a better meeting. Do it consistently and something larger starts to shift. A team that works together on the process and sees its input shape the outcome will stop holding back. Over a semester, then a year, you are not just running better meetings. You are building a team that is genuinely good at deliberating ideas together, and that is a capacity most academic units never develop.

Your most important work as a leader is rarely bringing the solution. It is building the conditions where a room full of smart people can do their best thinking together, out loud, on the record. That's the job. Everything else follows from it.

Thanks for reading today. I'll see you next week.

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