Everyone thinks
the same way at once.

White: facts, and the gaps in them: What do we know, what do we only believe, and what would we need to find out. Naming the gap between the first two is usually the most valuable minute of the session.

Red: feelings, with no justification allowed: Say the reaction without defending it. This round exists because unspoken discomfort routes itself into fake data arguments, which are far harder to resolve than the discomfort was.

Black and yellow: risk, then benefit: Run caution and optimism as separate timeboxed rounds. Both are legitimate, both are destructive when they interrupt each other, and neither is a personality trait.

Green and blue: alternatives, then process: Green generates options rather than judging the one on the table. Blue is held by the facilitator throughout and closes the session with a decision and owners.

Prompt against the whole canvas: Ask it for prompts to open a hat, for green hat alternatives once the black hat round has surfaced the real constraint, or for the questions a thin white hat round is missing.

Use it to widen, not to decide: The decision has to belong to the group. An AI that hands a room a conclusion ends the exercise, which defeats the point of structuring the discussion in the first place.

Iterate without losing work: Re-prompt as often as you want. Cards the group has already written stay exactly where they are while the AI builds around them.

Everyone contributes at once: On a canvas the whole group writes into the current hat in parallel rather than speaking in turn, which is where most of a remote session's material is normally lost.

Quieter people get heard: Writing into a hat area removes the need to interrupt, and the red hat round in particular surfaces reactions that would never have been said aloud in a meeting.

Asynchronous white and green rounds: Open the board early for the facts round and the alternatives round, then run a shorter live session for black, yellow, and the decision. Research improves with time; deciding does not.

The conclusion sits beside the rounds: Six months later, the question is never what did we decide, it is why. A board where the decision sits next to the black hat concerns answers that in one glance.

Unresolved concerns become tasks: Black hat items that were accepted rather than answered should leave as owned risks, not as notes. This is the step that separates a decision from an act of optimism.

Share the reasoning, not just the outcome: Send a view-only link to everyone affected. People argue much less with a decision whose alternatives and risks they can see were genuinely considered.