The Size of Your Hat and Coat

In the last post I discussed the Six Rings metaphor which revealed that both the Six Hats and the Six Coats metaphors were both cognitive hierarchies. In this post I will discuss leadership or emphasis within a project or system.

First, we have the Six Hats which we can express as a Venn diagram:

We can also express the Six Coats as a Venn diagram:

These diagrams illustrate an equal emphasis on all the Hats and all the Coats. However, no system is completely balanced. An actual system might have a Six Hats Venn diagram like the following:

In this example the emphasis is predominantly on the Blue Hat, Operational.

An actual system may also have a Six Coats Venn diagram as follows:

In this example it is the Black Coat, Functional that has emphasis.

Putting the Hat and Coat together we can say that the emphasis of the system or leadership of the project or business is Blue Hat, Black Coat or Operational/Functional. Here’s a Mix Thirty-Six diagram of the emphasis:

You can see that the Blue Hat row and the Black Coat column are larger.  If this were a computing project we could say that the operational perspective and functional focus are leading the effort. We are likely to get an effective transaction system at the expense of everything else. We hope that that is what the other systems that interact with ours will want.

This is a very simple example, but by analyzing the Mix Thirty-Six of external and internal systems we can realize beneficial systems. And everything is ultimately a system within its own right.