The green hat is for creative thinking. The person who puts on the green hat is going to use the idioms of creative thinking. Those around are required to treat the output as a creative output. Ideally both thinker and listener should be wearing green hats.
The green colour symbolizes fertility, growth and the value of seeds.
The search for alternatives is a fundamental aspect of green hat thinking. There is a need to go beyond the known and the obvious and the satisfactory.
The green hat thinker uses the creative pause to consider, at any point, whether there might be alternative ideas. There need be no reason for this pause.
In green hat thinking the idiom of movement replaces that of judgement. The thinker seeks to move forward from an idea in order to reach a new idea.
Provocation is an important part of green hat thinking, and is symbolized by the word po. A provocation is used to take us out of our usual patterns of thinking. There are many ways of setting up provocations, including the random word method.
Lateral thinking is a set of attitudes, idioms and techniques (including movement, provocation and po) for cutting across patterns in a self-organizing asymmetric patterning system. It is used to generate new concepts and perceptions.