To conclude our blog series on Cultivating Leadership Through Conversations we are talking to Candice Smith, Founder of The Thinking Field and one of two Time To Think Global Faculty members in Australia as she share with us her insights on how to cultivate generative conversations.
What is the Thinking Environment® process and what does it offer leaders?
A Thinking Environment is the set of conditions under which people can think for themselves with rigour, imagination, courage, and grace. After years of research and observation Nancy Kline, the founder of the Thinking Environment methodology recognised that people generate their best thinking if the people around them behave in 10 specific ways. These 10 behaviours have become known as ‘The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment': Attention, Equality, Ease, Appreciation, Encouragement, Feelings, Information, Difference, Incisive Questions, Place.
Each of the components is valuable individually, but it is the system of all Ten Components working simultaneously that gives this process its transformative impact. This “way of being”, the way in which we treat each other, has a catalytic and generative impact on the thinking that happens in those around us.
The success of leadership is tied inextricably to the work leaders can inspire from the people they lead. And the excellent results of their work will emerge from the rigour, accuracy, creativity, and focus of their thinking. As such, a fundamental act of leadership is to create an environment in which everyone can think for themselves, with rigour and courage, to create a generative Thinking Environment. Every subsequent act of leadership gains quality from there.
How do the 10 components of a Thinking Environment facilitate generative conversations?
ATTENTION
Listening without interruption and with interest in where the person will go next in their thinking - Attention is an act of creation.
The quality of our attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking. Attention generates thinking, and therefore essential for generative conversations.
EQUALITY
Regarding each other as thinking peers, giving equal time to think. Even in a hierarchy people can be equal as thinkers.
In a Thinking Environment everyone is valued equally as a thinker. Everyone gets a turn to think out loud. To know you will get your turn to speak makes your attention more genuine and relaxed and your speaking more succinct, resulting in high quality ideas and decisions.
EASE
Discarding internal urgency. Ease creates; urgency destroys.
Urgency puts our brains into an ‘avoid’, contracted state which drives reactive thinking, while ease puts us into a ‘toward’ state where more rigorous, creative and interconnected thinking can be accessed.
APPRECIATION
Noticing what is good and saying it. The human mind works best in the presence of appreciation.
Reality contains both that which is working well, and that which is not working well, and yet we tend to only focus on one aspect of reality, that which is not working well. To think generatively, we need to include the full picture of reality, not a limited view.
ENCOURAGEMENT
Giving courage to go to the unexplored edge of thinking by ceasing competition as thinkers. To be ‘better than’ is not necessarily to be ‘good’.
Competition between thinkers and in conversations can be dangerous. It can keep their attention on each other as rivals, not on the huge potential for each to think courageously for themselves.
FEELINGS
Welcoming the release of emotion. Unexpressed feelings can inhibit good thinking.
Thinking stops when we are upset. But if we express feelings just enough, thinking re-starts. If, when people show signs of feelings, we relax and welcome them, generativity and good thinking will resume.
INFORMATION
Absorbing all the relevant facts. Full and accurate information results in intellectual integrity.
We base our decisions on information of many sorts. When the information is incorrect or limited in a conversation, the quality of our thinking suffers. Accurate and full information can both dismantle denial and enable us to access the facts in a generative way.
DIFFERENCE
Committing to freedom from untrue assumptions driving prejudice.
Prejudice consists of untrue assumptions, particularly about identity groups, and functions, therefore, as a generative thinking inhibitor. When we commit to freeing ourselves of these assumptions, we enhance the quality of everyone’s thinking, and we can think generatively, as ourselves.
INCISIVE QUESTIONSTM
Freeing the human mind of untrue assumptions lived as true. A host of generative ideas lies just beneath an untrue limiting assumption.
The key block to high-quality independent and generative thinking is an untrue limiting assumption, lived as true. To free the mind and access generativity we need to know how to construct an Incisive Question.
PLACE
Producing a physical environment – the room, the listener, your body – that says, ‘You matter’.
When the physical environment affirms our importance, we think more clearly and generatively. When our bodies are cared for and respected, our thinking improves.
At a practical level, there are a few shared ways of engaging which can reliably ensure generative conversations:
- Rounds: In group contexts, go systematically around the room giving everyone a turn to speak once before anyone speaks twice. Start and end meetings in this way, and allow each item to be discussed to be addressed in this Round format.
- Presencing Appreciation: Begin and end meetings with a Round which presences appreciation.
- Thinking Pairs - Exploring one’s own ideas in depth: The practice of two people both providing one another with uninterrupted time to think generatively, for equal amounts of time, is the most reliable way to access the benefits of generative attention.
