Book review - Nancy Kline – Time to Think
/Esi and I recently completed a leadership coaching course and Nancy Kline’s book “Time to Think” was highly recommended by our tutors.
I love this book because it’s a very practical book about cultivating a thinking environment in your team.
According to the book the reason a thinking environment is important is because ‘thinking for yourself is the thing on which everything else depends’.
Kline suggests using incisive questions which tackle the ‘assumptions that are limiting your progress’.
I didn't think it was that important until I tried it with one of my case studies in our course and it worked so well that it really surprised me. I find it also works really well for decisions or problems I get stuck with.
Incisive questions remove limiting beliefs and assume that you can overcome the block you are having, making you think of the possibilities, not the problems. This is powerful stuff!
The ten components of a thinking environment are:
Give your attention in the thinking environment – listen with respect, interest, and fascination.
Ask incisive questions – removing assumptions that limit ideas and replacing them with the possibilities
Equality – treating each other as thinking peers – giving equal turns
Give appreciation – practice 5/1 ratio of appreciation to criticism. Criticism breaks ideas down and appreciation encourages thinking.
Ease – offering freedom from rush or urgency. Ease creates, urgency destroys
Encouragement – moving beyond competition – To be better than it is not necessarily to be good.
Feelings – allowing sufficient emotional release to restore thinking
Information – providing a full and accurate picture of reality
Place – creating a physical environment that says to people – “you matter”
Diversity – adding quality because of the differences between us
Create a thinking environment in your team and you will get good, interesting ideas that go beyond your expectations.
Team effectiveness depends on the calibre of thinking the team can do. Giving everyone the chance to be heard increases the intelligence of groups. Begin with a positive reality and let them finish.
Chairing a brilliant team meeting:
Give everyone a turn to speak
Ask everyone to say what is going well in their work, or in the group’s work
Give attention without interruption during open and even fiery discussions
Ask Incisive questions to reveal and remove assumptions that are limiting ideasDivide into thinking partnership when thinking stalls and give each person five minutes to think out loud without interruption
Go around intermittently to give everyone a turn to say what they think
Encourage the sharing of truth and information
Permit the expression of feelings
Ask everyone what they thought went well in the meeting and what they respect in each other
‘The quality of your attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking'
Timed talk – the structure recognises that interruption does violence to the formation of ideas. Set a timer and take turns to talk. Stop when the timer stops.
When there is a lot of change in the environment for instance changes in the company or in a team:
The only tool for change is thinking and listening. Change means loss and loss requires grieving.
Add the following when there is change
Give relevant information about the upcoming changes as soon as you possibly can and as succinctly as you can
Give everyone a chance to say how they really feel about the change
Ask them what ideas they have for adapting. Find out what they are assuming that could stop them from making a good transition
Listen, listen and listen
Appreciate their good work
The 6 part thinking sessions
Encourage people to select a thinking partner and practice the following steps with each other. This will develop great ideas that encourage people to think for themselves about how to solve problems.
1) Listen – ask ‘What do you want to think about?’
2) Goal – what do you want the session to achieve at this point?
3) Assumptions – what are you assuming – What is your positive opposite of that assumption?
4) Incisive Question – if you knew that….. what ideas would you have towards that goal?
5) Write the question down – write down the question
6) Appreciate each other – what qualities do you respect in each other?
At the end of her book, Kline suggests how you can practice the above in your family, relationships, politics and in schools and education systems. It was a really useful and liberating book and I hope to remember and practice the tools in this book in my life.
