The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment

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, driven by the promise of no interruption and by respect and interest in where people will go with their thinking, is the key to a Thinking Environment. Attention is that powerful. It generates thinking. It is an act of creation.

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 and a turn to give attention. Knowing you will get your turn to speak makes your attention more genuine and relaxed. It also makes your speech more succinct.

Equality prevents the talkative people from silencing the quiet ones. It also requires the quiet ones to contribute their own thinking, resulting in high-quality ideas and decisions.

EASE

Discarding internal urgency

Ease creates; urgency destroys.

Ease, an internal state free from rush or urgency, creates the best conditions for thinking.

But Ease, particularly in organisations and through the ‘push’ aspect of social networking, is systematically bred out of our lives. If we want people to think well under impossible deadlines and inside the injunctions of ‘faster, better, cheaper, more,’ we must cultivate internal ease.

APPRECIATION

Noticing what is good and saying it

The human mind works best in the presence of appreciation.

In life, we learn that to be appreciative is to be naïve, whereas to be critical is to be realistic. Therefore, in discussions, we focus first, and sometimes only, on things that are not working. Because the brain requires appreciation to work well, our thinking is often specious.

The Thinking Environment recognises the right ratio of appreciation to challenge so that individuals and groups can think at their best.

ENCOURAGEMENT

Giving courage to go to the unexplored edge of thinking by ceasing competition as thinkers

To be ‘better than’ is not necessarily good’.

To compete does not ensure excellence. It merely ensures comparative success. Therefore, competition between thinkers can be dangerous. It can keep their attention on each other as rivals, not on the vast potential for each to think courageously for themselves.

A Thinking Environment prevents internal competition among colleagues and replaces it with a wholehearted, unthreatened search for good ideas.

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. Unfortunately, we have this backwards in our society. We believe that when feelings start, thinking stops. When we assume this, we interfere with the process that helps a person think again.

If, when people show signs of feelings, we relax and welcome them, good thinking will resume.

INFORMATION

Absorbing all the relevant  facts 

Complete and accurate information results in intellectual integrity.

We base our decisions on information of many sorts. When the information is incorrect or limited, the quality of our thinking suffers, and we can be trapped in denial. Accurate and complete information can dismantle denial and provide the truth for independent thinking.

DIFFERENCE

Committing to freedom from untrue assumptions driving prejudice 

Prejudice consists of untrue assumptions, particularly about identity groups and functions, therefore, as a thinking inhibitor. When we commit to freeing ourselves of these assumptions, we enhance the quality of everyone’s thinking.

A Thinking Environment helps realise this commitment.

INCISIVE QUESTIONS

Freeing the human mind of untrue assumptions lived as true

A wellspring of good ideas lies just beneath an untrue limiting assumption.
An Incisive Question will remove it, freeing the mind to think afresh.

The key block to high-quality independent thinking is an untrue limiting assumption lived as true. Therefore, to free the mind, we need to know how to construct an Incisive Question, a tool of unbelievable precision and power.

PLACE

Producing a physical environment – the room, the listener, your body – that says, ‘You matter.’

We think more clearly and boldly when the physical environment affirms our importance. When our bodies are cared for and respected, our thinking improves.

Thinking Environments are places that say back to people, ‘You matter.’ People think at their best when they notice that the place reflects their value to the people there and the event.

And because the first place of thinking is the body, it needs to be in a condition that says to us as thinkers, ‘You matter’.

In these ways, Place is a silent form of appreciation.