What is a Thinking Environment?
The Thinking Environment is a system of ten behaviours. Together, they
unleash individual and collective intelligence. Good
relationships, independent thinking and far better decisions result.
The decisions are also more likely to be implemented.
Furthermore, a Thinking Environment saves time.
For more information on each behaviour, click it.
Attention
Listening without interruption and with interest in where the person will go next in their thinking
Equality
Regarding each other as thinking peers, giving equal time to think
Ease
Discarding internal urgency
Appreciation
Noticing what is good and saying it
Encouragement
Giving courage to go to the unexplored edge of thinking by ceasing competition as thinkers
Feelings
Welcoming the release of emotion
Information
Supplying succinctly, with permission and care, essential facts
Difference
Committing to freedom from untrue assumptions driving prejudice
incisive questions
Freeing the human mind of untrue assumptions lived as true
Place
Producing a physical environment – the room, the listener, your body – that says, ‘You matter’
The Thinking Environment was discovered by author and educator Nancy Kline, and is now being used all over the world. Scroll down for more information about Nancy Kline.
Some more benefits
- People lead more fulfilling lives and work out their own solutions to their issues.
- Groups unleash collective intelligence, save time and come to better decisions.
- Engagement skyrockets.
- Couples find their relationship more enriching.
- Conflicts are settled.
- Young people find their voice and stand tall.
- Families are better off.
Thinking meetings
Meetings can be creative places where people listen, take in each others' thinking, develop ideas and build decisions on the best thinking of all.
In a Thinking Environment, everyone gets the opportunity to think independently, to say what they really think, and to be heard and respected. In addition to all other benefits, this reduces the risk of dangerous and expensive decisions caused by people holding back what they actually think.
Values
from words on a paper to lived reality
Creating a Thinking Environment transforms an organisation’s stated values into tangible, lived, work-place reality.
"The Thinking Environment provides the structure that creates the culture."
Nancy Kline
Author and educator Nancy Kline has spent 40 years
seeking to answer a question:
How can we help people to think for themselves,
with rigour, imagination, courage and grace ?
The result of her quest is a Thinking Environment.
Her books have sold over
100,000 copies worldwide: the 26-year-old best seller
Time To Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind;
More Time To Think: The Power of Independent Thinking;
and, most recently,
The Promise That Changes Everything: I Won’t Interrupt You.
Nancy is a guest lecturer at Henley Business School,
and has contributed to leadership development at Saïd Business
School at the University of Oxford. She coaches business
leaders and teaches coaches how to generate a Thinking
Environment in their coaching. Her books have become key
elements in many coaching development programmes.
Monica Schüldt
For 30+ years, Monica Schüldt has helped leaders
and groups improve performance, her clients ranging from top management to working groups and sports teams. While the first 20 years were successful, making the Thinking Environment the foundation of all her work has had extraordinarily positive effects.
Her most recent book, 'How to Listen So People Can Think', is a celebration of and practical guide to the Thinking Environment, full of stories from all spheres of life and with hands-on information which enables the reader to start creating a Thinking Environment.
She is co-author of the Swedish bestselling book Collaborator or counterlaborator: the art of turning around a climate of discontent and a book on the geological history of Sweden. Her first book was on the interpersonal aspects of mergers.
A Cambridge University graduate, Monica Schüldt is a member of the Time To Think Global Faculty and has 15 years’ experience of living and teaching the Thinking Environment, including qualifying other practitioners.
'A Thinking Environment has improved my life and work so much that I want to share it with others.'
Monica Schüldt, M.A.