This book was sort of an organisational pastoral care book. It is all about creating an environment in meetings or other conversations to help people think clearly. The grand idea is that if you give people enough time and set up the right conditions, breakthroughs in work will happen, and problems can be solved and overcome. The idea is like in pastoral care, where the person themselves holds the answer and you as a facilitator can help bring this out of them. Kline has sort of come up with this productive/pastoral life hack that can help people think clearer and arrive at empowering solutions. In one sense, the system is pretty lightweight, but it can be drastically hard to implement depending on your work culture.
The book takes you through the set-up needed to first create a Thinking Environment. There is a chapter for each of the ten requirements. Then the book focuses on group meetings and how to run them in such a way that everyone gets a say, and everyone can think together in how they are going to move forward. Again, in each step there is a chapter. Then, it focuses on one-to-one meetings where you can help someone else think through a problem. This is by listening to them deeply, understanding the issue and the Limiting Assumptions and asking the Incisive Question to get them thinking past their blocker. Below are the structures for each of these main areas.
Thinking Environments
The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment:
- Attention Listening with respect, interest and fascination.
- Incisive Questions Removing assumptions that limit ideas.
- Equality Treating each other as thinking peers.
- Giving equal turns and attention.
- Keeping agreements and boundaries.
- Appreciation Practising a five-to-one ratio of appreciation to criticism.
- Ease Offering freedom from rush or urgency.
- Encouragement Moving beyond competition.
- Feelings Allowing sufficient emotional release to restore thinking.
- Information Providing a full and accurate picture of reality.
- Place Creating a physical environment that says back to people, ‘You matter.’
- Diversity Adding quality because of the differences between us.
Some of these seem simple, but in practice they can be very hard. Are you able to "Keep your eyes on the eyes of the person thinking, no matter what. Don’t look away even for a second," even if there is a fire in the room, you are to pay the speaker your undivided attention. How are you if someone cries in your presence? "Our society is terrified of tears, and of anger and fear. We have mixed up the release of pain with the cause of pain." If we help release emotions instead of shutting them down, people may be able to think clearly after that, but are we willing to allow it in the workplace? In all of these elements, you can see how in certain workplace cultures, where there is little time, high demand, and a strong hierarchy of power, they can create settings where thinking creatively or more productivity are hindered.
Thinking meetings
Meetings in this book are over-glamorised as the beating heart of everything. There are people in meetings deciding what car we will drive, how they will sell us things and how they will govern us. Meetings are places where decisions are made, and we all feel the effect of them. In workplaces, meetings are where agendas and directions for organisations are set. The template put forward in this book is:
At the beginning:
- Give everyone a turn to speak.
- Ask everyone to say what is going well in their work, or in the group’s work.
Throughout:
- Give attention without interruption during open and even fiery discussion.
- Ask Incisive Questions to reveal and remove assumptions that are limiting ideas.
- Divide into Thinking Partnerships 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.
- Permit also the sharing of truth and information.
- Permit the expression of feelings.
At the end:
- Ask everyone what they thought went well in the meeting and what they respect in each other.
The objection dealt with in this book is that this sounds like it will take too much time and work won't get done. Kline says that allowing the time for this type of meeting will mean you won't need another and the group will come up with more high-value ideas.
My thoughts are that, in a meeting, it is really important who is in the room for the discussion. I have been in many meetings where there are too many people who don't need to be there (myself included). Some people love meetings and seeing how the sausage is made, but does everyone from all levels of the organisation need to be in certain meetings? I was an IT guy in a recurring meeting about tertiary legal education, because they may have an IT question about the platform they were using. Would I really be given the floor to speak on the issues and help brainstorm with other legal academics for creative solutions? Are we all really peers and does everyone in the organisation have equal say in how everything is to be run, even when it is beyond the scope of their own role?
One-on-one thinking sessions
This section in particular, I appreciated the most, as it really did remind me of some of the pastoral care training I had done. There was a section on how to deal with fiery discussions by agreeing to use a timer, but I am going to skip to the framework for a Thinking Session; there was again a chapter on each of these parts.
These are the effective questions:
Part 1
- What do you want to think about?
- Is there anything more (you think or feel or want to say about this)?
Part 2
- What do you want the session to achieve at this point?
Part 3
- What are you assuming (that is stopping your achieving that goal)? (To find the bedrock assumption:) That’s possible, but what are you assuming that makes that stop you?
- What is your positive opposite of that assumption?
Part 4
- If you knew that (new, freeing assumption)... what ideas would you have towards that goal?
Part 5
- Write down the Incisive Question.
Part 6
- What quality do you respect in each other?
On the facilitators' side, deep active listening is involved. You have to really hear what the person wants to talk about, asking this over and over a few times, and to see what bedrock assumptions they are making about the issues. Does it have to do with their life or their self? How can you then help shift their thinking to get past any blocking or Limiting Assumptions they have as to why they can't solve their problem? This involves the Incisive Question. Once you work out what that question is, you then ask it over and over again to draw out more ideas from the person in what they can do in this new imagined future.
This concept of the Incisive Question is pretty much the gold of the book, and to do this, it feels like a simple trick. Here is how it is put:
To construct an Incisive Question:
- Hypothesize (‘If you knew ….’).
- Follow with a freeing true assumption (‘… that you are blindingly stunning …’).
- Attach that new assumption to the goal (‘… how would you feel around Sam?’).
If you knew + freeing assumption + goal = Incisive Question.
The framework works in cases like someone who doesn't feel like they are respected in the workplace and they are trying to work out if they can speak up about their findings, but people are going to ignore her anyway. The Incisive Question, given in the present tense, might look like: "If you knew you were respected by your boss, then how would you present your ideas?" It allows the person to imagine a future and how they would get it.
I used it on myself when I don't think I am doing a good job at parenting: "If you were a good Father, what would you do when you come home from work?" That then helps me to think of what that might look like.
Now I don't know how much of a life hack this is; I have only sort of used it, and not in a massively formal way. But I do like the re-framing approach to help people think through some limiting ideas they might have of themselves and to imagine a way forward. It seems like a good tool to have in your pastoral care toolbox.
Overall, I appreciated the clarity of this book with examples of how this might work. There were perhaps a bit too many stories padding out the main content, but most helped see how this practice can be demonstrated. I am, however, still a bit cynical about group meetings.
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