Does everyone’s independent, fresh thinking matter more now than ever?

More Time To Think is a resounding “yes” to this question. In this graceful, sage like book, Nancy Kline will take you into the heart of the Thinking Environment as it has unfolded over the last decade since the publication of Time To Think. It will touch you with stories, challenge you with theory, inspire you with results, stretch you with questions, excite you with practice. And it will move you with its eloquence and warmth.

This book is both a good place to start and a superb place to continue your understanding of this important theory and process. If you long for leadership you trust, meetings you love, relationships you cherish, community you know can work for everyone, or the life you really want, More Time To Think can lead you there.

This Thinking Environment has emerged from one important observation and one importunate question. The observation is simple. It is even a Introduction bit dry. But it is chilling in its implications. It can slip right by us if we are not looking. And the price we pay for not seeing it is high.

The observation is:

The quality of everything human beings do, everything – everything – depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.

If this observation is true, and I think it is almost certain (although I am wary of certainty – I think it is a drug, and an impossibility), it changes our understanding of leadership. It places right at the top of required expertise in leaders and professionals and parents and teachers the ability to generate people’s finest independent thinking.

Suddenly then, in the horizon emerges this question:

How do we help people to think for themselves, with rigour, imagination, courage and grace?
How do we do that?

That question has fascinated me for most of my life. In 1973 Peter Kline and I founded Thornton Friends School and began to look for answers to that question. Over the years we and our colleagues confirmed that the most important factor in whether or not people can think for themselves is how they are being treated by the people with them while they are thinking.

The way people behave with each other actually determines the quality of their thinking. Behaviour in the listener is more important than IQ, education, experience or background in the thinker. Over time we noticed that there were ten behaviours that enhance people’s thinking most. (I am sorry there are ten; it seems too pat, and disturbingly biblical. Maybe you will discover an eleventh. If you do, we will un-neaten the list in a flash.)

We began to see that the Ten Components of a Thinking Environment are around us all of the time, darting in and out of view, igniting people’s thinking, but intermittently crashing into other behaviours that inhibit people’s thinking. We had to extricate the thinking-enhancing behaviours from the thinking-inhibiting ones. As we did, we could see that their power was undeniable. No archaeologists were ever more exhilarated than we were, after years of digging, to gaze upon that simple fact.

If we behave in ten particular ways, people around us will think for themselves, often brilliantly.