A blog by Helen Cramman. Originally posted: 19 December 2023
A new year’s resolution
In 2023 I have been reflecting on what I might like to do with my life. Am I happy with my work-life balance? What do I enjoy? When do I find ‘Flow’ where an afternoon passes in the blink of an eye? When do I feel I am doing something really meaningful? I have come to the conclusion that I find these moments when I am being creative. I don’t consider myself to be particularly artistic but I love problem solving, making connections and coming up with new ideas. That for me is what being creative is all about. In 2024, I therefore want to see if I can create more opportunities to be creative both at work and at home.
A shocking realisation
To feed my creative desire for problem solving, making connections and coming up with new ideas, I need time to really think about something. I get very agitated when I can’t find time to do this. However, whilst undertaking the Thinking Environment facilitation course, I had a fairly shocking realisation as to just how little opportunity I get to think properly in my working week these days and why I am probably so frustrated by my job at the moment. I also realised that this was the case for many of the colleagues I work with and the staff that I train. With this in mind, I set out to do things differently and to try the techniques I had been trained in on the course in how to create more effective Thinking Environments.
Radically different
For the last couple of months, I have been trying to incorporate opportunities for others to have space to think in the meetings and training sessions that I have been running. It has led to a few odd looks at the start of the sessions, but positive feedback after participants have experienced it.
The first slightly terrifying realisation I had was just how radically different my planning had to be when I set out to make a session have more space for participants to think and to be creative. I needed to introduce time for participants to do their thinking and also for me to explain to them how the session was going to be structured to enable them to do good thinking. This second part seems crazy to include, but is actually crucial because we are pretty terrible at enabling good thinking in the way we usually operate.
Principles of the Thinking Environment
There are three core principles to the Thinking Environment: attention, equality, ease.
- We are all expected to give the person speaking our full attention (no checking emails or getting distracted by our phones).
- We each get an equal amount of time to do our thinking out loud, and we know we will each get our turn.
- When we do our thinking, we know that no one will interrupt us, which creates a sense of ease and enables us to do our best thinking.
With these three simple principles, we create a place where some amazing thinking can be done. However, this needs time to be dedicated to following the process.
Creating time
Breaking it down, if I have five people in a meeting and I would like them all to share their thoughts for two minutes each, that is 10 minutes. Lets say that I would then like to give them each another chance to share their thoughts as their ideas may have developed having heard from the others. That is then 20 minutes on a single topic. With topping and tailing, that will be 25-30 minutes on that one topic.
A typical meeting is an hour long.
The radical realisation is that we can therefore only cover two agenda items if we want everyone to contribute their thinking on the topics.
I can’t remember the last time I attended a meeting that had only two agenda items on it, or that was designed to gather the thoughts from everyone present at the meeting.
It is worth it
Having experienced it in action though, it is worth it. In the meetings where I have used this approach, I have heard amazing thoughts and insights from colleagues who would usually sit silently as the loudest voices jump in quickly to share their thoughts. My concern that the usually quiet colleagues may feel uncomfortable in this type of arrangement proved to be unfounded. If anything, it was those that usually dominated the conversation that were more uncomfortable as the process required them to wait their turn.
Revised expectations
My first main takeaway from experimenting with the Thinking Environment approach over the last few months is that in order to achieve sufficient space to think, I had to change my expectation of what could be crammed into a single training session or a meeting. For the training sessions, information delivery needed to be reduced in order to give time for thinking on the topic in question. The removed content then either needed to disappear completely, or be delivered in a different way.
It’s all about the questions
The second lesson I learnt, is the importance of a question. For both the training sessions and the meetings, I needed to think on what were the key things I wanted participants to think about. The Thinking Environment says that the brain thinks best in the presence of a question. So, what were the precious questions that I wanted to include in the sessions? I am now putting significant time and effort into getting the questions right. What do I want people to dedicate their thinking to in the precious time they gift me?
What next?
So, to generate opportunities to be more creative in 2024, I will be giving myself the space to think about the questions to ask both myself and others. I will also be setting myself a series of creative challenges to try out new experiences at work and at home to help me get my creative thinking flowing.
Educational Ponderings 