#HappinessMatters: How's your thinking environment?

Lord previewed this methodology at the Happiness Matters conference underway in Cape Town this week.

Since training with Nancy Kline on her system of The Thinking Environment, Lord has focused her work on helping people connect and engage with each other through generative thinking.

Quality action requires quality thinking

The generative thinking model is based on an observation Kline made early on in her life: "The observation being that the quality of everything we do in our life depends for its quality on the quality of the thinking we do first," explained Lord.

While quality thinking is necessary to meet the challenges of today's world, Kline noted that there are various things that are inhibiting people from thinking independently, engaging, and contributing to the collective. Kline later found a conclusive answer to this problem.

"The answer to 'how do we make sure that everybody can think well for themselves and can engage with courage, with confidence and with passion and with joy', is we need to pay attention to how we're treating each other," explained Lord.

After discovering this key to quality thinking, Kline set out to find the ingredients in treating each other that encourages confident, independent, shared thinking.

Nancy Kline's 10 components for thinking environments are:

• Attention
  
• Equality
  
• Ease
  
• Appreciation
  
• Feelings
  
• Encouragement
  
• Information
  
• Diversity
  
• Incisive questions
  
• Place

"The combination of these ingredients, if you're noticing them, you're practicing them, you're asking yourself the question, 'what does it mean to create an environment of equality for someone', noticing when it's not present, doing what it takes to restore it - that is the work of creating a thinking environment," said Lord.

The world of exchange thinking

Focusing on the first ingredient - attention, Lord noted that the world most are born into, the world of exchange thinking, is not conducive to quality thinking. This is because we have been trained all our lives to listen to reply rather than listen to allow others to think. When speakers read us formulating a response, said Lord, it has an impact on where the speaker goes with their thinking. How we're treating others is being shaped by how we're listening.

"If we really want to create engagement with the people that we live with and we work with, I'm going to suggest that there's another way we can listen to each other and it requires a conscious shift on the part of the one who's listening to step out of the world of exchange thinking and to decide to create an experience for the person they're listening to which, for the person being listened to, will be like being invited into the world of their own fully independent thinking where they're not going to feel the oncoming limitation that your response creates for them," explained Lord.

Ignite thinking

"When people feel our response coming at them, they try and shape their thinking to meet the needs of our response. But if what they feel is that we're managing that response, and we're managing it by staying interested instead in where this person is going with their thinking, then something different happens. Our listening starts to ignite the thinking of the person we're listening to."

Lord suggests that if companies want to see results, they need to focus on building relationships through this generative attention in which quality listening produces quality thinking.

"When you've got people who are engaged and able to express themselves and be who they truly are, you're going to get an environment in which there's a lot more happiness," said Lord.

Essentially, generative attention can help managers and leaders listen people into solutions for themselves.

For more info on The Thinking Environment model, go to www.timetothink.com.

Since working with Nancy Kline, Trisha Lord has focused her work on developing and delivering Thinking Environment expertise, both locally in South Africa and abroad. In 2009, together with Candice Smith, Lord trained 10 people in Australia to be Thinking Environment consultants. This collaboration resulted in Smith and Lord launching a new business called BraveHeart: Cultivating Courage in June 2010. Together with Smith, Lord has trained 20 people to become either Thinking Environment coaches and/or facilitators, and in addition to supervising the growing South African collegiate, she spends much of her time delivering Thinking Environment programmes, facilitation and coaching in the corporate, public and not-for-profit sectors in South Africa.