‘Sorry for interrupting your interruption’, I heard a board member say recently. The speaker was lightheartedly saying that he had not yet finished his thought. We all have been interrupted and interrupt too. According to the Gottman Institute in Seattle, in 2017 the average listening time was not that long. Even for professional listeners it was only 20 seconds. Three years later it had fallen to 11 seconds.
Imagine what it would be like to be able to form and express your thoughts, knowing that you would not be interrupted! This is Part 2 of a 4 part series on the Thinking Environment. In this post I will outline three of the ten components that work together to enable all participants to access and share their high-quality thinking.
- Attention, that is listening without interruption. This means actively listening rather than thinking about what you will say next and waiting for a gap to jump in. As a thinker, knowing that you will not be interrupted is empowering. Instead of getting a point across in a short sound-bite you have time to develop the idea more fully.
- Equality, regarding each other as thinking peers. In a Thinking Environment everyone is valued equally as a thinker regardless of position. Equality keeps the talkative people from silencing the quiet ones. And it requires the quiet ones to contribute their own thinking.
- Ease, discarding internal urgency. Ease means being present for the thinker. A case study in London showed that a senior management team achieved significant time savings when they ran their team as a Thinking Environment. Ease creates. Urgency destroys.