Back-to-Back meetings? Team’s calls? Reoccurring events? Emails squeezed in and an action list growing longer by the day.
I don’t mean thinking when replying to the email or thinking when you’re in the meeting, I mean actually dedicate time to thinking.
Thinking about the direction of your department?
Thinking further than 12-18 months out?
Thinking about your teams Strengths and development areas?
God Dammit whilst we’re here thinking about yourself, your aspirations, your strengths and development areas.
I coach in a lot of organisations and see leaders becoming nomads, travelling from one meeting to the next. Every meeting generating actions, every action generating another meeting. Before long there’s barely enough time to complete the actions never mind consider whether they’re the right ones in the first place .
Somewhere along the line Leadership has gotten confused between being busy and actually adding value.
We’ve optimised organisations for activity and speed, but Leadership isn’t about doing more. It’s about creating the conditions for better thinking, better decisions and aligned actions. They are 2 very different things.
One of the ideas that stayed with me since I qualified to be a coach comes from Nancy Kline author of Time to think.
She says:
The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The quality of our thinking depends on the quality of attention.
It’s a ridiculously simple idea but it turns out it’s profound and very rare.
If Leaders never have time to think, what happens to the quality of their decisions?.
If managers move from one conversation to the next without reflection, what happens to the quality of their coaching?
If organisations reward immediate answers and action over thoughtful consideration, what happens to innovation?
This isn’t a time management issue.
This is a leadership issue.
In many of my leadership workshops, I introduce a Thinking environment exercise inspired by Nancy Kline.
The task is simple.
In pairs, one person thinks & talks for 5 minutes and the other person gives them their full and total attention.
No interrupting
No advice
No sharing a similar story
Just undivided attention
It’s remarkable to watch and it’s even more transformative to those who take part.
At first, it’s really uncomfortable, people laugh, they fill silence with hand and nodding gestures, some even sit on their hands and zip their mouth up to stop themselves from instinctively want to jump in.
Why is it so painful?
Because we’ve become so used to interruption that uninterrupted thinking now feels unfamiliar. And then something changes…
People slow down.
Their thinking deepens. They move beyond rehearsed answers and start discovering thoughts they didn’t even know they had.
Which makes me wonder…
AI is brilliant for helping us generate ideas, produce first drafts and undoubtedly saves time, but there’s a risk. If we’re not careful, we’ll mistake faster answers for better thinking, or worse still not do any of the thinking at all. And you know what they say, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.
So, here’s the final kicker question:
Thinking shouldn’t be a luxury; it’s the whole job.
The irony is, more and more organisations are looking for innovation from their leaders and at the same time the issues leaders face are becoming more complex and nuanced, so time to to think has never been more important.
Time to think, really think, won’t happen in between meetings and space won’t just magically appear in your diary.
You must stop treating thinking as a luxury and guard it from the calendar vampires.
As Nancy Kline says…
The more we value thinking, the more we will protect the conditions that allow it to flourish.