Nancy Kline - The Promise That Changes Everything

Nancy Kline is a bestselling author and Founding Director of Time To Think, a global leadership development and coaching company she established in 1997. Her ongoing research through work with colleagues, professionals, executives and teams around the world continues to build the body of thought known as The Thinking Environment. Nancy is also Visiting Faculty at Henley Centre for Coaching, Henley Business School, UK.

Born and raised in New Mexico, Nancy is now also a UK citizen and lives in Oxfordshire with her English husband, Christopher Spence.

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First published by Penguin Life in 2020

Copyright Nancy Kline, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-98816-9

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For Christopher

who is in every word

Sometimes youre just standing there. You have a thought. And your life changes forever. Maybe you have had one of those moments. It happened to me when I was thirty-seven.

I was co-founder of a Quaker school in Maryland. All of the faculty and students had gone for the day, and I was gazing out my office window, looking across the playing fields to the woods. I was thinking about what more I could do with the rest of my life to make a difference in the world.

Out of nowhere came this question:

What is the one thing which, if it were to change, could change everything else for the better?

And an answer:

The quality of peoples independent thinking.

That may not sound exciting to you. But I was ecstatic.

It made sense. What we do follows what we think. So if our thinking is good, our decisions and actions will be, too. If our thinking is rubbish, well, welcome to the world.

So all we had to do, I reasoned, was improve our thinking, our independent thinking, and voil, we could change everything.

The tricky part would be how to do it. I had a few ideas. Not many. But that was good enough for me. Start with something, they say. Just start.

This book, another thirty-seven years later, is the fourth big pause to capture findings from observations my colleagues and I have made in that search for how:

How do we improve the quality of our independent thinking?

We have some answers now. They are tentative, as all good answers should be. But they are thrilling. And simple. And so far astonishingly dependable.

Those answers are developments of ten ways of being with each other. I call them the ten components of a thinking environment. We will explore them in depth in a little while because when we live them, as a system of being, we and the world around us do begin to change.

This thinking environment starts and ends with the promise not to interrupt each other. It really does. I know that sounds too simple a thing to change a life, much less a world. But that simple promise is loaded. Like an atom. Take it apart and you see an unimaginable force, a force that generates the brilliance of life, in this case the brilliance of independent thinking.

Here we will explore how this promise does that, and why, and how it can become the centrepiece of our lives.

It seems that about every ten years my colleagues and I look up and realize that over that period we have learned so much more, so many new insights have surfaced, so many peoples lives and organizations and relationships have grown in beautiful new directions because of these findings, and so much new research has substantiated and explained our own that a new book almost writes itself. This is the latest.

This book is both the science of the promise not to interrupt, and the music of it. It is both journey and scrutiny, reason and irrepressible stirrings.

It reflects the experience we all have every day. We interrupt. And we are interrupted. We may be inured to its ravaging because it is just the way life has become. But each time it happens, we wince. Often we rage. It registers.

The book builds on that common experience, sharing these past ten years of work with people, with their teams and their leaders, with families and schools, with law firms, scientists, engineers, the military, the police, academics, business schools, doctors and medical teams, politicians, therapists, business coaches and mediators. The results resound. Yours can, too. Living the promise is the proof of its efficacy.

To glimpse this living of the promise of no interruption, I think we have to understand the nature of three things: independent thinking, interruption and the promise itself. I have divided the book into those three points of focus. Each is both philosophical and practical. And each draws on those conditions for independent thinking, the ten components of a thinking environment. These ten ways of being with each other profoundly affect the quality of our thinking. In brief, they are: attention, equality, ease, appreciation, feelings, encouragement, information, difference, incisive questions and place. We will explore them in depth in a little while.

The book does propose ways to live these components, to become a thinking environment by making and keeping this promise not to interrupt. It offers glimpses into a life as rich as this. More than anything else, this book is a saunter, a stretch, a suggestion. We humans, I find, learn the profound things best from experience, not from instruction. We learn from living the complexity of the context, not from lurching through a list.

And so this book is a conversation with you. I hope it will allow you to imagine what can change for you and your world because you and others around you make this promise and begin to think for yourselves with new quality and grace. I hope you will see as well that this most powerful promise of no interruption can affect even our current most vicious societal scourge polarization. And I hope that exploration will lift your heart.

I invite you to join me, as if we were actually together, thinking for ourselves and delighting mutually in our freed minds.

If this is your first acquaintance with the thinking environment, welcome.

If this is one of many years of your engagement with it, I am honoured.