Are you looking for the special support and companionship that a team coach can offer as you work to develop your team or a facilitator can offer as you design and deliver a business-critical meeting?
I am a Time to Think Coach and Facilitator and use these skills when working with teams to encourage courageous and creative thinking whilst developing great team behaviours and ways of working – all by introducing the team to the Thinking Environment.
If you are interested in discussing any of the Team activities, please get in touch. I would be happy to come to your office to discuss your needs and then develop a proposal for you on the basis of our conversation.
About The Thinking Environment
Nancy Kline, author of Time to Think, has devoted her career to exploring what enhances the quality and power of human thinking. She identified the Thinking Environment – a deceptively simple yet deeply impactful team culture that ignites high quality thinking and increases meeting productivity.
The Thinking Environment consists of 10 core Components. Each Component is powerful individually, but the presence of all 10 working together results in a highly transformative experience for thinker and listener alike.
When the Components are practiced within the framework of the 4 core Applications the result is deceptively simple yet constructively disruptive team process.
The Components and Applications are combined to meet the needs of the team and the meeting agenda, making the Thinking Environment an ideal, flexible method for enhancing the power of individual thinking, intensifying team creativity and increasing productivity.
Team Diagnostics
Does your team have the potential to be a high performing team, but is struggling to attain that standard? Are you aware of dysfunction in your team, but can’t quite get to the source of it and/or are not sure how to address the emerging issues? Are you already aware of models that support high performing team-work, but struggle to implement them in your Board Room?
If this is the case, then participating in a Team Diagnostic may help you and your team members get to the source of your challenge and identify what is needed to move you towards your high-performing ideal.
My method is one of exploration, not one of imposing yet another team-working model onto you. Instead, I use the Thinking Environment approach as I work with you and your team members, together and individually, to explore what is working well, what opportunities and challenges are present, what assumptions are shaping team and individual behaviours and what might be holding you back from your ideal performance. My aim is to identify the great, to verbalise the unspoken known and bring the unknown into the open.
The output is a detailed diagnostic report; and using the Thinking Environment approach, I will support you as you identify the critical next steps in your development. With this information, I will produce a summary report which you can use with your team to address your critical next steps.
Team Coaching
Do you have a vision for your team and are looking for someone to support you as you work towards this vision? Is your team facing challenges that need to be addressed? Is progress hindered by core assumptions that need to be identified and replaced?
As an Executive and Thinking Environment Coach, I support teams as they come together to identify, develop and adopt the behaviours and practices that are essential to great performance – behaviours and practices that are aligned with the Components of the Thinking Environment. I act as a mirror to your team process and offer you feedback, support and challenge as you explore your current reality, identify where you want to get to and create the means by which you will journey there.
If you would like to discuss how I could support you as you develop your team, please contact me.
Team Facilitation
There are times when an impartial external facilitator can help shift a team as they work together on a challenge or a change programme. As your team facilitator, I work with you to create a team environment, based on the Thinking Environment, that is highly supportive of your team members and fully focused on your goals and objectives.
The Thinking Environment provides a space in which all team members can experience the deep attention of their peers, igniting their thinking in a way that they may not have experienced before; they will each experience being fully heard as they share their thoughts without interruption. It also supports the development of each member as an independent thinker – thinking for themselves, as themselves, rather than complying or conforming to what they think others want to hear.
And the output? A deep engagement with the questions outlined in the agenda, an increase in the quality of consequent decisions, and the generation of new ideas and potential solutions. You will also experience a surprising increase in meeting productivity.
