Collaborative Thinking Experiences

Why It Works

Structure and Flexibility

Collaborative Thinking Experiences adapts Time to Think knowledge into different contexts, always tailored to the particular organisation or group’s needs.

Time to Think provides the scaffold and framework, within which space for thinking and creativity emerges.

As accredited “Time to Think Facilitators”, the Co-Founders of Collaborative Thinking Experiences have seen the power of the Components and Applications first hand.

The Quest to Enable People to Do Their Best, Independent Thinking

Collaborative Thinking Experiences are an expression of the work of Nancy Kline.

Driven by a quest to understand why the world was as she found it, Nancy noticed that the quality of all action depends on the quality of the thinking that precedes it.

The question then became, what influences the quality of thinking. The answer she discovered was: how people are treated by those they are with, at the time when they are asked to think.

So then her quest became: what behaviours enable people to do their best, independent thinking – with rigour, imagination and grace? Nancy identified ten behaviours (“Components”) and articulated several ways of utilising these behaviours (“Applications”). She published her work and established “Time To Think Ltd” to make it accessible to a global audience.

The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment® *

  1. Attention – Listening without interruption and with interest in where the person will go next in their thinking
  2. Equality – Regarding each other as thinking peers, giving equal time to think
  3. Ease – Discarding internal urgency
  4. Appreciation – Noticing what is good and saying it
  5. Encouragement – Giving courage to go to the unexplored edge of thinking by ceasing competition as thinkers
  6. Feelings – Welcoming the release of emotion
  7. Information – Supplying essential facts.
  8. Difference – Committing to freedom from untrue assumptions driving prejudice
  9. Incisive Question – Freeing the human mind of untrue assumptions lived as true
  10. Place – Producing a physical environment – the room, the listener, your body – that says, ‘You matter’

* ® by Nancy Kline. More detail on the Ten Components can be found at the Time to Think website.

This TED talk by Time to Think Faculty Member, Monica (Swedish: My) Schüldt, introduces Time to Think and its impact on the quality of thinking.