Learn How to Facilitate Groups Brilliantly: the Thinking Environment Foundation Programme

Do you run team meetings, facilitate learning events, chair boards or executive groups, or in any other context,  get people together to think about important things?  Do you ever find that people don't contribute as well as you would hope, or that some dominate and others don't contribute?

If you wish to take your skills in running groups to the next level, and develop a set of approaches that increases participation, honest discussion and real engagement, then you will find it valuable to engage with the Thiniking Environment.

This is based on Nancy Kline's work, published as Time to Think, More Time to Think, and The Promise that Changes Everything.

At the heart of Nancy's approach, which she calls a Thinking Environment, is the belief that attention is generative; that is, the quality of someone's thinking, in my presence, is at least in part a product of the quality of attention that I give to them. (if you doubt this, consider the reverse: when you are trying to think about something and the person who is meant to be listening is clearly not attending... see what I mean?)

But in addition to a quality of attention that is in fact rare in most work contexts, there are nine other components of Thinking Environment; and there are various applications of these components that are suited to both group and one-to-one contexts.

The Foundation Programme is an introduction to this work in the context of working with groups: a precise but easeful approach to enabling all present to think outstandingly well.  I have blogged previously about this many times, ranging from my initial exploration of the process with Nancy, through to its practical application in a coaching session. (Other posts may be found by clicking here).

So I am delighted once more to be offering the Foundation Programme in the Lake District, this June (19/20). This Programme teaches you the ten components of the Thinking Environment, and a number of practical applications and findings that will transform your meetings.

If you choose to join us, you will be working as part of a small group of practitioners, jointly exploring the practice through practice!  Here's what a previous participant ha dot say about one of my programmes:

I really enjoyed the practice based approach you used throughout. Your role in the group was perfectly pitched - it felt like we were a group of equal thinkers, but you had more insight into the approach, which you shared generously with us. I really appreciated you sharing your experiences of using the approach in different contexts and also current knowledge of changes and  discussions with Nancy. This felt as if we were up to date with the latest thinking. 

This course is a prerequisite for the Thinking Environment Facilitator Qualifying Course, should you wish to take your practice to the next level.

More details are on my website, here; and of course if you wish to talk about the programme, or have any questions, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Making the Unthinkable Thinkable

Here's something I am struggling with at the moment. 

I am, by and large, in favour of people thinking, and indeed thinking for themselves (as my frequent posts about Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment testify).  Likewise, I am in favour of free speech, and deeply suspicious of those who try to stop others from saying things they do not wish to have said.

And yet... I think there are boundaries. Indeed, I am sure there are. The obvious ones about inciting to violence or criminal activity are easy. But that's not where my dilemma lies. I am thinking more about the erosion of public morals; or to put it another way, the undermining of values that underpin a civilised society. 

Until fairly recently, for example, there was a broad consensus that suicide is not good. It is not good for the individual, nor for his or her immediate family and friends,  nor for the wider society. But one of the results of the debate about Assisted Dying (and other cultural discourses about hyper-autonomy) is that that consensus is being eroded. 

The press have very strict guidelines about the reporting of suicides, because it is well-established that it can be socially contagious.  And such guidelines I believe to be a societal good. But the political debate about assisted suicide has been carried on vociferously and often intemperately.  And my point is this: that by making the unthinkable thinkable (in this case, suicide) we risk increasing the number of people who move from thought to action.

This is also (one of the reasons) why pornography is so harmful; and why we have a particular abhorrence of (and legal sanctions against) child pornography. For whilst it may be true that not all those who indulge in child pornography go on to act out their fantasies, it is certainly the case that nobody abused a child without fantasising about doing so first (I refer readers again to Gwen Adshead's excellent book The Devil You Know, about which I have blogged before).

And we have a new factor to make this problem considerably more complex: social media. Another book I have already blogged about is Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. It is worth reading his account of teenagers presenting as having Tourette Syndrome with a very particular tic: the word 'beans' - and how that came about: social contagion from a popular TikTok star, Evie Meg Field. For more on Tourette social contagion, see this piece in The Atlantic, by Helen Lewis. 

It turns out that young people (whose brains, of course, are not fully developed) are very susceptible; and that social media algorithms effectively bombard their developing brains with reinforcing content of whatever catches their imagination.

It seems self-evident that many of the teenage girls who suddenly discover that they are transgender are in fact suffering the same kind of social contagion; and that girls who have other psychological, emotional and cognitive comorbidities are particularly vulnerable. When trans was 'unthinkable' (ie hardly any teenagers had heard of it) this population reached other self-diagnoses, such as anorexia (which also became 'thinkable' - and then socially contagious - at a particular point in time).

So on the one hand, I believe that ideas are amongst the most precious - and worthy-to-be-safeguarded - things that we have; not least in Higher Education, which is my particular field of interest.  But clearly, ideas are also potentially harmful, not just at an individual level but also at a societal level. When we make what was unthinkable thinkable, the consequences can be catastrophic.

How do we square that circle?  I don't know; and what is worse, we don't know, as a society. Censorship is profoundly distasteful to me, except in extremis; and I have particular mistrust of anyone who thinks that he or she is the right person to do the censoring.  Yet the impact of harmful ideas (and I haven't even started to discuss toxic ideologies such as Andrew Tate's, or racism, which again seemed unthinkable for the vast majority of us until very recently etc...) is profound and vastly amplified by modern technology and the booming echo chambers that it creates. 

Perhaps we need some previously unthought ideas to address this...

The Devil You Know

I am continuing to think about issues and themes raised by Gwen Adshead's excellent book, The Devil You Know, about which I have blogged previously. One of the fascinating tensions that comes through from her autobiographical reflections on her work with people who have done evil, concerns judgement and being non-judgemental (another topic I have blogged about before).

On the one hand, it is clear that listening in a non-judgemental way is extremely valuable and important in helping people to tell their stories.  And that, in turn, is very important in terms of their learning, growth and healing as human beings. 

And yet, it is also important that they reach a judgement on their evil actions (for in the context of the cases Adshead considers, that is what we are dealing with - murder, child sexual abuse etc). It seems clear that when they can name their offence rather than use a euphemism (such as 'my index') and acknowledge the evil of it, they are on the path to recovery. So the judgement is important, and a practitioner's non-judgemental listening should not collude with any denial of that. 

Carl Rogers is interesting here: as a therapist he was renowned for his non-judgemental listening and his unconditional positive regard. Yet in raising his children - and in his own private life - he held to high moral standards. Yet the non-judgemental approach, and his stance of unconditional positive regard eventually caused him profound problems, probably contributing to his breakdown later in his life; in particular when he found that for some of the therapists he was training, being 'authentic' included sleeping with clients; and they would say 'it may be wrong for you Carl, but it's not for me...' - and from his position of being non-judgemental and striving to maintain unconditional positive regard, he found he had nowhere to stand to correct them (he also confided to Bill Coulson that he was no longer competent to edit the journals he was editor of, as he was so attuned to the effort and positive intentions of those who wrote papers that he was not able to evaluate which ones were of real value, and still less able to tell some authors that theirs weren't). 

So my (somewhat tentative) conclusion is that being non-judgemental is a useful listening stance (in some situations) but we need not to allow it to become our moral stance. It is stark in Adshead's world of high security psychiatric hospitals, where the evils are so clear, but is equally important in the world of work and our domestic lives, when perhaps it is more tempting to collude in the name of kindness, or to keep the peace.

The vulnerability paradox

Vulnerability is the ability to be wounded; vulnera being the Latin for wounds. Yet so often when we are talking about emotional or psychological health, it is only in vulnerability that we are able to heal. 

This was made very clear in Gwen Adshead's excellent book The Devil You Know, which I read after listening to her completely compelling Reith Lectures.  

She writes movingly about the impact of people who have committed dreadful crimes talking with each other about their crimes, as catalytic in helping them to start to re-build their sense of themselves and their ability to function effectively in the world.

Yet all our instincts can militate against us risking vulnerability - why should we risk being (further) wounded? 

To a lesser extent, this reluctance manifests in many aspects of our social and work lives, and our completely natural reluctance to be vulnerable creates barriers between us and others, and indeed between us and ourself. 

This is where concepts like psychological safety, unconditional and uninterruptive attention, and unconditional positive regard come into play; helping to create the conditions in which people are able to explore - to take risks with - vulnerability and discover the relief and the healing that can ensue. 

As a coach, I find that there is another layer to the paradox, as well. One of the most effective ways for me as a coach to help people to risk being vulnerable is to be vulnerable myself. Yet the risk is, of course, that the focus of the conversation becomes me and my stuff, which is not helpful. This is particularly the case if the coach shares wounds, not scars, as I have blogged before. However, a degree of disclosure, followed by questions that encourage the individual to think about their stuff, not the coach's, can be an effective way to deal with that risk.

There is of course a further layer of complexity when one is facilitating a group or team; when coaching 1-1 I can be confident that I will not abuse someone's vulnerability; but when I am facilitating a group, I cannot have the same level of assurance. So I think I have an additional level of responsibility when as a facilitator I create an environment in which people are encouraged and supported to be vulnerable. 

Clear contracting is clearly a part of the solution; but with the best will in the world I cannot guarantee that everyone will honour confidentiality agreements after the event, for example. So I end up taking a calculated risk, with others' vulnerabilities, on the basis that, more often than not it is helpful and productive for the group to talk honestly about reality than to collude about unreality; and, of course, on the assumption that finally it is each individual's call how vulnerable he or she chooses to be.

And even if that does lead teams to having discussions that are not always comfortable - well, better the Devil you know...