Thinking Environment

We offer:

• Thinking Environment® Consultancy
• Thinking Partnerships
• Thinking Environment® Meeting Facilitation
• Thinking Environment® Coaching
• Thinking Environment® Foundation Courses

The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The quality of our thinking depends on the way we treat each other while we are thinking. Thinking is a multi-faceted process of intelligence and includes feelings, creativity, speculation and intuition as well as cognition, analysis and computation. Beacon employs the Thinking Environment® as a space in which people are able to think for themselves, a space which allows a person to engage in a trustful and respectful relationship.

Leaders, creating and shaping change at unprecedented rates, have to be able to think for themselves and to set up the conditions in every interaction and in every meeting that will allow people at all levels to think for themselves, too – with rigour, imagination, courage and grace. Creating a Thinking Environment® is fundamental to good leadership.

The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment®

1. Attention
   Listening with palpable respect and without interruption – The quality of your attention profoundly affects the quality of other people’s thinking. As the listener you must be more drivingly interested in what is real and true for people than you are frightened of being proved wrong. As the thinker, knowing you will not be interrupted frees you truly to think for yourself.
2. Equality
   Treating each other as thinking peers. Giving equal turns and attention. Keeping agreements and boundaries.
3. Ease
   Offering freedom from internal rush or urgency. Ease creates – urgency destroys.
4. Appreciation
   Offering genuine acknowledgement of a person’s qualities, practicing a 5:1 ratio of appreciation to criticism – the human mind thinks more rigorously and creatively in a context of specific, sincere, succinct praise.
5. Encouragement
   Giving courage to go to the cutting edge of ideas by moving beyond internal competition.
6. Feelings
   Allowing sufficient emotional release to restore thinking. Listening through the anger makes way for thorough thinking.
7. Information
   Supplying the facts. Dismantling denial. Withholding or denying information results in intellectual vandalism. Facing what you have been denying leads to better thinking.
8. Diversity
   Welcoming divergent thinking and diverse group identities. The mind works best in the presence of reality. Reality is diverse.
9. Incisive Questions
   Removing assumptions that limit our ability to think for ourselves clearly and creatively. The liberation of the human mind lies right inside an Incisive Question.
10. Place
    Creating a physical environment that says back to people, ‘you matter’. When the physical environment affirms their importance, people think more boldly. When our bodies are cared for and respected, our thinking improves.

We offer:

• Thinking Environment™ Consultancy
• Thinking Partnerships
• Thinking Environment™ Meeting Facilitation
• Thinking Environment™ Coaching
• Thinking Environment™ Foundation Courses