Posted on July 25, 2017March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

William Gordon and George Prince: Synectics

Creativity is all about having brilliant new ideas.

Go on… Have one now.

Creative ideas don’t just come to us when we want them. The whole process is mysterious, and cannot be called up on demand. Or can it?

Yes, it can. Or so said William Gordon and George Prince. If you know how to, you can find creative solutions when you need them. And their research into the creative process led them to a methodology still used today: Synectics.

William Gordon

William (Bill) Gordon was born in 1919.He attended the University of Pennsylvania, but it is not clear whether he graduated. Between 1950 and 1960, Gordon led the Invention Design Group at consulting firm Arthur D Little & Co. He was, himself, a prolific inventor, with numerous patents to his name.

Synectics had its origins just after the Second World War. Gordon started studying how individuals and groups act creatively. This became more intensive and systematic, leading to him forming the Invention Design Group within Arthur D Little. There, he helped set up synectics groups within several client companies.

It was while leading this team, that Gordon met future Synectics co-founder, George Prince. With two further colleagues, they left Arthur D Little in 1960 to found Synectics Inc. There they pursued further research, developing and selling their model for how to run a creative process.

Also in that year, Gordon wrote ‘Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity‘.

However, Gordon did not remain at Synectics Inc for long. He left to found Synectics Education Systems, to promote problem‑solving and education based on the use of metaphor.

Gordon died in 2003.

George Prince

George Prince was born in 1918 and grew up in New York State. He attended college at Phillips Exeter Academy and Williams College, graduating in Geology. The second World War saw him serving as a junior officer in the US Navy, in the North Atlantic.

Upon his return, Prince joined an advertising company in Rochester, where he rose to VP. He then learned of the work of Arthur D Little’s Invention Design Group, led by William Gordon. He joined the Arthur D Little company in the 1950s to be a part of that group.

In 1960, he, Gordon and two other colleagues left Arthur D Little to found Synectics Inc (now Synecticsworld). This company researched, developed and promoted their creative problem-solving methodology, Synectics.

Prince remained with the company for most of his, life, as Chairman. In 1970, he wrote ‘The Practice of Creativity‘, which remains in print. He died in 2009.

Synectics

Synectics is a rich methodology for solving problems creatively. However, the principles are easy to grasp:

look for alien concepts and things that seem irrelevant, and join them together.
Embrace emotions over intellect, and the irrational over the rational.

In applying these principles, Gordon and Prince assumed that the creative process can be described and then taught to others. They also believed that their process, Synectics, will apply widely to different domains of endeavour and can be used by groups and individuals.

They start with a cycling between the ‘operational world’ of routines and procedures, and the ‘innovation world’ of speculation and experimentation. New solutions become more available as we move out of the reality of the operational world, and increasingly embrace fantasy, metaphor, and absurdity.

The process they articulate is at its simplest:

Articulate the task.
Explore options, generating radical ideas that they called ‘Springboards’.
Select the best idea. Synectics presumes a preference for newness over feasibility at this stage.
Develop that idea, and how it might work in practice.
Put forward your possible solution.

There is a fuller description of the Synectics Problem Solving Process in an earlier article.

Two ideas stick with me from my learning about Synectics many years ago

The first one is the use of ‘How to…’

I love the way Synectics reframes every problem as ‘how to…’ I like it because it presupposes a solution exists and therefor the problem becomes finding it.

And once a selected idea emerges, the emphasis becomes intensely practical. We work on ‘how to make it work’. We constantly articulate the challenges and problems of implementation as ‘how to…’ Each time we solve this, we can modify the trial solution until, with no further issues, we have a possible solution, worthy of putting to the test in the real world.

The second is ‘In and Out Thinking’

Often, when we are in a meeting particularly a long one that is trying to solve a problem, our minds wander. We have ideas and thoughts that come from ‘inside’, as well as from the meeting: ‘outside’.

We can make best use of these by dividing our notebook page in two – I like to draw a vertical line. On one side, make notes about what you hear or see in the meeting – the Outside thinking. On the other, note down ideas that come from your own thoughts – the Inside thinking. Often these will be connections or distinctions, but sometimes they are seemingly random thoughts. Seemingly, because they are almost certainly triggered by something, but to you, they seem irrelevant, because you are not aware of the link.

Often, these are your Eureka moments.

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Posted on April 11, 2017March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner: Freakonomics

Surfing Malcolm Gladwell’s wake on the wave of popular social science books came a pair of writers who set the stage for many journalist/social scientist combinations. Steven Levitt was a rising star in the world of economics when he was interviewed by successful journalist Stephen Dubner.

When the publishing world offered sufficient incentives (in the form of an author’s advance), they began their collaboration that has resulted in four books and over 5 million sales. More important, it opened our minds to the world of perverse incentives that the two dubbed ‘Freakonomics’.

Steven D Levitt

Steven Levitt is a successful academic. Born in New Orleans, in 1967, he studied economics at Harvard, graduating in 1989. He then spent a couple of years in management consulting, specialising in decision-making, before enrolling in a PhD programme at MIT.

His time at MIT was far from conventional. Whilst his peers did the standard thing of analysing case studies and studying theory, Levitt discerned a simple truth about academic life: success depends on published papers. So before even starting his formal thesis work, he was gathering and analysing his own data, conducting his own research, and writing his first papers.

His varied and curious approach to economics, and his succession of published papers, paid off. he was awarded his PhD in 1994 and, following a period as a research fellow at Harvard, was offered a post in arguably the most prestigious economics department in the US, at the University of Chicago. In just two years, he was made a professor.

He is now William Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and was, in 2003, the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal. This is awarded every two years by the American Economic Association to the most promising US economist under the age of 40.

In the same year, a New York Times journalist interviewed Levitt for an extended article. That journalist was Stephen J Dubner.

Stephen J Dubner

Stephen Dubner was born in 1963 (AVGY), in New York, and started writing young. His first published work was in a children’s magazine . He studied at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. He graduated in 1984 and focused on a music career until he switched to writing in 1988 and enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts in Writing programme at Columbia University. After graduating in 1990, he taught in the English Department and started work as a journalist, becoming a story editor at The New York Times Magazine.

Dubner’s journalistic writing is highly regarded, and he has also written for Time, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. In 2003, he interviewed a rising star among academic economists, called Steven Levitt.

The Spirit of Freakonomics

The thing about Freakonomics is that the book series, New York Times columns, and blogs range over a wide arena of social science and economics. What connects it all is the idea that, whilst everyone knows that people respond to incentives, research shows that some of our responses are surprising. So surprising, shocking, delightful, and curious, that the stories of what happens are compelling, and the unravelling of why it happens often reads like the most gripping of detective fiction.

The other vital aspect of the spirit of freakonomics is the combination of an academic economist’s eye for data and the story-telling capability of a seasoned journalist. These are held together by the glue of a shared sense of curiosity and delight in the phenomena that Levitt and Dubner explore.

The books make for a great read. They are thought-provoking and enhanced by Levitt’s analysis of large amounts of data. Indeed, the use of data is another theme. However, this is not to say that Levitt and Dubner’s conclusions have gone unchallenged. With astonishing claims, like ‘abortion cuts crime’, come a welter of critique.

In some cases the critiques have hit home, in other cases, Levitt and Dubner have successfully countered them. What all of their writing is, is entertaining and thought-provoking. It is no wonder that their books have sold so well. And, on the margins, they also highlight some important truths that managers would do well to note:

People respond to incentives.
People’s response to incentives is not always what you would expect and is sometimes hard to understand.
Big data sets can hold within them valuable and surprising conclusions. We can uncover useful insights and, equally, demolish cherished assumptions.
Working with big data sets in the messy and complex world of human interactions is tricky. Separating coincidence from causation among correlated data is hard. And extracting data where many confounding variables are present will open you up to biting challenge.
Socio-economic evidence should inform policy, but not dictate it.

The Freakonomics Library

Steven Levitt at TED

Steven Levitt has spoken twice at TED events, in 2004 and 2005.

[ted id=29]

[ted id=30]

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Posted on May 17, 2016October 14, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Ikujiro Nonaka: Knowledge Management

Ikujiro Nonaka has been described by a long-term colleague and collaborator as the ‘Father of Knowledge Management’. He takes a radical view – in the true sense of radical: he goes to the route of how we acquire, create and share knowledge.

Very Short Biography

Ikujiro Nonaka was born in 1935 and grew up in Tokyo. He studied political science at Waseda University, gaining his BS in 1958. He started work that year at Fuji Electric, where his principal accomplishment was to create their management programme. He went on to further develop this, in alliance with Keio University.

Nonaka left Fuji in 1967, to study in the United States, at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded his MBA in 1968, and his PhD in Business Administration, in 1972. He took posts at US universities (Claremont Graduate University and then the Haas Business School at UC Berkeley), before returning to Japan, as a professor at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University.

There he collaborated with another staff member, whom he had known as a grad student at Berkeley, Hirotaka Takeuchi. It was the latter who describes Nonaka as the ‘Father of Knowledge Management’.

The Knowledge Creating Company

Together, Nonaka and Takeuchi have written numerous articles, and the highly influential 1995 book, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Two of their Harvard Business Review articles have been particularly influential:

A more recent article is also well-worth reading:

The Big Idea: The Wise Leader (2011)

At the heart of Nonaka’s thinking is the rejection of the common view of Knowledge Management as fundamentally an IT function. The data management part of knowledge management is a minor – indeed, incidental – component. The fundamental part is the creation and sharing of knowledge, which takes place via the relationships between people.

He therefore asserts that spending tens, or hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology systems misses this essential truth and argues that true knowledge creating companies are ones with a generous community feel.

Ba

‘Ba’ is a word Nonaka coined to mean a meeting place for minds. Whilst it can be a physical space within the organisation, Nonaka sees it more as a mental state, where people are able to share and create knowledge together. He likens the concept to that of ‘flow‘ – in the sense that both are states of total focus and immersion. However, unlike flow, Ba is a shared mental state.

The SECI Model

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s most notable contribution is their SECI Model of how knowledge transforms in organisations. Regular readers of Pocketblog will know just how much we love models, so here goes.

The SECI Model is a representation of the dynamic way that knowledge flows from explicit to implicit and back. It sets out to unite the Western preference for Explicit knowledge (‘Know why’ or, to use the ancient Greek term, ‘episteme’) and the Japanese focus on tacit knowledge (‘know how’, or ‘techne’).

Nonaka and Takeuchi start their cycle with social knowledge sharing to build tacit knowledge and move around to internalization of explicit knowledge to make it implicit, or tacit. They then see that knowledge being shared, restarting the cycle (they originally drew it as a continuous spiral, but I prefer the loop metaphor). At each stage, knowledge is converted, and made more useful.

Phronesis

In his latest work, Nonaka draws the ancient Greek analogies of episteme and techne, and highlights a third sort of wisdom that the ancients cherished: ‘phronesis’, or ‘practical wisdom’. He describes phronesis as the wisdom to know what must be done – judgement, if you like. He sees this as the antidote to an overly rigid focus on theoretical know-why knowledge, or practical, know-how. In Aristotelian ethics, phronesis is usually seen as rational thinking and prudent judgement.

Nonaka thus connects up knowledge management with leadership. Phroneis gives us a clearer understanding of how our organisation relates to the rest of the world: purpose, choices, actions. This can give the organisation a resilience that a less self-aware organisation will lack. Nonaka argues that phronetic leaders can foster improved judgement and decision-making by creating a culture of sharing, nurturing, and creating knowledge through informal social connections: ‘Ba’.

Nonaka in his Own Words

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Posted on April 12, 2016March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

Donald Schön: Reflection in Action

Donald Schön (Schon for the rest of this article) differs from other thinkers and managers in this series, because he was more a philosopher than a business thinker. Therefore, his ideas are subtle, but no less important for managers and professionals to understand; at least in outline.

Very Short Biography

Schon was born in 1930, in Boston and grew up nearby. In 1951, he gained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale and went to France to study music at the Sorbonne. He returned to the US to pursue philosophy at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in 1955.

After a short spell teaching philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Kansas City, he joined consulting firm Arthur D Little in 1957, and remained there until 1963 (AVGY).

From then on, he produced a series of books, joining the faculty of MIT in 1968 and becoming Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education in 1972. It was in the years that followed this that he collaborated fruitfully with Chris Argyris.

Donald Schon’s Ideas

Within Schon’s writing are three big ideas that are especially relevant to managers and professionals.

The Learning Society

The rapid pace of technological change means that our systems and technologies no longer provide a stable base for society or its organisations. This means that we need to be constantly learning. This idea was picked up by Peter Senge in his writing on the ‘Learning Organization’. We need to be constantly learning lessons as we go and the same is true for society as a whole and organisations within it. Yet governments and organisations both like to centralise their policy making processes, isolating them from the people who have the experiences to understand and therefore solve the new problems that emerge.

Generative Metaphors

Schon wrote about how powerful a metaphor can be in framing the professional response to an issue. Schon suggested that the challenge is often less in problem-solving, and more in problem-setting. How we state a problem dictates the type of solution we find. So, for example, if the problem of poor communication is fragmentation, then we look for a solution of co-ordination. An example he gave from the social sphere was when we refer to the problems of a neighbourhood as a ‘blight’ and therefore frame our response as a treatment for disease. This is something that is the subject of current research, not least by Paul H Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky. I have written about the dangers of metaphor choice elsewhere.

Reflection in Action

Perhaps Schon’s most important contribution was in thinking about the process of learning. In addition to his collaboration with Argyris – which led to three books and the idea of double loop learning; he also focused on reflection.

He started by setting out reasons why what he termed ‘technical rationality’ is a poor model of professional learning. This is the process of filling new students and professionals-to-be with knowledge at the start of their careers, and expecting them to apply that knowledge. The common response to this approach was then ‘reflection on action’. This is the process of stepping back after each piece of work, project, or experience, and reflecting on what we have learned from it.

We know that this is an excellent route to developing wisdom, but Schon argued that professionalism requires something else, as well: the ability to think o our feet. For this, we require the ability of ‘reflection in action’ – reflecting while we are carrying out our tasks and exercising our skills. This seems to me to be intimately linked with both Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of ‘flow states’ (in which we lose ourselves in activities where we are able to constantly monitor our progress) and Kolb’s idea of ‘Experiential Learning’ (in which we learn through a constant cycle of experience, reflection, generalisation, and application).

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Posted on January 5, 2016March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

Marshall McLuhan: Global Village

Marshall McLuhan is often described in hyperbole: as a genius, prophet, huckster, wizard or charlatan. He was an academic who studied neither business nor management. Not therefore an obvious candidate for Pocketblog’s Management Thinkers series, you would think. But what he did offer were thoughtful provocations on the evolution of societies. And what serious manager, professional or business-person would not want at least a passing knowledge of that?

Marshall McLuhan

Very Short Biography

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911, in Alberta, Canada, and he grew up in Winnipeg. He studied at the University of Manitoba, transferring from his engineering degree to a BA (1933) and then MA (1934) degree in English. He then moved to Cambridge University, where he earned another BA and MA, before earning a PhD in 1943.

He took a number of minor academic posts in Canada from 1944 until he joined the University of Toronto, where he remained for the remainder of his career. During the 1960’s McLuhan’s reputation grew and he became much in demand as a speaker and public intellectual. He suffered a stroke in 1979, from which he never fully recovered, and died on the last day of 1980.

McLuhan’s Message

McLuhan was noted for saying that most people did not understand his work. It was his standard challenge to critics, and he even lampooned this himself, when he appeared in a brief cameo role, in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, telling a pompous academic that ‘You know nothing of my work.’

So I will ‘fess up and say that I know nothing of McLuhan’s work, but this brief interpretation.

That means I will brush aside any debate about whether McLuhan truly foresaw the internet, whether the ‘Global Village’ was a utopian concept or a vision of alienation, and what he really meant by his most famous quote: ‘the medium is the message’ (see below). Instead, I want to focus on an insight that is, I think, of great value to managers: the idea of Four Laws of Media.

The Four Laws of Media

Technology will continue to change our culture and we need to understand the way it does so. McLuhan provided us a framework with which to do so. He identified four effects that technology has on culture. It is an extension of ourselves. New technologies have profound social, psychological and sometimes physiological effects, that can:

Amplify or extend part of our culture
Historically, writing extended memory, libraries extended our knowledge and telescopes extended our vision. More recently, aeroplanes extend our ability to move and the internet extends our ability to socialise and appreciate cats.

Obsolesce (displace) aspects of our culture
New technology displaces old. In the process, it makes some of our capabilities and social preferences less prominent in our culture. In storytelling, printing made oral storytelling obsolete and more recently, movies displaced theatre.

Retrieve elements that had previously been obsolesced
Ironically, as television gained much blame for displacing reading and compromising literacy in many western cultures, it is the mobile phone and texting that has retrieved literacy, and rap music that has retrieved poetry.

Reverse or ‘flip’ into something else entirely
A a technology strengthens it can contain the seeds of its own destruction – it can self limit. Car culture in many European cities is being flipped into bicycle culture, and internet devices are being flipped into a desire for ‘unplugged’ time. As a technology moves to an extreme, its nature will change – sometimes unpredictably.

This work was the culmination of McLuhan’s work; published shortly after his death. To me, it seems to transcend the hype and hyperbole. It is a useful model for considering the consequences of change and examining possible future scenarios. He saw technology as a primary driver of change when this was still contentious. Now we clearly see its pivotal role as a driver and an enabler of change. And for most managers, that is an important thing to get to grips with.

The Medium is the Message in 2 Minutes…

Courtesy of the Open University and BBC Radio 4.

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Posted on September 22, 2015March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

Warren Buffett: Oracle of Omaha

At the start of every year, many thousands (possibly millions, globally) of people look forward to some New Year reading, from the richest writer in the world. Don’t rack your brains for a best-selling multi-billionnaire novelist though: the writer is Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha*.

Short Biography

Warren Buffett was born in 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska. By the age of six, he was trading in soft drinks and dreaming of becoming rich. When he was 12, his father won a seat in Congress and the family moved to Washington DC, where Buffett took on five paper rounds a day and earned the equivalent of a full time wage. He saved his money and, at 14 invested it in farmland in Nebraska, which he then rented out.

His academic career started at 17, at Wharton, but he quickly left, in search of a more practical and less theoretical education. He found it at Columbia Business School, where one of the leading thinkers in investing, Ben Graham, lectured. Graham’s ideas had a profound effect on Buffett’s investment strategies from then until now, focusing as they did on underlying value in all of its aspects.

Let’s skip lightly over the stellar performance of Buffett Partnership, Ltd – his stock investment business that managed other people’s funds, which ran from the mid 1950s to 1969. He closed it down to focus on investing through Berkshire Hathaway. At first it was a textile business that Buffett acquired in 1965. It eventually closed all its mills in 1985, but by then it was the core of a diverse portfolio of businesses. Its shareholders profit from massive stock performance that frequently outstrips industry averages by a wide margin, generated by Buffett’s choice of outright acquisitions and stock purchases.

Once a year, at the start of the year, Buffett writes a long letter to his shareholders. It explains carefully Buffett’s assessment of the year past and the future of the business. It combines folksy humour, wry metaphor, and deep insight. It is widely read not just by investors and analysts, for whom it is a professional interest, but by folk like me, who see it as a fascinating exercise in communication, combined with a source of interesting insight.

What can we learn from Warren Buffett?

There are very many websites and articles purporting to extract lessons from one of the world’s most successful and penetrating business minds. What a surprise! But I am determined to add another, because I won’t be thinking about investing; that’s not my thing. Instead, I am going to focus on what I think day-to-day managers and business leaders can learn about doing your job well.

Keep it Simple

Buffett likes investing in simple businesses that he can fully understand. As a manager, keep it simple and don’t take on something you don’t understand. So, if you need to take on something you don’t understand, then make it your urgent business to understand it.

Character / Integrity / Reputation

They all amount to the same thing. Buffett puts an astronomical premium on these. As well as his annual letter, Buffett issues a biennial memo to the CEOs of the businesses Berkshire Hathaway owns, his ‘all stars’. These are not published but frequently leak onto the web. Here are two extracts from the most recent (December 2014), which clearly makes his point.

The top priority — trumping everything else, including profits — is that all of us continue to guard Berkshire’s reputation… As I’ve said in these memos for more than 25 years: “We can afford to lose money — even a lot of money. But we can’t afford to lose reputation — even a shred of reputation.”

Sometimes your associates will say “Everybody else is doing it.” This rationale is almost always a bad one if it is the main justification for a business action. It is totally unacceptable when evaluating a moral decision.

Select for leadership on track record, and then trust your leader

This is Buffett’s approach and it applies to any manager who appoints supervisors, or any leader who appoints managers. Experience matters – look for evidence. When you get the right person, trust them enough to give them the autonomy that will allow them to add to your leadership, rather than be subordinate to it.

Merit is all that matters

This one is simple: Buffett rejects all judgements based on gender, race, or age. So too should you. The person that has the skills and energy to excel in a role is the person for the job.

Rational decisions

Trust the numbers too. Do everything you can to understand the nature of cognitive bias. Study the facts and work hard to eliminate any other influence over your choices. You will get things wrong, just as Buffett has done on many occasions. But each time he does, he analyses it and discusses it in clear objective tones without a trace of blame for anything other than his failings in judgement. He takes away the lessons and uses them.

Trends not Headlines

Buffett rejects knee-jerk reactions to headlines and focuses on the big picture underneath them. When he is ready he makes decisions rapidly, but he won’t be hustled.

The only memo to his all stars that is on the Berkshire Hathaway website is also the most astonishing piece of business communication I have seen. Two things strike me as remarkable. The steadying calm and confidence with which it is written, and the remarkable strength that a business would need to have for its CEO to be able to say the things he does. It is a short note, so to reproduce anything valuable from it would doubtless be morally a breach of copyright even if it stayed on the right side of the law, so do have a look at it. The context may be obvious when I tell you the memo was issued on 26 September, 2001. The message from Warren Buffett is on the Berkshire Hathaway site.

Read Voraciously

Warren Buffett and his business partner, Berkshire Hathaway Vice-Chairman Charlie Munger, both set aside large chunks of their working day to read. They read all sorts of stuff and the breadth and depth of their reading gives them both profound understanding and a wide context. This commitment to learning is what you need if you are to grow in wisdom and make sound decisions more often.

Obsess over detail

There isn’t much to say about this but to note that the big picture is all very well and an appealing target for leaders’ attention, but the details are often where the differences get made. The skill, of course, is to figure out which details (see paragraph above for the best technique).

Delegate everything that is not strategic

In Buffett’s case, deciding how to invest Berkshire Hathaway’s assets is the strategic role he fills. Everything else – and in particular the operation of the Berkshire Hathaway businesses, he delegates completely. While he makes himself available to his All Stars for a conversation 24 hours a day if they need it, he does not require them to communicate with him more than once every two years. At that time, each is required to put one name in a sealed envelope and send it to him. This name is that of the most suitable successor, should the business CEO be suddenly unable to fulfil their role.

Right, that’s me done, I’m off to do the ironing. ‘Delegate it’ you say. ‘Indeed’, says my wife!

* Although Buffett is also known as the Sage of Omaha and the Wizard of Omaha, Oracle is the term he himself favours.

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Posted on January 20, 2015March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

Nancy Kline: Thinking Environment

The powerful belief behind coaching: whether life coaching, corporate coaching, performance coaching or any other sort is simple: If we fully understand the challenge or problem we face, then we can access our own solution to it. Nancy Kline puts it this way:

Usually the brain that contains the problem also contains the solution – often the best one.

Her contribution is to formalise a set of criteria for what she calls (and has trademarked as) a Thinking Environment. These ten conditions at once make sense: they are both obvious and insightful.

[Very] Brief Biography

There is not a lot of information around on Kline, save that she was born in New Mexico and served on the faculty of a Quaker School in Virginia, where she and her first husband set up a satellite institution in 1972. It was there that she started to think deeply about how to create the space to think. She went on, after twelve years, to be a director at the rightwing Leadership Institute. In 1990, she married her second husband, Christopher Spence, and moved to the UK. Shortly afterwards, she set up her consulting and coaching business and wrote her first book, Time to Think, published in 1999.

Kline’s Thinking

It seems to me that the entire burden of Kline’s ideas is supported by one statement:

The quality of your attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking.

This tracks back to her and her colleagues’ observations of teenage students trying to solve their own problems for themselves and it is the the core principle of her attitude to coaching – and of the attitude of many coaches. Her book, Time to Think: Listening to ignite the human mind and her concept of a Thinking EnvironmentⓇ set out ten conditions that create a good environment in which we can think. These conditions are:

Attention
You need to listen carefully, take an interest in everything you hear, and be respectful of the ideas, beliefs and values that are embedded.
Incisive questions
In the coaching context, the questions you ask evoke awareness, so your goal is to shake up entrenched patterns of thinking that can create unwarranted limitations.
Equality
Speaker and listener deserve equal respect, attention, and time, and must maintain their commitments to one another.
Appreciation
This one reminds me of the Losada and Heaphy paper in 2004 that shows (and the methodology has been criticised) that five to one ratio of positive to negative comments drives stronger group performance.
Ease
Creating time, without a feeling of urgency or hurry. Kline sees urgency as a destructive force.
Encouragement
Beyond the positive sense of this work, Kline also means us to engender a collaborative rather than competitive mindset.
Feelings
Letting the speaker express and experience their emotions, to release the speaker from their grip.
Information
Drawing out a complete and, as far as possible, reliable statement of reality.
Place
Selecting an appropriate physical environment in which we feel fully respected.
Diversity
Differences create opportunities. Diversity adds value.

Kline’s Offering to Organisations

Kline is clearly a master coach, and her organisation offers a range of training. Her book does not only offer a prescription for how to create an environment where people can think more clearly – and therefore solve problems more effectively. It also contains valuable insights of a range of organisational types. Along the way, what I found most useful, were some of the specific questions she suggests asking others… and ourselves. I would put Kline in a category with another asker of insightful questions, Susan Scott.

Any leader or manager can gain a lot by taking time to think about some of her questions, of which my two favourites are:

What do you really think?

What do we already know now that we are going to find out in a year?

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Posted on December 11, 2012March 19, 2018 by Mike Clayton

Six times Four: More de Bono

Last week, I discussed Edward de Bono’s (or maybe his and others’) Six Thinking Hats. In my blog title, I described his mind as fertile and that fertility led, step by step, from:

Six Thinking Hats (1985) to:
Six Action Shoes (1991)
Six Value Medals (2005)
Six Frames – for thinking about information (2008)

We’ve listed the six hats. Let’s do the same for the others. Whilst I own copies of Six Action Shoes and Six Value Medals, it was only in researching this blog that I learned about the newest book here, so I am indebted to Professor Tortoise for the primer in the Six Frames.

Six Action Shoes

Navy Formal Shoes
Represent formal routines, processes and procedures.

Grey Sneakers
Represent exploring, investigating and gathering information.

Brown Practical Brogues
Represent practical, pragmatic, roll-your-sleeves-up action.

Orange Gumboots
Represent safety-conscious activities and emergency action.

Pink Comfy Slippers
Represent caring, concerned, compassionate and sensitive action.

Purple Riding Boots
Represent leadership, authority and command.

Six Value Medals

Gold Medal – Human Values
Values relating to putting people first.

Silver Medal – Organisational Values
Values relating to your organisation’s purpose.

Steel Medal – Quality Values
Values relating to your product, service or function.

Glass Medal – Creativity Values
Values relating to creating, innovating and simplicity.

Wood Medal – Environmental Values
Values relating to sustainability and impact on the community and on society.

Brass Medal – Perceptual Values
Values relating to the way things appear.

Six Frames for Thinking

Triangle Frame – Purpose
Understanding the information at hand – the What, the Why and the Where.

Circle Frame – Accuracy
Is the information consistent, accurate and adequate for our needs (to solve a problem or make a decision, for example)?

Square frame – Perspectives
We can look at information and a situation from different points of view, with different biases and prejudices. Which ones are present?

Heart Frame – Interest
Focuses our attention on the relevant, salient, interesting information that matters most to you.

Diamond Frame – Value
How do we evaluate the value of our information? We can use the six value medals to prioritise its importance.

Slab Frame – Conclusions
What does the information tell us and, crucially, what next?

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