Nancy Kline, the promise that changes everything

Nancy Kline is Founder and President of Time to Think, Author of Time to Think, More Time to Think, and The Promise That Changes Everything: I Won’t Interrupt You. She is a coach and speaker, and a visiting lecturer at Henley Business School.

Before ‘coach’ became a common part of the business vocabulary, her job involved listening and helping people to listen to one another, and Nancy was already working on the question “How do we help people to think for themselves?”

Nancy has always been a writer – she has written 11 books in all - but ‘Time to Think’ was her breakthrough best seller. At present, and for a while now, she has had to manage the tension between writing, and running a leadership development and coaching business. Ultimately, she has recognised that the two are inextricable and that her writing and her thinking environment work serve each other.

Nancy says she experienced her mother (and father) as what she would now call “an embodied thinking environment.” She reflects that her mother hardly ever interrupted her, and she seemed interested all of the time, so much so that her ‘way of being’ became what Nancy understood listening to be.

She says “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. And then the quality of our thinking depends on the way people are treating us while we are thinking.”

Nancy’s vision is that one day every human being will live in a thinking environment from birth to death. She says ‘Time to Think’ the organisation is not really an organisation but a loose network of qualified professionals. The strategy of ‘Time to Think’ is “to discover, teach, and qualify people” and to work with those qualified people and others to learn and discover more.

Nancy’s leadership philosophy is that “the core job of a leader is to generate the finest thinking from everybody whom they influence” which requires them to be able to create the conditions for good independent thinking wherever they are.

She believes that there are differences in what the male and female cultures allow by way of instruction in how to lead. She believes that there are facets of female culture that allow them to create thinking

environments more consistently than male culture. However, you can learn to superimpose on your own culture the other gender’s cultural permission to create thinking environments. As a generalisation, you often find a better-quality thinking environment where a team has both men and women.

Nancy feels deeply committed to the NHS. She came to the UK to live when she married Christopher Spence. She sees the NHS as “one expression of the finest in civilisation.” She believes that human beings are born with a right to healthcare and to education and “there’s something about going to bed at night and knowing that everybody’s going to get the care they need whether or not they can afford it. There’s something dignifying of me in knowing that they’re being dignified.”

Nancy’s new book ‘The Promise that Changes Everything’ focuses on the one thing that Nancy considers to be the distinguishing characteristic of a thinking environment and that is the promise “I won’t interrupt you.” The book delineates the four generic systems of interruption that we live in.

Nancy says that “the nature of a thinking environment… is that it is ever emergent… we are noticing new things all the time.” So, has she now written all that there is to say on the thinking environment? Probably not!

Nancy is proud that she has stayed true to the idea that the conditions for independent thinking are there to be discovered. Therefore, it was never to become a methodology, but it was always going to be a fluid concept. And from the beginning she has wanted there to be “less company and more practitioners.” “Small is beautiful” has remained her organising principle.

She has made plenty of mistakes but sees them as positive – it means that we have had the courage to go out there and try – and believes that we should get excited to see that we have made a mistake rather than defensive, frightened, or embarrassed.

Nancy has been inspired on her journey by her parents, some important teachers, Christopher her husband, and by Peter Kline. Peter, her first boss, said “our first job here as teachers is to create whatever it will take for these young people to think for themselves, not just to think like us.”

Books that Nancy Kline would recommend are “any book by Margaret Heffernan” on leadership, ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Failure’ by Stuart Firestein, and ‘The Tao of Leadership’ by John Heider.

Nancy’s self-care regime includes a daily period of sitting and noticing, and starting the planning for her work with the question “What will give me energy and meaning?” She eats well, and she sleeps without an alarm. And also she has a thinking session every Sunday.

To her 20-year old self Nancy would say “Please know, Nancy, that all things are going to turn out better than you can possibly imagine.”