Shush, give the thinker a chance to think

Two of my thinking partners Clare Norman and Claire Pedrick got me thinking about thinking.

Was it Einstein who said ‘you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it’ or something like that.

There’s old thinking and new thinking.

I think I can tell when the person I am thinking with is sharing their old thinking with me. They are looking straight at me, talking quickly, deliberately, seamlessly. They seem to ‘know’ what they are talking about. They know their script, possibly have rehearsed it many times in their head and said it to several different people over time. They are used to it, maybe even used by it.

New thinking is not joined up at first, there are gaps, hesitations, even silence. The ‘new’ thinker will look away, often up to the corner of the room or down to the table. For a moment they are not articulate as if jumbled and they change their minds. They are uncertain. This is new thinking.

New thinking informs new action and change. Old thinking reinforces the status quo and not much changes.

For me coaching is about enabling people to get to where they want to get to, which is different from where they are now. To get from here to there something has to change so new thinking is needed.

Last weekend I was a participant at Clare Norman’s Lock-in and during some new thinking the group came to a new definition of our work – “coaching is a joint endeavour to discover new thinking”. I really like that.