Thinking Environment: Work in Progress
This is my first attempt at articulating a theory around the fundamental need for Thinking Environments in changemaking work. I'll return often to update!
Many thanks to Andrea Quantrill and Heart of Yorkshire College Group for giving me the opportunity to workshop my thinking.
I’ve been working with the Thinking Environment for thirty years now - and working with Andrea for the last four or five years. Our belief in the capacity of this simple set of processes has never wavered. It teaches us how to bake the values we believe in, into the work. We have seen the Thinking Environment build trust and shift cultures, we’ve seen it amplify the voices of the rarely heard and put the brakes on those who dominate the airspace. We’ve seen it enable colleagues to slow down, take a breath, pause and notice - and the consequent impact that has on decision making, efficiency of time and wellbeing. With my public health background, I love a health metaphor. You could think of the Thinking Environment as an infusion of vitamins. It’s both calming and enlivening at the same time.
I am going to take us all through the first principles of a Thinking Environment this morning and we’ll use the processes to do some really good thinking, around values-line questions that you design. But I want to begin by making the case for why it’s so essential that more and more of our organisations work in this way. After thirty years, it’s actually more important than ever.
By compelling pause, Thinking Environments release potentia. You may have heard me use this word before, if you’ve seen any of my stuff. Potentia is a changemaking power. It comes from the work of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Writing many years ago in Latin, he had two words for power at his disposal. Potestas is power as we know it, power-as-usual. It is hierarchy, fragmentation, clout. It’s usually invested in an individual. Our people-management structures are fundamentally built on this potestas, or power-over. And because of that, we all need a measure of it, if we’re to have any impact.
Potentia is something different. Spinoza thought of it as an energy, a life-force, that will that we have in all of us to change things for the better, to not just survive but to flourish. You all have it, or you wouldn’t be doing this work. You’d be more interested in managing people than in managing change, which is your job to do. Potentia is about using your influence to drive momentum, no matter what your relative place in the hierarchy. Next week, we’ll work through an exercise around leveraging this influence.
I learned about potentia and potestas when I studied with a changemaker called Rosi Braidotti at Utrecht University. She reckons that a good career, one where you rise up the ranks, is two-thirds potestas and one-third potentia. So we all need a bit of each. As changemakers - and that’s how I’ll refer to you from now on - we need to reverse Rosi’s formula. Two-thirds potentia and a bit of potestas to get our foot in the door. Because if we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we always get.
You’ll know potentia when you encounter it in someone. It’s a buzz. It’s that excited feeling you get when someone’s energy inspires you to think creatively, to elevate yourself. When you go into a conversation tired and come away energised and full of ideas. Potentia - whether yours, a colleague’s, a student’s - is what makes the work worthwhile. It’s when you know that something is changing.
What we’ve learned in the past few years is that the Thinking Environment releases potentia, because it compels pause. You have to stop and think, rather than just say words. And pause + potentia are what we need for changemaking to have momentum. In FE, things are always fizzling out under the weight of everything being urgent. As changemakers, we must learn to prime the energy, without exhausting ourselves.
And FE needs to change, because the model we have is not sustainable. I don’t need to rehearse all the reasons why - you live them every day. Suffice to say that the problems we have with teacher recruitment, retention and student and staff wellbeing are all symptoms of a complex set of wider societal and global problems. And yet, FE has the potential to lead us to new futures. Our incredibly diverse student profile, our industry-experienced teachers, our skills focus - if we weren’t so hampered, we’d have everything that this country needs, to make the transition to a greener and more just future.
What we are learning about change (see Greg Satell’s article for evidence) is that whilst a 20th century style persuasive marketing approach might lead you to to buy a certain washing powder, those manipulative techniques are failing when it comes to social change, unless of course you’ve got the reach of an Elon Musk. Real purposeful social change takes a shift in power - that shift from potestas to potentia. And change is found in the minor gestures not the big noise projects. The persistent, consistent influencing of those around you. Start small and grow a sustainable, change-making practice.
Over the past couple of years, the ETF and Oxford Saïd Business School have been doing a systems analysis of FE, a huge piece of research. They discovered a lot - not least and not for today, that SEND remains an afterthought for many leaders. Two other key things stand out:
FE has an image problem. Despite the evidence - so, for example, in the latest figures published by Ofsted, 90% of FE provision was good or outstanding - FE is perceived by much of the public, the media and many policymakers as unsuccessful. We can speculate about why a mainly working-class education service is seen this way, but whatever the reason, it’s a problem.
Secondly, there’s a split at the heart of FE’s purpose (which, in systems thinking, is called its North Star). For what purpose does FE exist? For a social purpose, enabling young and older people from often modest backgrounds to flourish in the world? Or do we exist to serve the requirements of Ofsted, funding and awarding bodies? Of course, we have to do both. But we are so exhausted by serving the latter, that we end up doing the important social purpose work - the stuff we came into FE to do - almost in our spare time.
So why can we see the Great North Run, or the Pride of Britain Awards, for example, as affirmative examples of people power and yet somehow perceive FE - which is absolutely people power - as somehow failing? Maybe because we are not held accountable for what really matters. Of course we have to be held to account for the public money we receive, no-one would dispute that. But where are the metrics around our values, around the stuff that we all agree matters the most? I’m sure most of you will have heard of leadership thinker Simon Sinek. He talks about how, in the commercial sector, purpose-driven organisations are actually more profitable over time and how this is achieved by having metrics linked to that social purpose. This is my new work at the moment, developing new approaches to what we measure as impact. Why am I telling you this? Because everything I’m researching, all the evidence for new, socially responsible, approaches to impact measurement, is threaded through with what the Thinking Environment brings.
Compelling silence to enable thinking and pause to release potentia - the recipe for changemaking momentum.
A shift in power dynamics from potestas to potentia, to release diverse voices, perspectives and lived experiences and to enhance collective project working (rather than people management, we lose so much energy in people management).
Silence and space to dig into assumptions, to enable more sustainable and better informed decision-making.
Thinking Environments lead to sustainable decision-making.
Thinking Environments build trust and mitigate misunderstanding, because people have to shut up and listen to one another.
Thinking Environments avoid power play - you can openly sabotage but you can’t subvert.
Just yesterday, Josh Spears from Darlington College wrote a fierce article about the summer we’ve had in this country. In it, he makes clear that it’s not just that FE is expected to mend the social fabric, it’s that we are the social fabric. He makes the point, obvious I know, that those smashing the windows of his local learning centre had the most to gain from enrolling there. Josh’s call to action is about investment in FE, but we need more than that. We need a complete overhaul of the systems, structures and processes that tie our hands behind our backs. And we don’t do that, without determinedly making spaces to think.
In the social impact work I’m doing, we talk about the ‘Long Now’ - the limitations of our short-term culture and the importance of doing things now which will have long-term impact. When I worked on the pilot of the Green Changemakers project in the West Midlands, the DfE wanted our impact data within a few weeks of the programme finishing. Meaningless. I’m sorry, but if we want a fairer, greener and more sustainable future, we need to change. The Thinking Environment is the best vehicle I know for that.