A Time to Think
A Time to Think sets up Nancy Kline's Ten Components deliberately, so a person can think for themselves without interruption, rescue or subtle correction, because most 'thinking time' in meetings is actually someone else's thinking imposed early.
Ten conditions lay out one after another, from attention through to place.
Reach for this when…
- Meetings default to the loudest or most senior person's conclusion within minutes.
- You keep finishing other people's sentences, literally or in how you respond.
- Someone needs to think something through and you keep offering solutions instead.
How to run it
- Set all ten conditions: attention, equality, ease, appreciation, encouragement, feelings, information, diversity, incisive questions, place.
- One person speaks without interruption while others give full attention.
- Use incisive questions to surface and remove the limiting assumption underneath.
- Rotate so everyone gets an uninterrupted turn.
- Close with a short round of appreciation.
A worked example
Situation. Amina Juma ran Baobab Design Studio, a small design agency in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where the same two senior designers dominated every studio meeting and the quieter juniors had stopped offering ideas at all.
Applied. She restructured the Friday review as a round: each person spoke on their work for two full minutes with nobody, including her, allowed to interrupt or jump in with a fix.
Result. One junior designer, mid-turn, worked out the fix to a problem she'd been stuck on for weeks - out loud, unprompted, once nobody rescued her. The senior pair started listening instead of waiting for their turn.
The catch
It depends entirely on everyone genuinely holding the discipline of not interrupting - one senior person breaking it once undoes the trust needed for the room to try again. It's slow compared with normal meeting pace, which makes it a hard sell under real time pressure. 'Full attention' as a stated ground rule can feel artificial, even patronising, to groups unfamiliar with the approach.
If you're already forming your response while the other person is still talking, you're not in a thinking environment.
Origin: Nancy Kline