How To Ignite Human Brilliance : Appreciation

In this series of blog posts, I will be exploring the 10 Components of a Thinking Environment® and bringing each component to life by sharing my own personal experiences and stories of how these components make a positive difference in the world.

All quoted text is attributed to Nancy Kline, unless otherwise indicated.

The 10 Components of a Thinking Environment® are: Attention, Equality, Ease, Appreciation, Feelings, Encouragement, Information, Difference, Incisive Questions^TM and Place.

Click on each component above to read a blog relating to each one.

This post explores the component of Appreciation.

Appreciation, in a nutshell is “Noticing what is good and saying it.” We know that “The human mind thinks more rigorously and creatively in a context of specific, sincere, succinct praise.”

Over my leadership career, I have had the good fortune of working for some wonderful leaders who made me feel appreciated. I will never my first ever manager. His name was Rod Dixon, and he was the Manufacturing Manager at the lighting factory I worked at fresh out of university. I was his Production Assistant. I did not realise at the time how special Rod was in his capacity to make people feel truly seen and appreciated.  It was not until I was much further along in my career that I realised how rare this quality was.

On Rod’s final day before his retirement, he called me into his office and asked me to sit down. I expected Rod to say something along the lines of “Cassie, if you keep working hard, one day you could be the Manufacturing Manager!” But that is not what he said. Instead Rod said “Cassie, don’t let this place hold you back.” The kindness and generosity of this comment has stayed with me for almost three decades. In that moment I really felt that Rod saw and appreciated my potential. That one comment helped me to believe in myself – to feel valued for who I was, and for all I could become - not just the work I did as his Production Assistant.

I came to the Thinking Environment® having already been thoroughly convinced about the power of appreciation through my experiences of facilitating of Appreciative Inquiry summits for past clients.

This is one of my favourite stories about the power of Appreciation.

In 1957, in a Monastery in Thailand, a group of monks were relocating a giant clay Buddha when one of the them noticed a crack in the statue. Taking a closer look, the monk was surprised to notice a golden glow coming from beneath the clay. Carefully chipping away at the clay, he discovered that the entire statue was in fact made of pure, solid gold. Historians believe the Buddha had been covered with clay to protect it from an attack by the Burmese army. All the monks who had covered the precious statue had been killed in the attack. It took several hundred years for this treasure to be discovered.

I love this story because it also speaks to the gold hidden inside of us. We so often fail to see and appreciate the gold that exists inside of us. It has been estimated that we spend about 80% of our time trying to fix what’s not working and only 20% of our time trying to build on our strengths.

Earlier this year, I was engaged to facilitate an Appreciative Inquiry Summit, which is a shared experience of illuminating the answers to questions that look for the true, the good and the possible. It’s a powerful experience that guides us to discover and amplify the gold that is already here. As Frank Barrett explains “Appreciative Inquiry is a strength-based, capacity building approach to transforming human systems toward a shared image of their most positive potential by first discovering the very best in their shared experience.”

I facilitated the group through 5 D’s holding space to think about this series of questions:

• DEFINE: What do we want more than anything as an organisation?
• DISCOVER: What are we doing really, really well (individually and collectively)?
• DREAM: What would extraordinary success would look and feel like?
• DESIGN: What are the pathways towards that future-state vision?
• DELIVER: What are our next best steps?

I loved facilitating the day. The participants also loved it. The whole experience felt more like play than it did work. Now that I am trained in a Thinking Environment® I am really looking forward to my next opportunity to facilitate an Appreciative Inquiry Summit and weaving through more of the 10 components.

Several years ago, I was asked to facilitate a two-day off-site for an organisation that had a heavy past. Many of the leaders had been hurt by the actions and decision of past leaders, many felt that they were not valued by the organisation. To end the event, I wanted to contribute to every person feeling just a little bit more appreciated. I printed three slips of paper for each leader with the following prompt at the top ” “Dear Mary, I have never told you this before, but what I really appreciate about you is…”.  The logistics of handing out these slips of paper to everyone at the event, asking people to fill them out, and ensuring every single leader had 3 completed slips in a sealed envelope by the end of the event was a logistical nightmare. But it was so worth it. There were tears. There were hugs, and I sensed that there was a little more open-heartedness and courage to move towards a brighter future together.

As I have facilitated a Thinking Environment®, I have continued to see the power of noticing what is good and saying it. I am learning how to ensure that we slow down to ensure that giving and receiving appreciation is no way performative – that the noticing and the appreciating has space to really land. That people say “Thank you”, and take a few deep breaths to soak in the good, nourishing feelings that a few words of accurate, honest appreciation can create for both the giver and the receiver.

I now understand that appreciation is a thinking enhancer – it puts our brains in a ‘toward’ rather than ‘avoid’ state. This means that we’re able to access our more evolved part of our brain to generate more creative, expansive, connecting thinking and regulate responses better. Criticism does the opposite of this.

In a Thinking Environment®, Appreciation is presenced explicitly through the practices of starting and ending all meetings or group gatherings with an appreciatively focussed opening and closing round, and through having the appreciation of a quality in one another be a shared practice too. Beginning a Thinking Environment with an appreciative round, is not an ‘ice-breaker’, it’s an essential primer that puts our bodies and brains in a state to think well.

Being appreciative is being rigorous, not soft: reality contains both that which is going well and that which is not, and if we only focus on what’s not working, we’re not therefore thinking rigorously and realistically, we’re only addressing part of the picture.

In conclusion

The only way to really understand the power of a Thinking Environment® is to experience it. The more I practice embodying the ten components, and the more people I share it with, the more natural and easeful the components become.

“We will get to a new and better world with new and better thinking. Brave thinking that dismantles denial. Thinking that is the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” Nancy Kline

Hi there, I'm Cassandra Goodman.

I'm a former global executive turned accredited Thinking Environment™ Trainer and Facilitator.I love empowering people to activate their own brilliance - and the brilliance of those around them.

Are you ready to ignite the brilliance in your team or organisation? 

The Thinking Environment is both a framework you can learn, and a way of being you can practice.

Learn about my workshop offerings here.

Or reach out to explore possibilities [email protected]