Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind

by Nancy Kline

Caroline Allen of the No-Nonsense Team of Consultants said in a speech she made at a renowned management college in Britain: In the next century organizations will become increasingly virtual: places in cyberspace with fluid workforces; where time means everything and space means nothing, where structures cannot be defined on graph paper. In this world organizations will be the relationships between the players: the employees, the customers, the suppliers and the varied communities in which the networked organization operates. The relationships will be all that actually exist. Discovering what individuals can offer will no longer be possible by standing over their backs with a stop watch. As physical tasks become more and more the domain of the robot, people’s contribution will be the result of what they think, not what they do. Creating a Thinking Environment for each other then becomes ever more essential. The dynamics of the relationship between two thinking partners are the building blocks of tomorrow’s organizations.