Appreciation … freshest thinking!

Appreciation is such a foundation stone of joyful practice, that it’s easy to take it for granted. It’s one of the ten components of a Thinking Environment, a set of processes which enable the conditions for independent thinking, and it’s the easiest - in some senses - to enact.

After all, how hard can it be to appreciate another human being? It takes moments to notice what’s good about someone and say it. Yet it remains counter-cultural in workplace culture, a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘need to have’, despite compelling scientific evidence of the impact of appreciation on brain and heart function, never mind levels of trust and collegiality in organisations.

Appreciation can be differentiated from praise, because it transcends hierarchies - one equal thinker to another. Praise can be a little bit patronising, a little bit head-patty. And it’s different from saying “thank you”. Thank yous are important, but when you thank someone there’s a level at which you’re making it your party. Appreciation at its best is reciprocal but it’s not transactional; you don’t give to receive.

The guidelines for giving appreciation in Thinking Environment practice are that it should be succinct, sincere and specific.

Succinct because we are just not programmed to listen to someone ramble on about how great we are; we stop listening, we start to feel finessed. Succinct appreciation lands: as Brené Brown says, clear is kind.

Sincere because as human beings we know when someone’s being fake. Lying appreciation is worse than no appreciation at all.

Specific because that helps the other person to understand exactly what they did that’s appreciated. Not only does that help them value doing it again, but it sets off a chain reaction.

That chain reaction is something I’d not really thought about, despite a Thinking Environment practice of 26 years and it was a d’oh moment as well as a lightbulb moment when I returned to my books early this morning, in preparation for the JoyFE Broadcast. I couldn’t find what I was looking for in Thinking Environment founder Nancy Kline’s most recent book, so I returned to More Time to Think, published in 2009 (p.43).

Appreciation from the outside sets up liberating assumptions and incisive questions on the inside.

I’m getting a bit geeky here, so I’d better explain. In a Thinking Environment, untrue limiting assumptions that we live as true are at the heart of what we’re trying to unpick. For individuals, they are the deep-in-your-bones stuff, like “I’m not good enough”; for organisations its often the stubborn systemic sticking points: “We’ve always done it this way.” An incisive question is crafted through the the thinkers’ own words to create a moment of possibility: “If you knew that you could pull this off, how might you…?” The incisive question doesn’t necessarily banish the untrue limiting assumption, but it certainly weakens it over time.

If I appreciate the incisiveness of your thinking, that might be an insight you’ve never had for yourself. People often feel they are rambling in Thinking Environment situations because they are so used to be interrupted that it feels a bit weird to be given the gift of another’s generative attention. You accept the appreciation with a simple “thank you” (because this time it is your party) and maybe during the day you turn it over and over in your mind, like a precious gem. “Am I incisive?” you may ask yourself, but you’ve no reason to believe I’m lying and maybe a little confirmation bias sets in: you start to notice your incisive thinking on other occasions. This makes you a little bolder; you start getting in more situations where you can be incisive. It’s a virtuous spiral, or a joy loop, as David Russell describes affirmative systems change.

I experienced something similar when I kept receiving appreciation that I was kind. I’d never thought of myself as kind; in fact I thought of myself as a little waspish. But I started to notice the kind things I did and I started to be kinder too…not for appreciation but because of how it made me feel. Somewhere inside my brain, not quite intentionally, I had asked myself an incisive question along the lines of, “If you knew you could do this kindly…?”

That’s why appreciation should be meaningful, as well as succinct, specific and sincere. Someone told me recently that they’d received appreciation twice recently about how nice their earrings were (same earrings, two different people; they must have been excellent earrings). But what can you do with that? My disappointed friend didn’t have any untrue limiting assumptions about earrings. But they might have wanted an insight into something they really didn’t know about themselves, in order to shift something stuck in their self-esteem. Because that’s the beauty of appreciation. It keeps working long after the generous moment when someone took the time to notice what was good and then say it out loud.