Embracing Spacious Thinking

As companies face increasing pressure to do more with less and to be innovative when technology feels like a runaway train, one of the challenges we won’t identify right away is “how does our thinking help or hinder us?”

There is pressure to move fast to deliver new things in new ways. There is pressure to be productive and to demonstrably perform. There is pressure to do so with the resources we have. When things feel a bit out of control, it is a natural reaction to want to name and control how we act on challenges that come up.

Doing mode vs. spacious mode

Megan Reitz and John Higgins have been looking at how leaders and employees operate, and they have identified two modes of attention we might use at work:

• Doing mode: Narrow attention to specific task(s) to better control them, to have higher predictability on outcomes, and get things done efficiently.
• Spacious mode: Expansive attention that isn’t hurried, allowing people to be more receptive to relationships, interdependencies, and possibilities.

The benefits of the spacious mode of attention include insights into challenges, uncovering opportunities, more diverse connections/relationships, and higher engagement. But spacious thinking is regularly suppressed in organizations. Why?

Because the dominant work culture ethos is all about productivity and achievement. Any behaviors that seem “unproductive” in the short term are not valued. Employees may avoid spacious mode because it can be interpreted as being inefficient or not acting urgently enough. Some also said that they feel like they need permission to be out of doing mode.

Managers and leaders play a key role in this dynamic. They model what acceptable work behaviors, so if they maintain a narrow focus on short-term deliverables/goals, then their teams will be focused on that as well. There’s not time or space available to get past the “do now” list, to consider if those tasks are the right ones, and no discovery time to uncover new opportunities or engage in innovative work.

Leaders also overestimate how open they are to spacious mode thinking and that it’s easy for people to get into that mode of thinking even if it’s not “permissible.” In reality, they underestimate the power dynamics – there’s an “advantage blindness” whereby they don’t realize it’s harder for people who are not at their level to take initiative outside of the implicit boundaries they set.

People want to do meaningful work, but the overwhelming emphasis on tasks that managers require can be a blocker to the types of conversations that employees want to prioritize higher. Everyone wants to optimize productivity, but there’s a gap here in how to do that.

Expanding your focus

As Ben Fogarty puts it, spacious thinking is beneficial because it is “widening the space around the work so insight has a chance to emerge.” Fogarty also recommends using spacious thinking to combat time pressure. Taking time away from a problem, allowing for independent and quiet consideration, and engaging in conversations that don’t have a fixed agenda are ways you can get away for pressured decisions.

Reitz and Higgins cited an example of spacious mode from an archivist at a global arts institution. Faced with an ultimatum to find cost savings or reduce their team size (short-term thinking), they held a team meeting to do some open thinking (spacious thinking). The team realized there were some overlooked assets in the archive that became a very successful commercial revenue source.

Part of widening the space is providing openness for other ideas, giving them room to land, and then adjusting the framework being used as appropriate. Cognitive diversity is one way to bring in other ideas.

I’ve written quite a bit about why and how diversity is so important to decision making, innovation, and performance. When managers and leaders step back and make room for spacious thinking, they are also making room for diverse viewpoints.

This approach, coupled with psychological safety, can often lead to more meaningful discussions and ultimately more engaged and productive team dynamics.

Diverse lived experiences can also impact how spacious thinking is considered (or not). Some examples from Reitz and Higgins include:

• Career/life stage: People who are mid-career might feel more pressure to deliver and to “get the show on the road.”
• Neurodiversity: People might need different levels of explicit permission to step out or need guiderails on expectations.
• Power dynamics: High power people define the “space” allowed to a greater or lesser degree depending on the culture (both lived and work culture).

The elements that allow for spacious thinking

Here are some ideas on how to encourage/move into spacious thinking:

1. Create psychological safety. You need a safe space for open dialogue. In this case, you also need people to feel comfortable with taking time to think about a problem without strong time pressures to get to a solution.
2. Encourage inclusivity. Facilitators should be actively seeking input from all team members to tap into their diverse perspectives, and ultimately, get to better outcomes. Inclusive discussions should be operational standard.
3. Engage in active listening. Be in the moment. Listen to what is being said instead of formulating your opinion or response in your head. Be tuned into what’s not said as well – think about context, motivations, and aim for clarity. Reflect back what you’ve heard to validate different contributions to the conversation.
4. Focus on ideas instead of tasks. Operationally, we need to talk about tasks, but if that’s the only focus, then bigger picture and cross-departmental conversations might not happen. For example, if a senior team opens every meeting focused on quarterly results, they may not ever get to more strategic thinking. Try a different opening question to trigger more spacious discussions: “What didn’t go well in the last few weeks and what can we learn from it?”
5. Add some novelty. If your team meets in the same way or same place, and follows the same agenda, at the same time, your brain kinda shuts down (it likes to conserve mental energy). There can be great value in designing the odd meeting to be about something other than tasks and updates. Use some prompts to switch modes of thinking: “What if we remove this dependency – what would happen?” or “What are the capabilities we need on this team to meet our 3-5 year goals?” Change up the other factors as well, by incorporating customer site visits, meeting outside or offsite if possible, inviting in other people (provides diverse perspectives), and so on.
6. Value and reward spacious thinking. Allow and encourage questions that force people to think more/differently/alternatively as part of the decision-making process. Explicitly talk about how more spacious discussions changed the course of the process and highlight the benefits.

Spacious thinking as a leadership capability in the AI era

If AI will/is already handling much of our “productive” work like tasks, process manager, automations, or project tracking, then what are the leadership capabilities that we should care about? It won’t be task/status oversight.

Instead, we’ll need teams with leaders that cultivate wisdom, judgement, and trust for themselves and their team members. And to do that, we need to make space for spacious thinking. If you are a middle manager, this shift is especially critical as operational management moves “down the organization” as contributors will be doing a lot more of it via AI instead.