E35. Conversations in Education: In the Presence of a Question with Katie Driver

What does it mean to think well and what gets in the way?

Kati Driver is a former civil servant and coach who works with people in public service, helping them think more clearly, more honestly and more deeply. Her practice is grounded in Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment, a framework built on the belief that the conditions we create around thinking matter as much as the thinking itself.

In this conversation, we explore what that actually looks like, not as an ideal, but as something that can be woven into the texture of daily professional life, even in busy, relational, interrupted environments like schools.

Together we explore:

• How Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment has shaped Katie's practice.

• Attention as a component of thinking - what it means to give it fully and why it's transformational even in two-minute pockets.

• Equality as a starting belief, the belief that everyone you work with can think well for themselves and what shifts when you hold that.

• Incisive questions - what they are, how they work and why they matter. 

• The promise of not being interrupted and what becomes possible when people are given space to reach their fifteenth thought.

• Silence as alive, not empty and what we miss when we mistake quiet for absence.

• What changes in groups and teams when they change the way they think together

Katie leaves us with the question: what would change for you if you knew everyone you work with could think well for themselves?