A 'thinking' pause

Leaders who prioritise thinking time can enhance strategic decision-making, foster innovation, and lead more effectively, balancing urgency with foresight.

- CAROLINE TAYLOR

The neglect of thinking time in leadership refers to the lack of space for deeper, more exploratory and reflective thinking less driven by urgency, more intentional, and extending well beyond the present moment, into the future.

The kind of thinking that allows leaders to contemplate the challenges, opportunities, and complexities that lie ahead of them and to work out how to respond.

This is about the space in which new solutions and ideas come through, where you move past easy assumptions, question the status quo, and imagine alternatives. Where you have the moments of clarity about what you can do to realise your future potential. The chance to spend time in a calmer space in which your leadership skills are fully primed to prevent crises because you plan ahead, remove the combustibles and invest in the relationships and networks you need.

It also includes thinking time for yourself-deliberate moments when you can reflect on your experiences and recognise you can gain learning and insight that can make you stronger, wiser and more effective for the next time. This time should be an integral part of any leader's regular and legitimate activity. Most leaders agree-in principle, at least. When asked if they'd like more thinking time, they respond resoundingly with 'yes'. Nobody disagrees that more time to think is essential. So, why is thinking time a neglected leadership act?

The leaders of today are constantly thinking. They think about what people need from them during backto-back meetings, reacting in the face of fast-flowing new information, making quick decisions, calculating and recalculating their priorities as they try to work out which fires to fight and all before they return to their digital devices to think about how many emails they can reply to or missed calls they can return in the five minutes before their next engagement.