Thinking as a Foundational Practice From The Mother of Twin 7 year old Boys with a Dedicated Investment in Mental Schema.
How we think matters. Restrictive thinking results from environmental structural drivers. I've learned that true intellectual growth often necessitates the deliberate act of intentionally opening my mental gates to multi domain perspectives, allowing them to inform and enrich my own understanding.
In 2023, I authored an academic essay which resonated when I found the poster for the workshop, a Time to Think led by Symphonia Leadership and Development, neurally bridging the logical precision of René Descartes (1596–1650) with the generative presence championed by Nancy Kline in her Thinking Environment®.
My process guides my stacked views of thinking—not just as cognition, but as a focus of attention.
At the time, the piece I wrote was rigorous. But incomplete. As Nora Bateson writes in Small Arcs of Larger Circles:
“We do not live in systems—we live in the shimmering threads between.”
Thinking, too, occurs in these threads: between people, generations, pain points, and possibility. And that brings me to a moment embedded in my cells.
A Moment I Carry in My Cells
In 2014, I volunteered at Kannemeyer Primary School for a Partners for Possibility, Mandela Day, event. A decisive young girl approached me. She said she wanted to become a doctor. Inspired by the doctors she’d seen on television, she knew what she wanted. Then she told me, with clear honesty, about life at home: strained, uncertain, sometimes unsafe. But her eyes held clarity, not confusion. That encounter didn’t fade. It imprinted. Later, during a 2025, job interview, I remembered a vow I had made in my twenties:
“Wherever I go, I will root my work in health and education.” What that young girl offered me wasn’t only inspiration—it was a relational exchange, however conflicted I was about her circumstances, I ignored them to listen to the positive energy she expelled. It was a cognitive intimacy that mirrored my own inner child. Bateson might call it a “warm data moment” where the personal, political, philosophical, and professional blur into something meaningfully whole.
Designing Mental Frameworks
True structure doesn’t constrain thought. It concentrates it toward coherence, a mantra, I hold dear.
Descartes Discourse on Method lays out a disciplined approach to inquiry:
Kline’s Time to Think, centuries later, extends this inner rigour into interpersonal practice. Her Ten Components don’t simply replicate Descartes system. They repattern it:
1. Attention – Listening with respect, interest, and fascination.
2. Equality – Giving equal turns and attention; keeping boundaries and promises.
3. Ease – Offering freedom from internal rush or urgency.
4. Appreciation – Noticing and voicing what is good and true about others.
5. Encouragement – Giving courage to go to the cutting edge of ideas by removing competition.
6. Feelings – Allowing sufficient emotional release to restore thinking.
7. Information – Supplying facts and disclosing what is assumed, withheld, or false.
8. Diversity – Welcoming different identities, experiences, and ways of thinking.
9. Incisive Questions – Removing limiting assumptions to help the mind think afresh.
10. Place – Creating a physical environment that affirms people and inspires thinking.
The Thinking Environment becomes a living structure where people are not fixed, but co-arising. Bateson might call this “the pedagogy of interperception”: We don’t just think alongside each other. We think through each other. Not in hierarchy. Not in comparison. But in scriptural communion.
Uncertainty to Insight
In Meditations, Descartes traces a path from doubt to certainty:
In systems leadership and education in South Africa, we move through similar chaos: fluctuating metrics, contested truths, fractured trust. Kline’s gift is a reframe: insight is not extracted, it’s evoked. Her method of listening as generative presence transforms leadership from command into deep co-thinking. As Bateson reminds us: “Context is not background. It is a relationship that holds potential.” That child at Kannemeyer Primary didn’t offer me a “success story.” She offered context to The Ghost in The Machine By Arthur Koestler, countless psychology, and Philosophy courses and critical personal interest studies in neural science. One that reframed my entire epistemology from expert to witness, from deliverables to dignity.
This is the heart of Visionarium Atelier: to design thinking that is not only intelligent, but inter-relationally aware as per Reggio Emilia pedagogy to overcome simplified reductionist thinking.
Descartes has been critiqued for circular reasoning. How can clarity be the metric if clarity is also the goal? In leadership, similar loops trap us: we chase simplified answers to multidimensional issues. This is where Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting joins Kline’s work. Both reject hierarchy as the default posture of influence. Both challenge the fallacy that leadership must always be decisive, commanding, or performative. Instead, they teach:
Bateson deepens it:
“To pay attention is to show care.”
At Kannemeyer Primary, this was no metaphor. It was oxygen. A child’s sense of what is possible is directly proportional to the quality of attention they receive.
Rebuilding through Presence
South Africa’s educational and institutional leadership systems carry the residues of apartheid’s dismemberment. In many cases, bureaucracy replaced intimacy, and “development” was reframed as extraction. Kline’s Thinking Environment® becomes radical in this context: she insists that thinking is a human right. Through Symphonia Leadership Development, Partners for Possibility, and the inclusion of Flawless Consulting in systemic leadership journeys, I’ve witnessed transformation:
Where leadership is not role-based but relationship-coded, each session becomes not training but a thinking sanctuary. This is what Bateson calls transcontextual seeing: meaning doesn’t live within us. It emerges between us.
Thinking Is Legacy Work
In this past week I've been thinking about my will as it relates to my son's which had me digging deep into my soul with the following emerging: Legacy is not what you leave behind. It’s what you think forward. Descartes once said:
“To live, not as others told me, but as reason would have me live.”
And now with cognitive enhancements, maturity, and life experience, I understand “reason” intentionally different; not as cold logic, but as participatory presence. As a refusal to shortcut truth for speed. As a commitment to witness, to walk with, to co-shape. That child at Kannemeyer Primary wasn’t imagining a better life.
She was naturally mapping one, as humans do. Atop the shoulders of historical giants, I found mine through continual adaptations again, and again.
Through Visionarium Atelier, I return to these foundations not to teach them, but to re-become them. Because thinking isn’t just what we do.
It’s how we live.
It’s how we remember.
It’s how we lead.