Thought Partnership: Exploring Ideas Together

Growing a Culture of Learning

Reading time: 5 minutes

If you search for the term "thought partner" on the Internet, you will find a long list of consultancies looking to be your thought partner in whatever organizational endeavor you may have. They are selling their genuine curiosity, Socratic questioning methods, non-judgmental objectivity, and ability to challenge assumptions. To me, that describes a coach, not a thought partner, but the definitions of coach, mentor, thought partner, consultant, and even trainer depend on who you ask. To make it more difficult, roles are rarely so limited and defined: You can be a coach, mentor, and thought partner within the space of a conversation with someone! That said, it’s important to pull these roles apart and examine them separately so we can be intentional about how they fit into our learning programs.

What Is a Thought Partnership?

Let's start with a definition.

A thought partnership is a mutually beneficial relationship where people have exploratory conversations in a safe environment.

Mutually beneficial – This distinguishes thought partnerships from mentoring, coaching, consulting, and training. Those relationships tend to be transactional in that one person is the expert and the other is receives support. A thought partnership is more like a friendship in that each person gets something out of the engagement. Thought partners may be friends in their personal lives, but they don’t have to be. You can have a thought partnership conversation with a stranger, but both people should walk away having benefited.

Exploratory – Thought partnership conversations are exploratory, grappling dialogs where people work together to make sense of something. It could be anything: an idea from a book, a global event, a new industry concept. The goal is to go deep, challenge your own ideas and assumptions, and open yourself up to thinking in new ways. These conversations are the muck and mire of mental exploration, not a finished product. Sometimes the people involved tend to agree; sometimes they come from opposite ends of the spectrum. The goal of the conversation is not necessarily for the people involved to arrive at the same opinion, but rather to deeply consider the journey.

Safe – In a digital age where everything you write or say can be looked up into perpetuity, it’s important for thought partnerships to be safe. Thought partners need to feel safe voicing half-formed opinions and positions as they grapple with an issue, knowing those statements are part of the process of developing a full-formed idea and won’t be held against them for all time.

To be clear, a thought partnership can be ongoing (maybe the partners meet every two weeks for an hour to hash out a new subject), or they can be one-time conversations that spur the thinking of everyone involved.

Thought Partnerships in Corporate Learning

The benefits of thought partnership go beyond two people connecting to learn from each other. A company that embraced thought partnership as a way of working and learning would experience fewer silos, more ideas, and better internal networks. They would also have a culture of learning where everyone has expertise to offer and safety to explore new ideas. That may be a pie-in-the-sky vision for you, but there are ways you can start building that culture in your organization tomorrow.

Build awareness: Have your employees ever heard of thought partnerships? Tell them! Make building thought partnerships a goal for your next learning experience. Post a blog to your company’s intranet site. Start using the thought partnership language in executive fireside chats. Ask executives and employees to share how thought partners have been formative in their careers. As you put this idea in front of employees over and over again, you begin to build familiarity and then a longing to have those types of conversations.

Create social opportunities in your learning programs: Discussion boards, breakout groups, and communities of practice are ways to introduce employees to each other and facilitate the initial connection that can transition into a thought partnership. Consider a multi-functional, global learning program that connects people who may not otherwise meet. Be sure to remind people to keep an eye out for people they would like to have a thought partnership conversation with!

Demonstrate thought partnership conversations: Executive fireside chats are a great way to create buy-in for thought partnerships because respected figures in the organization demonstrate what it looks like in front of employees. Consider calling the executives “thought partners” and having each person describe what that has meant to them at the beginning of the fireside chat. The Long and the Short of It podcast describes an in-person fireside chat where they paused the conversation periodically and asked listeners to take a few minutes to discuss the topic with their neighbor and then resumed the fireside chat. This listen and discuss approach allowed people to practice having quick thought partnership conversations with strangers while watching a thought partnership conversation on stage.

Start a thought partnership connection program: Some organizations have formal mentorship programs that connect employees who want to be mentored with employees who want to be mentors. With a few tweaks, you could do something very similar with thought partnerships. A low-tech alternative might be a message board where people could post a request for a thought partnership conversation, such as, “Looking for a thought partnership conversation on how communications will change in the AI revolution” or “I read xyz article, and I’m looking for someone to discuss how it applies to team leadership.” Other employees could respond to the requests and set up independent conversations.

The options are endless, and there are opportunities in both virtual and in-person environments.

Explore with curiosity and compassion:

• Who are your thought partners?

• What social learning experiences have been most effective at your organization?

• How can you facilitate thought partnerships in your training programs?