If you knew...

Jane and I do a Spelling Bee most days. Towards the end of the day, we often compare notes, and to spur each other on to greater success, we might ask How many words have you got starting with the letter N? And whoever has the fewer, knows that there are more to be had - and (and this is the point of this otherwise mundane domestic scene) often quickly finds a few more. 

It reminds me of an exercise I used to do many years ago, when I ran workshops on creativity for tech companies. Instead of asking 'How might we {very difficult challenge}?" I'd get them to frame the challenge as: 'Our competitors have just {very difficult challenge} - how do you think they have done it?' And again, it seemed that the knowledge that a solution is out there makes it easier (or makes us more determined?) to find one.

In both cases, it's almost as if asking the question (implied in both my examples) 'If you knew that ... how would you...?' prompts the brain to do some exceptional work.

And that, of course, is precisely the structure of an Incisive Question, in a Thinking Environment. 

Coincidence? I think not...

Therefore, if you need to clear a blockage, in your own or someone else's thinking, it's a great structure to use. As an Incisive Question, its formal job is to remove an untrue assumption and replace it with a true one.  I think that is also what happens implicitly in the other examples I cite. It removes the assumption that there are no more words beginning with N, or that there is no solution to this difficult challenge, and replaces them with an assumption of possibility, that enables the brain to break through.

So if you knew that this was a powerful structure, how would you use it?

Langgarth

I am feeling strangely upset by the news that Langgarth House, the house built in Stirling by my great grandfather, has been devastated by a large fire. This is the house that my grandfather sold to fund his acquisition of Aston Martin (a story I have told previously).

The story of the fire is told in The Daily Record, here. It would appear to be casual arson by a couple of teenagers.

It makes me particularly glad that my son Mike and I went up to Stirling to look around it a few years ago. It was on the market then, but would have required a couple of million to restore it, which strangely I didn't have in my back pocket at the time. We met some property developers from Edinburgh who had been round it, and they said it would be hard for the Council to find a buyer for it, unless it was someone like me with a particular interest.  I joked: So you you reckon I could get it for a fiver?'  'Yes,' they replied, 'but you'd be over-paying!' 

Over a pint in the pub, Mike and I briefly fantasised about the project. We both agreed a Billiard Room would be a great feature; and I imagined welcoming people there for coaching, or workshops. But it was a fantasy, and I think it was only Jane who thought (feared) that I might come home having bought the place.

What's the (implicit) contract?

I have  blogged before about the importance of contracting for coaching; and the fact that as a supervisor of coaches, whenever I hear a disaster unfolding, my first thought (and often my first question) is What was the contract?.

Occasionally, however, one comes across something that sits outside the normal contract, and that is causing the coach some retrospective anxiety: 'This happened, so I said/did this, and now I'm wondering if I should have...' Often, I hear, 'It felt ok at the time, but now I'm not so sure...'

Naturally, I find such cases interesting. One can't contract for everything, and often we can't talk in terms of absolutes, either. The Confidentiality aspect of the contract is a classic example: coaching is confidential except... {safeguarding, supervision, invoicing...} 

So for example, if a coachee decides to withdraw from a coaching relationship halfway through, one probably has an obligation to tell the client organisation, for reasons connected with invoicing.  Is that a breach of confidentiality?  Might it be perceived as such but the individual?  What if the client organisation asks for the reasons? After all, they have a right to know about the quality of the coaching being delivered...

It is here that I think that the concept of the implicit contract is valuable. You may not have contracted for the specific eventuality that has arisen, but it is worth asking two questions of yourself:

If I had contracted for this specific eventuality, what would I have been discussing with my coachee?

Given the contracting that we did in fact engage in, what would my coachee reasonably expect of me in this specific eventuality?

I find (so far) that asking these two questions helps coachees to evaluate their retrospective anxiety, and to decide whether it is well-founded - and if so what to do differently in the future. If not, of course, they can lay it to rest.

And one of the actions that often becomes clear as desirable, is more explicit contracting...

Casablanca

 I recently asked someone about the pictures behind her in a Zoom call, and heard a fascinating backstory.

As nobody has ever asked me why I have a Casablanca poster on my wall behind me, I thought I'd tell you anyway.

In the first place, it is, of course, because it is a fantastic film, and I find the actors, the look, and the moral of the story all very appealing.

However, there is a deeper reason. When I left the Pru in 1987, it was my ambition to write for a living. I thought I'd do some freelance training to support myself while I got established. I wrote several radio plays, all rejected by the BBC, and then a TV script which I submitted for the Radio Times drama awards.  I gotr a very warm letter back, saying I had been a near finalist, and that the BBC would be very interested to see any future work. And for some reason, that was the last script I submitted to the BBC.  In the meantime, the freelance work took off, and I have been doing that successfully ever since. 

Somewhere in that time I attended Bob McKee's Screenwriting Workshop.

It was excellent and I learned a great deal. And the final day of it was a screening of Casablanca, broken down scene-by-scene with a commentary by Bob.

So the poster is in part honouring that aspect of my identity as a writer.  You will of course be familiar with my Shifting Stories, and are currently reading my blog post, which is a major outlet of my writing talent; and I have written a number of things for clients, including a Teambuilding Manual and copious training materials and handouts, as well as a few articles for professional journals, such as Personnel Management.  I am even cited as a co-author of an academic paper (though in truth that is more a courtesy than an accurate designation). I believe I write well.

But beyond that, I still have an aspiration to write creatively, and it is that aspiration that my poster serves to remind me about.

Recruiting for EDI roles

Here's an idea.  I suggest that anyone interviewing someone for an EDI role should ask these questions:

What is a cause, issue or injustice that you feel particularly strongly about?

Tell us about it and why you feel so strongly...

Now, I'd like you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who takes the opposite position; someone intelligent and well-intentioned.  What would he or she say?

And anyone who is unable to answer that last question, in a way that would satisfy someone who did indeed take the opposite stance, would be a poor appointment. 

My thinking here is that people who lead on Diversity and Inclusion, should be able to understand and empathise with diverse views, and include people who differ from them in a respectful way. Otherwise, it is not diversity and inclusion, at all; merely the imposition of the current preferred views and beliefs. 

I have blogged previously about some of my reservations about the EDI agenda, so I won't repeat myself here. But I think the principle (and indeed the practice) that I suggest above would be very valuable for organisations wishing to avoid putting ideologues into influential roles.

And as I write this, it occurs to me that this could also apply to teaching roles, whether in Schools or Universities: activist teachers are all well and good (perhaps) but not if their activism means that they can only see - and teach - a simplistic view of complex issues.

I am reminded of the time when a friend and I signed up, at Fresher's Fair, to go out with the Hunt Saboteurs. We successfully disrupted a local hunt, and one of the huntsmen took the time, despite his understandable annoyance, to come and speak to us in an intelligent way. Most of the Sabs weren't prepared to listen to him, but my friend was wise enough to do so. I stayed with him and listened, too.

As we were going home afterwards, I expected him to be dismissive of the huntsman's arguments. But he was not. He was smart enough to realise that he hadn't done his homework. He had assumed he knew what the issues were and where he stood, but in fact had never engaged with the counter-arguments. 

That was a real lesson to me: if one wants to take a stand, one has, I think, an intellectual and a moral obligation to engage sincerely with those who disagree, to understand their arguments and perspectives. Then by all means, take a stand; but to do so without that preliminary step strikes me as rash, to put it mildly.

It is, of course, much easier to assume that those who disagree with me are either mad or bad, and probably both (and that may, of course, be the case...) but the rapid leap to that assumption is one of the things that fuels so much of the division and toxicity that seems to be on the increase - and not least in our Universities.

--

With thanks to  Tim Gouw for sharing his photos on Unsplash

Interruption 9/10

One of the joys of teaching without notes is that I sometimes surprises myself by what I say.  

It happened yesterday evening, when I was running a CPD session for the ICF Wales and Shropshire Coaches Group: an Introduction to the Thinking Environment. (For one participant's insightful reflections, see here).

I had given a brief overview of Attention, Equality and Ease, as the first three of the ten components that I wanted them to practice, and heard myself say: 'And interruptions, of course, violate all three of these.'   I had never stated it quite that way before, but recognised that it was absolutely accurate.

Which led me to think further (and this is, in part why I love a Thinking Environment) after the session.  Is there any of the components that Interruptions do not violate?

Clearly they assault appreciation, encouragement, and the full expression of feelings.  But the others are less obvious and deserve unpacking.

I think interruptions also undermine the component of Difference; for often they take the form of agreement (yes, that happened to me!) which minimises difference in the search for comfortable commonality) or disagreement (no, what I think is...) which often fails to honour difference, but rather 'correct' the other.

Place is interesting: and my thinking here is that interruptions do attack place, as they shift the focus, or even locus (which means place) of attention from the thinker to the interrupter.

The component of Incisive question is perhaps less obviously attacked; but one way we understand generative listening is that it implicitly (and silently) asks the incisive question: if you knew that I believe you have more good thinking to do on this, what would you say? In that context, it is clear that interruptions violate that.

And that's the 9/10 of my title.  Which leaves the component of Information. And frequently that is the content of the interruption: something the interrupter knows (or thinks) that he or she feels an urgent need to share with the thinker. But even in that instance, an interruption also impedes information: what would the thinker have said next if not interrupted.  So perhaps it's nine and a half out of ten that interruptions sabotage. But that would have been a less snappy title!

What do you think?

Experiment or commit?

One of the roles of a coach is sometimes to be an accountability buddy - to help people to stick to their good intentions. Many of us find it easier to honour commitments we make to others than those we make to ourselves (although one of the goals of my coaching is often to help people to develop consistency in honouring their commitments to themselves). 

Moreover, many are trained with models, such as Whitmore's famous GROW model, that teach that a good coach elicits client commitment at the end of each session.

So it is understandable that coaches often close a session by asking their clients what they are going to commit to doing, prior to the next coaching session. However, I often prefer to ask: What experiments might you run, as a result of this conversation?

There are several reasons I like to ask that question. One is that framing intentions as experiments means that there is no question of failing. The point of an experiment is to see if something works; and to learn from the result, whatever the result is. That ensures that the focus remains on learning, rather than on clients judging themselves.

Another reason is that it removes the risk of the coach turning into the expert: 'Do this, and things will be better...'  Likewise, it removes the risk of the coach turning into the judge. 'Well done!' or conversely 'Why didn't you...?'  So, for example, if a client leaves a session with a clear intention of having a difficult conversation with a colleague, and arrives at the next session not having done so, that result is the output of an experiment. And rather than condemn or collude, the coach can treat it as an object of enquiry, from which both will learn.

In this way, it helps to maintain that learning alliance that is so valuable: the coach and the client as co-explorers and co-learners. 

It also does a couple of other things. Many of my organisational clients are Universities, which means that many of those I coach are academics, or steeped in that system. A consequence of that is that if I propose anything to them ('You could try not interrupting your staff...') there is sometimes an automatic and (I suspect) subconsciously defensive response: 'What's the evidence-base for that suggestion?'  Whereas, if I suggest that they run an experiment - well, it's almost irresistible...

And finally (or at least this is my final thought at the moment - more may follow) it keeps it light; and I believe that the human mind often works at its best with a degree of light.

But don't take my word for it: run the experiment!