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.

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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!

That bloody pendulum...

My late father was both wise and acerbic. He used the phrase 'that bloody pendulum' to describe the tendency in society, in cultures, in organisations, and in individuals (and on reflection I think within himself) to swing from one extreme to another.

Until relatively recently, the pendulum in educated British circles was swung rather too far to the side of self-adulation: the Empire, the White Man's Burden, all that kind of stuff. It was certainly in need of a corrective. But now, it seems to me, that bloody pendulum is swinging rather a long way in the other direction. The mere fact of being white is seen as problematic, in some circles.

Likewise, I think that conformity to social norms was over-emphasised, to the extent of ostracising anyone who deviated (or was perceived to deviate) from them. But again, that bloody pendulum... the very idea of normal, which is in the first place a statistical fact exemplified by the bell curve of standard deviation, is seen as problematic. Whilst I am all in favour of Diversity, Inclusion and Equality (and also of motherhood and apple pie, of course) they are not absolute values as I have written previously; and I think there are risks to normalising the abnormal and abhorring the normal. 

And I find it interesting that those who denigrate whiteness and extol the virtues of indigenous cultures where skin colour is a bit darker, seem somewhat selective in which virtues they extol. For it is very common, in such cultures, to venerate ancestors; whilst the modern trend in our culture is to denigrate them and apologise for them. 

Of course they weren't perfect; but if we think either that we are better than them, or that all of their wisdom is disposable because they weren't wise in all things, then we risk throwing out several babies with the admittedly dirty bathwater. 

I'm thinking of things like: innocent until proven guilty, or even just war theory. It's not that these are perfect solutions to human problems, but they are the best we have found so far. Consider the alternatives that seem to be rearing their heads. In the first case, we seem to have innocent until someone has decided that you are offensive, at one extreme, and innocent despite courts having found you guilty (if you are powerful enough...), at the other; and in the second case, passivity when the innocent are attacked, on one hand; or unlimited use of deadly force on the other.

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Image from Mark Ross Studios via Scientific American

Thinking Partnership Programme

So this Thinking Environment… It springs from the work of Nancy Kline and is founded on a profound belief in the capacity of the human mind to think outstandingly well - given the right conditions.

This seems to me to be a core skill for a coach: to enable the person we are working with to think independently at his or her very best. Thinking independently is thinking as ourselves and for ourselves.

Kline's thesis is that we do this primarily by paying the person being coached a level of attention that is rare in daily life; and that such attention is generative of good thinking. The idea is, the quality of the individual’s thinking,  is (at least in part) a product of the quality of attention that we give them.

In Time to Think, and its successor, More Time to Think, Kline describes ten components of a Thinking Environment. 

The first, and the most important, of the components is attention. Attention of the quality we mean here is simple, but difficult - and rare. It consists of giving your whole attention to the person that you are listening to.

That means, amongst other things:

• removing all distractions (eg electronic devices with alerts…),
• refraining from taking notes whilst the individual is thinking,
• keeping a 'soft gaze' (of interest and encouragement) on the person’s face (though the person thinking may, of course, look wherever he or she chooses), 
• not thinking about how you will respond or what wise question you will ask next, 
• and above all, not interrupting.

In fact, even when someone stops talking, we refrain from interrupting the silence, as he or she may still be thinking. Thinking comes in waves, and the freshest thinking often arises after a pause. Such attention is so rare that it may feel like a luxury, or even feel uncomfortable; but it does seem to support really good thinking. 

The other nine components are equally rich, but I will not describe them all here, as it would make this a very long post. 

Coaching in this way is very different from many approaches. It takes seriously the assumption that the individual is more likely to come up with good solutions than the coach; the coach's role is to provide the environment - the Thinking Environment - in which that is most likely to happen.  I have blogged before about a specific example of this.

If you want to explore this further, I have a few places left on my next Thinking Partnership Programme (5/6 Sept and 11 Oct) here in the glorious Lake District.  Don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to know more, or have a look at my website, here.