Want Different Results? Do Something Different

From an article by the Newfield Network on observing and action:

We maintain that whenever individuals and organizations are dissatisfied with the results of their actions, they tend to reflect on the actions and on improving their performance by speeding up the process. We observe that dissatisfaction remains because basically the same kind of action is being performed. We believe that in these cases reflection should focus on the observer that they are, namely, that they should discover the basic assumptions that have been limiting their scope of action. From this perspective an unknown world of possibilities for actions and meaning opens up, a world that was inconceivable under the old paradigm.

What I took away from this paragraph is that revisiting our actions and endlessly refining them won’t necessarily fix problems. When something is less than satisfying, we need not to refine what we’re already doing, but to question the assumptions that led us to those actions in the first place. Reminds me of the saying that the definition of insanity or stupidity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.

I posted on my coaching blog about how coaching coaxes us through this process, moving away from doing the same things over and over and moving towards examining our assumptions and considering other options. Coaching expands our skills as observers and alerts us to new possibilities of action.

Communities of Practice for the Solopreneur

A number of the people who read this blog are, like me, thoroughly engaged in organizational work, yet working on their own as a consultant / coach / facilitator to organizations. When we’re outside of organizations, one of the things it can be hard to build is a community of practice.

I was thinking about this on the weekend when I attended a get-together of the coaches who went through The Coaches’ Training Institute co-active coaching training with me. Our cohort connected so strongly that we’ve continued to meet together, after all the courses, to share our experiences building our businesses, coaching clients, finding coaching niches, identifying our own strengths, sharing resources, and comparing what we’ve learned.

I believe that it’s essential for those of us working on our own to find ways like this to support our own learning and share the meaning we are finding in our work. And for those of us working within an organization, it’s always a good time to ask the questions: Do I have a community of practice here? Who am I learning from? Who is learning from me? How are we coming together to make sense of our work?

The Power of Questions: What Versus Why

Someone once told me that questions that start with “Why?” activate explanations and justifications. We are very good at explaining why we do things. We are talented when it comes to justifying why we don’t do things. We have lots of practice rationalizing to ourselves – and others – why we feel the way we do. We already have a myriad of mental scripts in our heads, just waiting to be played back. When someone asks you a “Why?” question, it activates what you already know and believe.

My education taught me to ask “Why?” questions. It taught me to seek out explanations, to be analytical, and to question justifications. Since I started working as a coach and facilitator, though, I’ve abandoned the “Why?” question. My clients don’t need to justify themselves to me. And if I ask questions that activate what they already know and believe, we aren’t discovering anything new. We’re just reinforcing existing mental scripts.

I’ve realized: when I ask a “What?” question instead, it opens up possibilities.

Listen to the difference:

Suppose a workplace facilitator asks a team: “Why are we focusing on this topic?”

The group responds with what we already know: business reasons, evidence, anecdotes. All of the reasons that put the topic on the agenda in the first place. The answers summarize everything we already believe.

What if the facilitator asks a “What?” question instead: “What will become possible for us if we focus on this topic?”

Suddenly, the answers change! The team is no longer sitting comfortably in the space of what we already know and our tidy logical explanations. Suddenly, we’re moved to a sense of possibility and openness. A sense that what we are doing matters to the future we are creating together.

What would it look like to ask yourself a “What?” question? Here are a few to get you started:

What would it look like if I . . .?

What would become possible if I . . .?

What is important to me about . . .?

Seven Ways of Leading: Which is Yours?

If you saw me anytime in December, I was probably dropping the Harvard Business Review article Seven Transformations of Leadership into my conversation. I read it and couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering what my own leadership “action logic” was, and where I saw leaders with different action logics.

Authors David Rooke and William R. Torbert say that leaders are made, not born; that there are seven leadership “action logics”; and that with intention, coaching, and practice, one can develop one’s leadership skills along the action logic continuum.

Starting at the bottom and working up to the top leadership style, they list:

• The Opportunist
• The Diplomat
• The Expert
• The Achiever
• The Individualist
• The Strategist
• The Alchemist

While the Opportunist, at the bottom of the scale, “wins any way possible” and is self-oriented, the Alchemist – the pinnacle of the leadership scale – “generates social transformations”.

The good news? Rooke and Torbert believe that anyone can move up the scale and progressively develop their leadership abilities, one step at a time.

What type of leader are you now? What type of leader do you aspire to be? What is your next leadership step?

(Thanks to Sandy McMullen and Mary Stacey at Context Consulting for passing along the article.)

The Killer Phrase: words that grind teams to a halt

“We’ve tried that before.”

“Put it in writing.”

“Get a committee to look at it.”

Australia’s The Change Agency (“listen deeply, reflect critically, strategise effectively, make change happen”) turned me on to the idea of the killer phrase. Killer phrases reduce possibility and inhibit creativity. They put an end to something, before the something has even started.

The Change Agency offers advice for groups that suffer from the killer phrase. I especially like these recommendations:

Institutionalize the term. Get some friendly groans going in the room as everyone brainstorms the killer phrases that their group loves to hide behind. Once the term is institutionalized and the phrases identified, have the team come up with a way of discouraging the use of any killer phrase. (The Change Agency suggests throwing wads of paper at the perpetrator).

Find the underlying cause of the killer phrase. Is the killer phrase camouflaging a valuable question? Searching out the question, rather than accepting the killer phrase, can lead to more possibility. (The Change Agency’s example: turning “We don’t have the resources,” into “How can we mobilise the resources to do this?”)

I’ve worked in groups with their own idiosyncratic killer phrases, and I’m sure I contributed a few of my own. In fact, in co-active coaching we have a similar concept for that internal voice that’s full of killer phrases: we call it the saboteur. Like the killer phrases, if the saboteur is taken at face value, it will kill possibility. And, like with killer phrases, there is often an underlying, important, valid concern underneath the saboteur’s voice.

I started wondering what my own internal “killer phrases” are. What does my inner saboteur say to me that kills my sense of possibility? I quickly recognized a few of my own killer phrases: “You don’t have the energy to do that.” “You don’t have the skills to do that.” “You aren’t outgoing or enthusiastic enough to run your own business.”

It was refreshing to write those down and get them out, actually! Now I can strategize on how to vanquish my killer phrases.

What are your killer phrases? How do you overcome them?

(Thanks to Jasmine at Stepwise Heritage and Tourism for passing along The Change Agency link!)

Personality and Business

I’m enjoying a new blog that looks at uses for the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) in business. Sandy McMullen, the blog’s author, has a fantastic book of her own paintings expressing the MBTI. Inner Landscapes is a “visual guide to the MBTI”. The paintings and text express the personality tool in a whole new light, quite literally.

Approaching With Appreciation

As a coach and facilitator, one methodology I use is Appreciative Inquiry. As Wikipedia explains:

Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a 4-stage process focusing on:

1. Discover: The identification of organizational processes that work well.

2. Dream: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.

3. Design: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.

4. Destiny (or Deliver): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t. It is the opposite of problem solving. Instead of focusing on fixing what’s wrong, AI focuses on how to create more of what’s already working.

This week, I read about a psychology study that reminded me of why Appreciative Inquiry works. Researchers assigned subjects to solve a maze, with a cartoon mouse pictured in the centre who was trying to get out of the maze. Half the subjects saw that when the mouse got out of the maze, it would get to a yummy piece of cheese. The other half of the subjects saw that when the mouse got out of the maze, an owl was ready to swoop down and eat the yummy mouse.

Although all the subjects successfully solved the maze in a similar amount of time, the two groups showed distinct aftereffects from the activity:

When the participants later took a test of creativity, those who had helped their mouse avoid the owl turned in scores that were fifty percent lower than the scores of students who had helped their mouse find the cheese. The state of mind elicited by attending to the owl had resulted in a lingering sense of caution, avoidance, and vigilance for things going wrong. This mind-state in turn weakened creativity, closed down options, and reduced the students’ flexibility in responding to the next task.

. . . The same action . . . has different consequences depending on whether it’s done to move toward something we welcome (activating the brain’s approach system) or to avoid something negative (activating the brain’s avoidance system). In the maze experiment, aversion was triggered by something as minor as the sight of a cartoon owl. It led to reductions in exploratory, creative behaviors. This is dramatic evidence that the avoidance system can narrow the focus of our lives, even when triggered by a purely symbolic threat.

-The Mindful Way Through Depression, p. 124-125

The coach within me invites you to ask yourself: Where in your life or organization are you narrowing your focus by acting to avoid something? What possibilities might open up if you shifted your actions to highlight what you are approaching, rather than what you are avoiding?

Coaching Site Up and Running

I’ve been hard at work practicing my coaching skills, laying out my coaching learning plan, and putting together my website so that clients can learn a little more about coaching and my approach.

Happy to report that it has all come together now at ReadyforChange, my official professional site.

Blogging on organizations and learning will continue here at Auditory Learner. As part of research for the current writing project, I’ve just walked out of the library with a number of organizational histories, am still browsing through In Search of Excellence, and am rounding out the reading material with Can’t Stop Won’t Stop – A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. I firmly believe in learning from multiple genres – what can the history of hip-hop tell me about writing an organizational history? I’m looking for examples of passionate storytelling, and the interweaving of anecdotes with timelines and events.

New Projects

In the past two weeks I’ve started two projects that feel like a great fit.

In line with my interest in organizational culture and organizational understanding, I’ve taken on a contract to write an organizational history for Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB). We’re looking forward to collecting so many of the stories that have made the history and culture of this organization what it is, and I’m heading up the work to compile all of this and more into book form. This week I’m loving the way this combines my skills in anthropology, background in psychology, and love for writing – I’m eager to sink my teeth into this for a few months to come.

Secondly, last weekend I took a phenomenal Coaches Training course. The model of Co-Active coaching taught at the Coaches Training Institute felt like home to me – assuming the coaching client is “creative, resourceful, and whole”, the expert on their own life, with the coach available with tools and processes to help the client dig deeper in understanding what’s meaningful to him/her and creating a life in line with that. It’s familiar because it’s how I approach facilitation – that the group is the expert, the group has the answers within it, and it’s the facilitator’s role to provide the process and space and support for the group to find their answers.

I’ve decided to take the leap: I will continue the coaching training and complete the four remaining training courses required in order to start the International Coaching Federation certification process. I’m looking forward to putting these new skills to work, starting by taking on clients at reduced rates in order to practice my developing skills. So far, the experiences have been good, and inspiring. Hearing people talk about what really matters to them is an utterly rewarding way to spend one’s days.

Best Feedback Explanation Yet

There’s been a feedback theme here lately, so I’m posting on one of two spectacular demonstrations of feedback that I saw this weekend.

I was taking the Co-Active Coaching Fundamentals course with the Coaches Training Institute (more on this later). After the first of many practice coaching sessions, we prepared to give feedback from the acting client to the acting coach. Rather than go through a model of how to give feedback, what to say and how to say it, etc., the facilitators just demonstrated:

Demo part one: Person A stood with a wastebasket behind her and tried to throw flipchart markers backwards over her head and have them land in the wastebasket. After each throw, Person B gave feedback. During the first set of feedback, each piece of feedback in no way helped Person A get the next marker closer to the wastebasket. Person B said things like, “Well, that throw was okay.” “That one was a really nice colour.” “That made a really cool sound as it landed.” “Have I told you that I think you’re a great person?”

It was a perfect demonstration of how unhelpful feedback can be when it’s non-specific or irrelevant.

Demo part two: After each throw, Person B gave Person A clear feedback: “You need to throw it about three feet further.” “Okay, the distance is good now, but about a foot to your left.” “You bounced off the wastebasket that time; just put enough into it to get it two inches further and you’ll be there.”

No theorizing, no instructions, just a clear demonstration that good feedback is feedback that helps the recipient get closer to their goal.