News You Can Use

Upcoming events for folks interested in coaching, facilitation, and general good times:

I’m launching a pilot course this week, with a full launch for the course in January. The One Change course will take coaching into a group setting, and have me pull out all the facilitation stops to support five people determined to make their One Change.

If you like having a good time and watching people be professional and energetic about course delivery, check out the good folks over at MicSkills4KaraokeThrills. Not only did I see them get 30 karaoke-newbies up in front of a mic, I also saw a group of karaoke coaches who ran a smoooooth operation, from registration, logistics, welcoming vibe, encouraging newsletters, regular check-ins, and evaluations. I love it when people bring that level of care and planning to their passion. The first course is over, but watch their website for karaoke redux.

Finally, I have every confidence that Coach Buffet is going to be an event full of learning, warmth, energy, and connection. Coach Buffet brings the speed-dating approach to coaching: who’s the best coaching match for you? Find out by meeting 12 coaches in one night and finding out who you click with. By the time you leave, you’ll have had multiple chances to get some awesome coaching, and you’ll have met some coaches who are ready to sign you up as a client and support you as you aim for your next goals. See you there!

Facilitation Training for Youth Age 15-30

ICA Associates offers incredible facilitation training. Their affiliated youth branch at ICA Canada runs a practically free training program for youth aged 15-30. Their next trainings are offered Oct. 24th, and Nov. 7th and 8th.

You can read all about it here.

Excerpts on Answering Yes

I’m reading The Answer to How is Yes, by Peter Block (thanks as always to Mary Stacey for providing an excellent influx of books).

First off, I thought this book was useful even before I started reading it, because one day as I was trying to figure something out I looked up from my notebook and there was the answer staring me in the face when I saw the book’s title: the answer to how is yes.

I am only 40 pages in or so, but here are a few things that have caught my eye:

pg. 11: “asking How? is a favorite defense against taking action”

pg.12: “The engineer and economist represent mindsets that dominate the culture. The mindset of the artist is increasingly absent in our workplaces. The mindset and role of the social architect is a way of integrating the gifts of the engineer, the economist, and the artist.”

pg. 20: “The desire to get others to change is alive and well in our personal lives also. If only the other person would learn, grow, be more flexible, express more feeling or less feeling, carry more of the load, or be more vulnerable, then our relationships would improve. Most of us enter therapy complaining about the behaviour of parents, partners, co-workers, children. While we may package our complaint as a desire to help them, we are really expressing our desire to control them.”

pg.23: “We need simply to make the subtle shift from ‘How do you measure this?’ to the question ‘What measurement would have meaning to me?’”

pg.24: “Therapist Pittmann McGehee states that the opposite of love is not hate, but efficiency.”

pg.31: “What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?… We will find meaning in exploring and understanding this crossroad. Our crossroad represents an as yet unfulfilled desire to change our focus, our purpose, what we want to pursue.”

These little excerpts give just a taste of the book. I’m not sure what my overall impression is yet, but am definitely finding sentences to chew on.

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?

Most Significant Change

Someone interning with the Aga Khan Foundation sent me the handbook for the Most Significant Change technique. The MSC combines storytelling with a focus on impact to conduct monitoring and evaluation and to stimulate organizational learning.

At the heart of the technique, individuals tell how the project/program in question has affected them, answering the question, “Over the last month, what has been the most significant change as a result of program x?” Depending on how you’re evaluating, you can change the time period for the question, can specify who or what is being changed (the most significant change for you? for the community? for the organization?), and/or specify an area of change.

The answers to the questions are then fed forward through different levels (of the organization, or of people being affected by the program), with each level establishing criteria to select the most significant of the significant changes that have been reported, and then passing that most significant change up to the next level.

I’m drawn to the potential of the Most Significant Change technique as a tool for organizational learning, because it uses storytelling (and it’s in our stories, I believe, that we recognize and record the things that are significant in our lives) and because it allows for unexpected change to surface. If evaluating a program but only looking for intended results, you miss the unintended consequences. If you’re open to asking questions that will reveal what you didn’t expect – that’s how organizational learning can happen.

From the handbook, here are some advantages to using the technique (particularly valuable for anyone working in the social change sector):

There are several reasons why a wide range of organisations have found MSC monitoring very useful and these include the following.
1. It is a good means of identifying unexpected changes.
2. It is a good way to clearly identify the values that prevail in an organisation and to have a practical discussion about which of those values are the most important. This happens when people think through and discuss which of the SCs is the most significant. This can happen at all levels of the organisation.
3. It is a participatory form of monitoring that requires no special professional skills. Compared to other monitoring approaches, it is easy to communicate across cultures. There is no need to explain what an indicator is. Everyone can tell stories about events they think were important.
4. It encourages analysis as well as data collection because people have to explain why they believe one change is more important than another.
5. It can build staff capacity in analysing data and conceptualising impact.
6. It can deliver a rich picture of what is happening, rather than an overly simplified picture where organisational, social and economic developments are reduced to a single number.
7. It can be used to monitor and evaluate bottom-up initiatives that do not have predefined outcomes against which to evaluate.

You can read more about the technique in the hundred-page handbook.

Coaching: Three Levels of Listening

I’ve posted earlier on some listening frameworks (here and here). The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) training added another framework, three parts this time.

Level one: Listening within your own head

Similar to the level one listening from Scharmer, this listening is all about you. As a coach, if you’re listening from within your own head, you aren’t really hearing what’s being said. You’re hearing your own inner voice wondering what question you’ll ask next, if you’re adding any value for this client, that you’ve heard all this before, that you need to pick up vegetables on the way home…

Level two: “Hard focus”

CTI calls this “hard focus” listening; it means focusing completely on the other person (i.e. the client). The other person is taking up all of your listening to the extent that it’s almost as if there is a bubble around you. We saw a few demonstrations of this type of listening from the expert coaches teaching our course – where they coached someone in front of the rest of us, but were so intent in their listening that it was as if the rest of us weren’t there.

Level three: “global listening”

Level three listening is also known as a “softer focus”, and there’s a place for it in coaching as well. With the level three listening, the coach listens to the edges around and the atmosphere within the bubble – so to speak – of the coach and client. At this level you listen for the emotion and energetic sense of the person, but also are aware of what’s going on in the room, the environment. For example, if there’s a fire truck going by, alarms blaring, during a particularly intense part of the coaching conversation, listening at level three means you’ll acknowledge it rather than pretending it’s not going on and intruding on the conversation.

I think the level three listening is a good one for group facilitators to think about in terms of distractions – I’ve often seen facilitators try (and have tried myself) to ignore distractions and proceed as if they’re not happening, forging on ahead in a loud voice and extra energy while half the group is distracted watching the facility staff arrive and set up a new flipchart (or some other interruption). Better to acknowledge, “Okay, we’re getting a new flipchart. Let’s get that set up.” It probably only requires ten seconds of acknowledged attention, but without that ten seconds of acknowledgement you’ve lost the group’s attention for a full minute or two. With that ten seconds acknowledgement, you can draw the group’s attention back and then carry forward.

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.

Anti-Oppression Training

A few weeks ago I took an anti-racism and anti-oppression training from the Toronto Hostels Training Centre. I enjoyed training in a participant group as culturally diverse as Toronto itself, and exchanging viewpoints with participants who work in various social service agencies throughout Toronto.

I’m getting familiar with the standard tools used in anti-oppression training (I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been in a training that received Peggy McIntosh’s Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack reading, available online in many places; and I’ve completed many versions of the power flower, or social identity wheel, in training workshops). Toronto Hostels Training Centre took the training a bit further with scenarios and role-plays of oppressive or racist situations encountered in social services agencies in Toronto, and the option of an advanced training offered later in the year.

I’ve found their list of “typical roles played during discriminatory incidents” helpful in considering what roles are being played, and what role needs to be played, when I witness a discriminatory event. The typical roles they identify (adapted from Komiotis and Dale, Toronto, 1998 ) are: the instigator (the source of the discrimination), the colluder (allows or joins in on the discrimination), the target, the silent observer (may be uncomfortable or opposed to the discrimination, but by his/her silence offers collusion), and the active opponent. Options available to the active opponent include: reframing what was said, asking questions, providing information, challenging beliefs, direct naming of what happened, and providing or seeking appropriate follow-up or debrief for individuals involved.

I’m looking for examples of these roles being played, and challenging myself to find ways to be the active opponent. Along a similar vein, I’ve been able to incorporate a Social Justice day into the leadership course I’m teaching at the Royal Ontario Museum, and tomorrow we’ll start out in the exhibit Out From Under: Disability, History, and Things to Remember, and will analyze barriers to participation that might be experienced by someone with a disability joining our leadership course.