Operating Practices for Leaders

A little while ago my colleague Dr Garth Britton and I began thinking about the ways in which our work as consultants and coaches had changed over the past five years. At the time we developed a very rough description of an approach we called Open-Ended Consulting based on some broad broad patterns we had detected in our practices. Then we got busy with work and life and didn’t progress this any further.

I’ve been thinking recently that much that I have learned as a consultant and Executive Coach I wish I have known when I was a senior executive. With that in mind I returned to this work and thought I would share these “practices” with you, with a view to fleshing each of them out over the coming months.

So here they are:

1. Begin in the middle – observe people and their work in context and develop rich description(s) of the situation and its antecedents.
2. Engage deeply and often – talk frequently to test insights and understandings and agree what is intended and what needs to be done.
3. Work together to co-design and articulate new ways forward (next steps), alternate understandings and potential new practices (disciplines).
4. Initiate short, sharp activities to test ideas, strategies and implementation approaches
5. Notice “rich points” and “striking moments” and explore similarities and differences
6. Continuously gather data to inform and test the ongoing usefulness of new frames and formatively evaluate the impact and effectiveness of emerging practices and tentative action.

Our thinking, as we identified these practices, has been heavily influenced by an alternative tradition of  thought about how we, as humans, engage with the world and each other. This tradition is strongly social in its underpinnings, recognising that from our birth, if not before, we engage with the world around us, including other people, both bodily and discursively. It is therefore a powerful alternative to strongly individualist ideas and helps to counteract the prevailing tendency to see the mind as separate and superior to the body, including particularly emotions and intuition.  In our view this tendency often leads us to seek objectivity in situations where it is simply not possible. At least not in the time available to make a decision about what to do next. It also means we often under-value the other ways of knowing we have available to us.

Exploring and experimenting with these practices has helped us be more confident in starting our work in complex and ambiguous circumstances by simply talking to people about how they are experiencing the situation and how they understand it. It has also reinforced for us the value of local, contextualised understandings and locally developed experiments, prototypes and actions as the basis of learning the way forward, one step at a time.

For the moment I’ll leave you with this thought:

“The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible.”

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone