Getting It Out of Our Heads

Over the past ten years what I do and how I do it has changed significantly.

One shift has been in the area of coaching. When I began in 2000 coaching was arguably just entering its second generation and moving from a focus on what might be called skills coaching, which grew out of sports coaching, into goal focused coaching. The kind of coaching that is exemplified by the GROW model. That is, helping people achieve what they needed to achieve in the context of their role within an organisation and/or their aspirations in life. The focus was and remains on performance in relation to specific goals or ends.

Early on I was lucky enough to encounter a number of people who certainly didn’t need skills coaching and were very adept at achieving goals and making things happen. They did, however, sometimes find themselves in situations that were hard to figure out and in which conventional approaches to leading, managing and organising didn’t always seem to work. With these people I quickly became a partner in conversations that were much more focused on sense-making to some degree but often just on finding a way to “go on”. That is to work out what would make sense for them to do in this situation at this time, given what they currently knew.

Two things in particular grew out of this experience for me. Firstly the recognition that in many instances working out how to “go on” or perhaps “make progress” was a great outcome, because in many of these circumstances it was actually impossible to frame the issue as a problem, at least in the conventional way. Often it was nothing more than a sense of unease or disquiet. Sometimes it was something so complex that establishing even a cursory sense of the factors that were at work was too difficult. So people had got used to feeling their way forward but appreciated the time and space to talk it through a bit.

Secondly I developed a heightened appreciation of the power of what one writer calls “relational-responsive” talk. What I mean by that is that it was OK to be involved in a conversation that went all over the place, that wasn’t structured and which I contributed observations and opinions to (conventionally coaches didn’t offer advice). These were conversations which required significant attention and I found myself somehow knowing what to say without having consciously thought about it. I also learned, through practice, that it helps to make any “background thinking” explicit, rather than keeping it hidden.

I began to understand more fully that who we are and how we “show up” in a conversation is an incredibly important part of what sets really good leaders apart. I also began to understand more fully how much the conventional thinking about leadership actually constrains how many people in leadership roles feel they are able to be. It demands a degree of forward focused certainty that actually proves quite difficult to maintain in reality.

I learned therefore that a different kind of conversation from the usual is needed when it is not so much a problem that you are attempting to solve as a difficulty that you are trying become attuned to and find your way about in. In fact this kind of talk/thinking happens, whether we like it or not, long before there can be talk of goals, actions and other kinds of more focused descriptions. It just that it mostly happens in the confusion of our inner conversations.

Getting it out in the open and putting it, however tentatively, into words, can be incredibly useful.