Lessons on learning from the spiritual to the secular - enough is never enough

Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.

 

From a quotation by Desmond Tutu 

The purpose of this post is to revisit a model of learning that I put together as part of some study for a coaching qualification that I completed in 2013.  The model that I produced I've called NODES in recognition of the fact that, for me, much if not all of what I learn is accomplished in relationship with others.  It emerged as a means of conceptualising a number of things that felt important to me about the process of learning: I learn with and from others, and the resposibilities of learning: if I am learning from others then I have a responsibility to be generous in sharing what I am learning.

I've embedded a link to a Slideshare presentation about NODES and the underpinning ideas, from which I have drawn, to develop the model.

Nodes model of conversational learning and social collaboration from John Rogers

From the spiritual

I want to draw attention to a conversation that I listened to in December 2014 when the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Rt Hon Justin Welby, was interviewed for the BBC Desert Island Discs programme.  In the conversation the presenter Kirsty Young asked the Archbishop a question about prayer:

KY "How do you know when a time of prayer has finished? How do you know when enough is enough?

JW: "I don't think enough is ever enough in prayer.  Because prayer is about engaging with Jesus Christ, us allowing his presence to shape us and to bring what is in us to him or just to enjoy his presence and there's never enough of that and certainly not in this job is there ever enough of it and so I don't think I can answer it because I don't think I've got to enough of it yet."

I thought that this was an interesting response for a number of reasons: The Archbishop was underlining the importance of relationships and inter-relationships, the need to engage in a relationship openly, whether through conversation or simply enjoying being with another person; to being open to our thoughts and feelings and to allow these thoughts to be shaped by others; to take seriously our own experience and to make it available to others so they too can use the ideas to develop their own experiences.  In sum, it was pointing the way towards what it means to be human and therefore, in the context of who was saying it, how to live in the image of God.

To the secular

From the secular domain of everyday workplace learning, here are three examples of how Rio Tinto, Xerox and LV= are solving problems by invoking the spirit and the practice of NODES. 

• Fixing the brakes on a bulldozer: a Community of Practice (CoP) success story from Rio Tinto link

• Mending photocopiers: an Infographic from Xerox link

• Helping customers get the right information: a case study from LV= link 

Conclusion - enough is never enough

 

It is in the Archbishop's response to the question 'How do you know when enough is enough?' that I relate something of my own experience of what it means to learn with and learn from others.  From the cosmic to the commonplace, from the spiritual to the secular, it is in the work of networking with others that we create the spaces and the opportunities to learn continuously and ongoingly.  In that sense enough is never enough.







  

Learn from observing human behaviour using an 'empathy map'

I picked up this piece from the Harvard Business Review blog - Three Creativity Challenges from IDEO’s Leaders Link to HBR blog

All three of the creativity challenges are good; I know about mind-mapping and already use it regularly but the other two were new to me.  Of most interest was the third challenge - 'Learn from observing human behaviour'.

Why is this of interest?

I learn a lot from watching and listening intently to what is going on around me everyday.  In my coaching work, in particular, I pay attention to the social data emerging in the conversation. In my professional development as a coach a lot of emphasis was placed on paying attention in any conversation to what is being heard, what you see the other person doing and how all of this is making you feel.  The parallels between this and the empathy map were instantly clear.

I’m interested in observing all aspects of talk including things like pace and tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures and use of humour. I then use this social data to provide detailed observational feedback.  And in turn I have had consistent feedback about how useful this approach is.  Perhaps it's because it helps an individual to make a connection between the interaction-in-that-moment in the room, to parallel experiences happening elsewhere. 

Why it is important to management learning?

This quote from John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid describes something that reflects my own experience of management learning:

Most conventional learning theory, including that implicit in most training courses, tends to endorse the valuation of abstract knowledge over actual practice and as a result to separate learning from working and, more significantly, learners from workers. 

As I have discovered through observing managerial work, if everyday workplace practice is placed centre-stage, in other words endorsing actual practice over abstract knowledge, then what you get is lots of context-rich learning: about what actually gets done; practice that is good and bad; practice that shows what's 'in' and what's 'out' through what people talk about; practice that pays attention to who does what and how.

The 'Empathy Map'

The Empathy Map is a practical tool that can help structure the observational process.  

Here are the instructions, copied from the IDEO blog

TOOL: Empathy Map

PARTICIPANTS: Solo or groups of two to eight people

TIME: 30-90 minutes

SUPPLIES: Whiteboard or large flip chart, Post-its, and pens

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. On a whiteboard or a large flip chart, draw a four-quadrant map. Label the sections with “say,” “do,” “think,” and “feel,” respectively.
2. Write down each of your key observations from the field on one Post-it note and populate the “say” and “do” quadrants. Try color-coding, for example, using green Post-its for positive statements and actions, yellow for neutral, and pink or red for frustrations, confusion, or pain points.
3. When you run out of observations (or room) in those quandrants, begin to fill the “think and” and “feel” sections with Post-its, based on the body language, tone, and choice of words you observed. Use the same color coding.
4. Take a step back and look at the map as a whole. What insights or conclusions can you draw from what you’ve written down. What seems new or surprising? Are there contradictions or disconnects within or between quadrants? What unexpected patterns appear? What, if any, latent human needs emerge?

Conclusion

Whether your interest is in IDEO's use of the empathy map as an aid to creativity or as a tool to capture different aspects of everyday practice, my sense is that it offers a practical method to help pay attention to what is going on.  And from which new ideas might emerge or provide the basis for feedback.  Experience-based learning can sometimes mean taking people out of the workplace to experience different environments, e.g. learning expeditions and project assignments but it can more simply be about learning from what's going on right now in situ.  

 

Management development - filling empty vessels or valuing experience?

Picture credit - Helping you Harmonise

I return to an issue that I have written about before, namely the development of management competence.

The reason that this has come back into my consciousness again is the experience that I had last week working with a group of aspiring managers over a period of three days.  In the group of 12, one person was currently in a line management role, another had been a line manager at a mobile phone company before joining the current organisation in a front-line role; the remaining 10 people were also in front-line roles but who had had no explicit management experience.  I share this because it posed some questions for me: would a course designed primarily for people with management experience still be relevant? how might I need to adapt my style to facilitate their learning?

An important principle that guides my thinking is that people are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge.  Their life experiences, the jobs they are doing or have done, their prior knowledge and skills all come with them into any situation be this a formal learning intervention like a course or doing their everyday work. It is this experience that is the root of their learning and my job is to facilitate or animate this.  To animate derives from the French – animateur – and includes meanings of “to give life to, to quicken, to enliven, to inspire, to encourage, to activate or to put in motion”.  This is a reference from David Boud and Nod Miller's 1996 book 'Working with Experience: Animating Learning in which they describe five propositions to guide facilitators/animators:

1. Experience is the foundation of, and stimulus for, learning
2. Learners actively construct their own experience
3. Learning is holistic
4. Learning is socially and culturally constructed
5. Learning is influenced by the socio-emotional context in which it occurs

Take seriously our own experience

 

The themes and topics that I talked about with the group covered a typical agenda for management development: self-awareness, situational leadership, objective setting, development planning, characteristics of high performing teams and stages of development, influencing, motivation, feedback and coaching.  In conversation with the group, it quickly became clear that, far from being empty vessels, they already knew a great deal about the topics.  In fact, as I reflect on this experience, perhaps the most important thing I did was to take seriously their prior knowledge before adding to it.  The result was a palpable sense of self-confidence within the group that they already knew a great deal, notwithstanding their relative managerial inexperience.  Both they and I were encouraged and motivated by this approach. 

 
My encouragement to all who I work with, whether in groups or individually, is to pay attention to what each of us is already doing and has always been doing, as opposed to what we should be doing.  Experience is the critical reflection point from which our insights can form the basis for action.   

Learning: Roman roads or woodpaths

 

As I wrote about in my post Learning: Roman roads or woodpaths, management developers are attracted to the possibility of identifying clear pathways and defined steps to follow.  In practice, much of our management learning is messy and nebulous and resistant to approaches, however tempting, that force us to follow a prescribed path.  

How?

 

Any form of inquiry-based process that stimulates the workings of our cognitive systems and which give us control over what is learned.  

Coaching and action learning.  Both are effective if there are others that can work with you in these ways.

Or self-reflective methods that can be done on your own like:

Freefall Writing  - this is good for working on issues or topics where you have a nagging concern about something but are struggling to articulate.  

Evernote, which is good for grabbing web pages and adding notes about fragments of ideas that can be returned to later and reviewed.

Blogging is certainly my most important learning tool.  I value the discipline that comes with writing something that is visible to all.

11 qualities of an effective manager - updated with a Slideshare presentation.

I have been blogging regularly for just over three years and the most popular post over this period was the one I wrote in September 2013 called 11 Qualities of the Effective Manager and their sources of learning It summarised the key findings of some research done with practising managers by two academics at Lancaster University in the UK.

To build on this blog, I have produced a short presentation of the research and included some reflections about the implications and possible methods to continue to develop managers and leaders.  The link to the presentation is here

11 qualities of the effective manager slideshare nov 2014 from John Rogers

What else? - a great coaching question but what else?

Julie Johnson, a business associate of mine, posted this piece on her blog about the 'What else?' question in a coaching conversation:

Imagine that you are coaching someone, and you both agree that it is time to focus on generating possible solutions to the challenge at hand. So you ask your coachee: “How can you achieve this goal?”  Without any hesitation, you receive an answer. What do you do next?

Let’s take a case in point. A few years ago I was coaching someone who wanted to get better at giving strategic presentations, especially to senior management. We had already explored what had gone well and less well in the past, conditions that have an impact on performance, the advantages to achieving the goal and the disadvantages of not achieving it. By this point, his motivation was solidly in place. With both of us keen to get to solutions, the conversation went something like this: 

I asked, “What can you do to improve your presentations skills when presenting to senior management?” My coachee quickly replied, “I can take a course.” 

Tempted to explore possible courses, and whether there was a budget for a course available, etc. etc., I simply made note and asked, “What else?”  He quickly replied, “I can get a presentation coach.” 

I thought about exploring the qualities of the ideal presentation coach, but didn’t.  Instead I inquired, “And what else can you do?” There was a slight pause, and then he answered, “Well, I could go on YouTube and check out the techniques of some of my favorite speakers. [pause] And TedTalks. Mmm. I’d like that.” 

I noted once more, and then said, “What other things might you do?” There was a significant pause, during which he looked out the window. Then he said, “David. He is quite good. I’d love to have coffee with him and pick his brain. [pause] And I really need to watch him more consciously when he presents next time, and figure out what it is he is doing exactly that works so well.”

“Mmmm.” I said, noting these new ideas. “And what else would work for you?” This pause was even longer, and I waited. Finally he said, “Well, a couple of my team members have attended some senior management meetings, and they’ve seen me in action.  I bet they would be happy to give me candid feedback and suggestions.”

Tempted to ask who he might speak with and what questions he might ask, I just said “Ok. Anything else?” After a very, very long silence, he said “Well frankly, if I am really serious about this, I should practice my next presentation several times before I actually have to give it. [pause] I could even film myself. Yes! Yes! It would be so useful to observe myself in action! Then, when I finally like what I see, I will have the confidence to do a repeat performance when it really matters!”

When he was out of ideas, we reviewed each option he had generated, and then moved eagerly on to action planning.

While some of those post-question silences were pretty long, I don’t even think that my coachee noticed them. He was very busy creating. His first ideas were probably not new, because his answers came immediately after the question was posed. But because I kept asking the same question (with different words) over and over again, his mind kept creating, and the pauses between question and answer got longer and longer.

My general guideline in these situations is “The longer the silence, the newer the idea.” There are two things to avoid once you have carefully crafted this creative moment:

• Don’t grab one idea and analyze it in detail – leave that for later once all the ideas are on the table.

• Keep in mind that the longer the silence after your question, the harder your coachee is probably thinking, and therefore creating. If your question is followed by silence, you are probably ‘on a roll’! This is the best confirmation that your question is a good one!

 Link to Julie Johnson's blog


I like the narrative style.  It's practical and gives a good insight into the judgements that a coach continually has to make about the nature of their interventions.  I shared the blog with some managers that I had been working with on coaching practices the day after the blog was posted and I received this response from one of the recipients shortly afterwards: 

Thanks John.  I actually used this approach with one of my team – it worked brilliantly, and almost as set out above.

...nice feedback and evidence of the importance of sharing ideas and practices.

Coaching practice - what else do we need to consider?

Through my masters studies I looked in some detail at the field of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology and the structuring of sense-making that is part of everyday conversational interaction. If you are interested in following this in more detail please go to my blog Observing Practice.

Of particular interest in Julie's account is the description of the silences. What's noticeable is the work that's going on in the silences.  

The 'what else?' question is an effective device to stimulate thought and the skill of the coach is to hold the pause to allow the thinking work to develop - "There was a significant pause, during which he looked out the window".  However, what we can't tell from this is what the coach was doing whilst the coachee was looking out of the window.  My expectation is that the coach was helping to maintain the silence by following good listening practices like maintaining eye contact and avoiding non-verbal gestures or movements that might distract the silence.  My point is that these practices are being taken-for-granted but they are as much a part of the ordering process to accomplish an effective coaching intervention as the powerfulness of the question itself.

Why is this important?

Coaching is an important approach to helping facilitate change in individuals and teams.  However, like other management practices, it has a kind of mysterious 'black box' quality to it; coaching is not accomplished through a model or a set of questions or behaviours but through a choreography of fine-grained actions that emerge situationally each and every time a coach works with an individual or a team.  In other words, however good 'what else?' is as a question - and it's one that I often use too when I'm coaching - it rather glosses over a lot of important but unseen work that is also contributing to the result.  

The challenge of capturing everyday action 

My continuing interest in conversation analysis is the opportunity that it offers to study the choreography and use it as a learning tool to  enhance the development of coaches and coaching practice. 

The challenge is that this choreography slips by too quickly and is too nuanced; and to be of use the action would need to be captured on video or audio and then analysed to produce a micro level detail of practice.  I know from personal experience that the analysis takes a great deal of time and, at present, is too onerous to be of practical use.  

However, I am hopeful.  Big data technologies are now emerging that are able to provide information about, inter alia, workplace interactions  - for an example see the HBR blog The new science of building great teams and the use of electronic badges to gather interactional data.  This type of analysis looks very promising and is producing some ground-breaking insight into how people interact.  It forms part of some work that is being described as social physics that is coming out of MIT.  I'm reading up on this at the moment and will write a further post of my sensing making on this topic.