Learning To Separate People And Their Ideas

I'm sure we have all been in this position - you are in a meeting where ideas are being shared. Someone puts forward an idea and someone raises an objection. The raiser of the idea reacts as if they have just been punched in the face - angry, defensive, aggressive. Or sullen, withdrawn, silent. Fight or flight. And all because someone raised an objection to their idea. People tend to hold their ideas very tightly. They identify with them. They are their idea. So an attack on their idea is very literally an attack on them.

Or what about this one - you were just in a meeting and someone says to you "that was a pretty bad idea they raised.. what a fool they must be". In this case we are associating the idea with the character of the person who raised it. The idea was bad so therefore, by extension, they must be bad. We see both of these situations all the time. Both associating strongly with your own ideas, and conflating the quality of an idea with the attributes or character of the person who raised it, are things most of us do all the time, and they are both extremely unhelpful.

CoachingDave Martin27 October 2020coaching, personal growth, mindset, learning, leadershipComment

Making Things Visible Lets Us Control Them

One of the most effective things any person or team can do to improve the way they work is to make their work visible. Unless you work in a factory building physical things, chances are most of your work is invisible. It lives in emails and in documents and in conversations. It's not physical stuff that you can easily see in front of you. It's hard to get an overall picture of where all your work is in your process and where things are getting stuck. On a factory floor you can see a pile of parts build up in front of a bottleneck. It's really hard to do that with invisible work. Invisible work generally only becomes visible when there is a problem.

So if you want to understand your work, you need some way to make it visible. Make a big board somewhere and put cards on it representing all the work that is in flight and where it is in your process. By visualising work that is usually invisible, you can start to see patterns and make changes to improve the flow. If is invisible you can't control it. You only become aware of it when it jumps out at you and causes you a problem. By making the invisible visible you gain control over something. That works great for things like invisible work, but what about other invisible things? Things like our own internal states - our thoughts and emotions.

CoachingDave Martin13 October 2020coachingComment

Tension and the desire for change Part 2

Last time I wrote about the drive for change being caused by a tension between the way we want the world to be and the way the world is. We looked at the two ways in which to release that tension - change reality to match your vision, or lower your vision to match reality. We explored the sad fact that most of the time it’s much easier to lower your expectations and what happens when you do that. We also looked at how you can keep your dreams alive in the face of difficulty - by not fixating on reaching the goal but focusing on the progress made along the journey. That post generated a bunch of questions from readers so I thought I'd write a follow-up to address them.

There were three main questions raised - does the goal have to be an external goal (change the world) and not an internal goal (change me); is any changing of your goal a bad thing; and what to do if you are a really goal oriented person and keep focusing on reaching that goal.

CoachingDave Martin29 September 2020goals, coaching, changeComment

Tension and the desire for change

We all carry within us a picture of how we would like reality to be. Then there is the objective reality that surrounds us. When those two do not agree, an uncomfortable tension is built up and it is this tension that creates the desire for change. Our imagined state is usually a much happier/more productive/more complete state than the one we actually find ourselves in. How many times have you said to yourself something like "I wish I could be more..." or even more commonly "I wish work could be more like...."? The difference between our dreams and aspirations and where we find ourselves creates a mental tension and this drives the desire to change.

Mental tension is uncomfortable. It needs to be resolved. It won't resolve itself - something needs to change to resolve that tension. There are only two things that can change here, either we make changes to make the world we live in more like the one we aspire to, or we lower our aspirations to make our dreams more like reality. Either we change the world, or the world changes us. Unfortunately, it is often much easier to adjust our aspirations downwards than to make real change in the world.

Organisational Change, CoachingDave Martin15 September 2020organisational change, change, personal growthComment

Feeling Stuck?

Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks, or months) where you just feel stuck? What do I mean by stuck? That feeling that you are not making progress. That you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is changing. Solving the same problem time after time and knowing that tomorrow you will probably be solving the same problems again. That feeling that you are working really hard but not really achieving anything.

If you do feel that way, I'm going to let you in on a secret - it's not just you. Unless you have talked openly to others about this (and how many of us have done that?), you probably feel like it's just you. That everyone else around you feels fine and is having a great, fulfilling experience. But they probably aren't. That feeling of being stuck is pretty common. Most of us have spent weeks, months or even whole careers feeling like that. It's not much fun. It's draining. Soul destroying. It leads to stress, burnout and just plain unhappiness. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

CoachingDave Martin1 September 2020capability building, complexity, development, coaching, psychologyComment

Crisis = Opportunity

Here in Australia (and around the world) we have seen crisis after crisis recently. In the last 6 months or so we have seen a horrific fire season that flattened whole towns and vast areas of wilderness. We have seen a global pandemic that has devastated lives around the world. We have seen the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by events overseas, but now shining a long overdue light on the lives of our Indigenous people and their often horrific treatment by law enforcement, and society in general. So far, 2020 has been a year of constant crisis.

It's an old cliche that every crisis is an opportunity in disguise. It usually pops up on awful inspirational posters or the social media posts of people who look insufferably smug. Sadly, it seems that those posters and smug social media folks are right. A crisis provides a shock to the system. It breaks the existing order. It forces a rebuilding and that rebuilding is where the opportunity is, if we can seize it.

Coaching, LeadershipDave Martin21 July 2020leadership, positivity, organisational changeComment

It's not really about results

As coaches, we have it drilled into us that coaching is about results - help people and organisations set goals and achieve them. We get fixated on getting the result we (and hopefully our clients) want. Particularly in the agile coaching world, we want our clients to "be agile" and we work hard to get to that result. The problem we have is that we are looking for big changes and big results - make this whole organisation (or BU or Team) agile. That requires a lot of change and the one thing we know about change, any change, is that it's hard and slow. Big change is even harder and slower. Big change that not only changes the way people work, but changes the way they think as well, is just about the hardest thing you can imagine doing. Especially at any sort of scale.

So we are often looking for particular results, but not achieving them. The system is changing but not enough to get us our result. So our instinct is to push harder. Drive the change more to speed up the result. The big problem with that, as we saw last time, is that pressure drives resistance and the harder we push, the harder the system pushes back. By trying harder to achieve our result, we make our result harder to achieve. So what do we do?

CoachingDave Martin7 July 2020coaching, organisational changeComment

Pressure Creates Resistance

As a brewer, when you hook up a keg of beer to the gas and hook up the tap, one of the things you learn quite quickly (unless you really like drinking nothing but foam) is that the pressure of the gas pushing the liquid through the tube creates a resistance in that tube that poses the flow. The more pressure, the more resistance. Eventually the resistance becomes too much, creates turbulence and the tap will pour gas and foam rather than lovely beer. Electrical engineers recognise this phenomenon as well - the more current you push through a wire (the pressure of the electrons), the more the wire will resist their flow and cause energy to be lost as heat. Eventually the wire will get so hot that it will melt.

This is a well known phenomenon of many of the physical sciences. Whenever you push one thing into or through another thing, there is resistance and that resistance is proportional to the pressure doing the pushing - small pressure, small resistance. Large pressure, large resistance. Importantly, that resistance can build to a point where it will cause damage to the materials involved. Push too hard and the wire will melt or the pipe will burst. Pushing harder may actually get you less flow because the resistance is greater. So why am I telling you this? Because it applies to coaching as well, but unlike the physical sciences we often don't recognise it.

CoachingDave Martin23 June 2020coaching, learning, leadershipComment

We Are What We Practice

A long time ago (although not in a galaxy far, far away), a rather clever fellow by the name of Buddha pre-empted the discovery of neuroplasticity by a thousand or so years when he said something along the lines of

"We are what we have practised. What we practice today is what we will become".

I say along the lines of because there are dozens of different translations but the message is basically the same. That the things we practice become stronger.

If I were a neuroscientist I could say it like this -

"If it fires together, it wires together".

Neurons that fire together build stronger connections so that sequence of firing becomes easier in future. As we practice something, the neurons fire together, wire together, build strong connections and whatever it is we are practising becomes easier and easier. We are used to this when learning skills - as we practice we get better. At first we have to think about what we are doing and it is slow and clumsy but eventually our bodies take over and things become smoother and more skilful. The sport you are practising becomes easier. The language you are learning becomes easier.

CoachingDave Martin9 June 2020positivity, practice, leadership, learningComment