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.

Any time we attempt to impose a change on a system, whether that system is an organisation or an individual, we create resistance. The system pushes back. The harder we push the change, the harder the system pushes back. Eventually one or other of the materials involved (in this case the organisation and the coach) will break. Usually it's the coach who either burns out or gets fired, but sometimes the organisation suffers badly as well, as anyone who has lived through a major restructure driven by coaches or consultants can attest.

So does this mean that coaching is a futile exercise? That creating change is impossible because of the resistance in the system? No. There's a key word in that paragraph above. Can you guess what it is?

Impose is the key word. Any time we impose change on a system, any time the coach tries to force the system to change, then the system pushes back. You can't force a system to change without something breaking. If you can't make a system change then where does that leave coaches? Our job is to be change agents. It usually says so right in the job description - drive change into the organisation or words like that. How do we do our jobs?

There's another way of writing that job description. Instead of "drive change” you could say "facilitate change”. That's much better. In fact any organisation that writes a coaching job description like that first one clearly knows nothing about how change works and you should probably think twice about going there. Coaches can't drive or force change. What we can do is facilitate change. We can help the system change itself.

This is where we have the advantage over the physical sciences. You can't ask a pipe to become wider or a wire to lower its resistance, but you can ask a system made up of thinking people to change. We need to engage with the system and get the system to change itself.

Whether the system is a single person, a team or a whole organisation, we need to engage with it and start a conversation about where they are, where they want to go and why they need to change in order to get there. We need to help and guide them on that journey. 

What we need to do as coaches is not drive or force change but to create the conditions where the system can start to change itself.

People talk a lot about co-creating change - coach and coachee working together to improve, hand in hand, as equal partners, and that's an awesome model but it's not the whole story. Co-creation implies a level of knowledge on the part of the coachee that they may not have. They may not have the faintest clue how or where to start or even where they need to go. They are in no position to co-create. If you try co-creation with them they will flounder. If they look to you for direction and you just keep asking them which way they want to go, things will go nowhere and you will soon be out of a job. "Too theoretical” is the charge levelled against coaches who give questions and no answers.

While co-creation is the goal, the partnership may well be much more unequal at first. After all, you are the expert they have brought in. They are looking to you for answers. You need to supply them with some. But you need to do it without imposing change on them. It's a delicate balancing act. You need to supply the actions but the desire to take those actions needs to be theirs, not yours.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

That's your job as a coach. To teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. To instil in them the desire for change. Once that's done, giving them a nudge in the right direction is easy and as they build their knowledge and skill, both in the thing you are trying to do and in the process of exploration and change itself, soon you'll be walking hand in hand and co-creating together.