Coachtech and the generation gap

A conversation I find myself having quite often with coaches is around which technologies we might want to consider using. That's what led me to write Superhuman Coaching, as it turns out.

It isn't where I gravitate to most quickly. I enjoy talking about the bleeding edge of technology development, and how it might impact coaching - perhaps that's the dreamer in me. I enjoy talking about the risks and ethical concerns technology raises (of which there are legion), and how coaches should respond to them - with a background in technology risk management I'm afraid I can't help that! But, more often than not, the discussion ends up at a much more tactical level, centring around technologies that a coach could use today in their sessions.

That's not a problem, of course. I enjoy talking about that as well, technology offers the opportunity to introduce more tools into our coaching toolbox, and some coachees want us to be doing that sort of thing. But a question that often comes up is: Does a coach's age have an impact on their adoption of technology?

This is often positioned as a generation gap. Younger people are digital natives, and older people are digital migrants. I like the way Douglas Adams describes it:

"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

Unfortunately, reality is more complex and nuanced than that, for two primary reasons.

1. Generation titles oversimplify things.

Apparently, I'm a Millennial. That makes me, as summed up by Simon Sinek, "entitled, narcissistic, self-interested, unfocused, and lazy". Possibly all of those words could be used to describe me. But that word, Millennial, spans a broad range of options. I'm of the pretty unique age where I'm too young to have ever seen a workplace not run on computers, and yet old enough to have gone through my teens without the internet. I got my first mobile phone while doing my A-Levels (a Nokia 5110 with removable Bart Simpson facia), while younger Millennials might have had a smartphone throughout secondary school.

Saying "Millenials adopt technology more quickly than Gen Xers" or something similar is overlooking the diversity of experiences held within each generation. While we all can't help falling into one category or another, there are aspects of each generation's stereotypes that we will feel aligned with or disconnected from.

While on the surface it might make sense that younger coaches will be more likely to adopt technology than older coaches, it certainly isn't as simple as that.

2. There are bigger drivers for technology adoption.

The well-known innovation adoption curve, from Everett Rogers' book Diffusion of Innovations, explores plenty of factors that influence people adopting technology. Income's a big one, because new technologies are often expensive. Personal connections also have a big impact, because hanging around with the right person will lead to getting exposed to different technologies, increasing one's awareness. And that can happen on a macro scale, too. Bluetooth headphones have been around for a long time, but when Apple launch them (with great aplomb) they're suddenly everywhere.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of whether or not someone will adopt some new technology is their degree of openness. Some coaches who have been around the block a time or two more than the rest of us might be much more keen on using technology, and some Gen Z coaches might be Luddites!

Let's make the conversation more human-sized.

It's tempting to want to categorise, generalising to make the world feel simpler to manage and predict. But each one of us is an individual, with our own preferences and strengths. There might be a general tendency for younger coaches to be quicker to adopt emerging technology, but that isn't a good enough reason or excuse to embrace it or avoid it.

A better angle, I think, is to think about coachees on a case by case basis. Each one of them has their own preferences towards or away from technology, and if we consider technology part of our working alliance with them - and it is - we'll adopt it and ignore it as best makes sense for them.

The truth is that our coachees are becoming younger relative to us, because we're all getting older. As a result of that, there will be some technologies that they'll have adopted long before we even become aware of them. But that shouldn't stop us from being able to work with them in a coaching context.

For the sake of building and maintaining rapport let's keep working on becoming more informed about what sorts of technologies are out there, what might be coming, and how we might become the best coaches we can be for our coachees using technology as part of our toolkits.