Two Skills All Coaches Need

Two enemies of critical thinking are conflating different things and not attending to how different things relate to each other.?

In the earlier chapter What’s the Difference Between Experts and Those With Less Competence we saw how experts see differences between different things. However, even when these differences are noted, people often conflate their behavior.

For example, consider the following types of work we do:

1. How we should be doing our work.
2. How people in an organization will react to proposed changes.
3. Discovering the product to build.
4. The market our product is in.
5. What happens outside of our company.

All are complex. But the complexity of them is different. We need to notice this. Our lack of ability to predict what is happening outside of our company, for instance, does not mean we can’t reasonably predict how to do our work.

How we relate things to each other is equally important.

Russ Ackoff talks about systems as being defined by the relationships between their components. Focusing on improving parts does not get you a good system.

For example, take the best parts of the best cars and put them together and you get a pile of junk. “Carness” is from how the parts work together.

When we view systems this way, we focus on the relationships between the components. We can create theories that explain behavior. We can see cause and effect. For example, delays in feedback enable mistakes we made to create waste. Working on too many things causes delays in the workflow which delays feedback. Lack of alignment requires more coordination which wastes time and causes delays.

When we combine these two skills, we can see that complexity is not very simple. There are many things intertwined with each other – some straightforward, some complicated, and some undecipherable due to the complexities of their interactions.

In creating value for our stakeholders, we have several different dimensions we must work with:

1. Discovering what product must be built
2. How long this will take and how to schedule for it
3. How we communicate with each other
4. How we do our work to keep workload below capacity and achieve quick feedback
5. How teams should be organized
6. How individual teams work
7. How teams interact with each other
8. The role of management

It’s tempting to just lump these all together, but we must make distinctions between them if we want to enable us to have all the power we can here. And we must see how they interact with each other as well.

This is an excerpt from Being an Effective Value Coach: Leading by Coaching People to Add Value For Themselves and others by Al Shalloway and Paula Stewart

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