Provision #735: Qualms Matter
Laser Provision
Few, if any, leaders would disagree with the title of today's Provision.
Quality matters. Quality matters not only in our goods and services, it also
matters in the way we carry and conduct ourselves as leaders. If quality is so
important, then, it becomes a key work of leadership to continuously maintain
and to constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve quality. If that doesn't
always define your leadership, or if you're not sure how to do it, then this is
the Provision for you. Read on.
LifeTrek Provision
Since 1998 I have been in the business of coaching leaders. There have been many
other assignments, of course, such as my extensive involvement in the work of
schools and
Wellcoaches, but coaching leaders has
always been in play.
That's because leaders value the importance of quality and understand coaching
as a way to improve quality. That's not because coaches are necessarily experts
in the content matter of any leader's particular position; that's rather because
coaches are process-matter experts in the key work of learning from experience.
In a certain sense, then, no leader actually needs a coach. Learning from
experience is a universal attribute of humans and other animals. The most
primordial of which has to do with aversion. Hence the age-old expression, "Fool
me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
It doesn't take too many burned hands before young children learn to avoid
touching a hot stove. The pain leads instantaneously to a reflex reaction; the
reflection on that experience then leads to the theory that we will keep our
hands away from hot stoves in the future.
Such reflection on action represents one of the hallmarks of human intelligence.
Thanks to our massive cerebral cortexes, no animal can match our ability to
learn from experience and to apply that learning over time.
One can even make the case that all learning is a matter of reflection on
experience. Even book learning has to be applied before it really makes sense
and takes hold. And, in the application process, great ideas are inevitably
transformed. Theory to practice is never a straightforward matter. It always
involves improvisation.
So I'm not persuaded that learning is ever a matter of reflection on reflection.
Such meta-reflections are little more than ruminations. They may feel good,
meeting our brain's need for stimulation, but they don't constitute real
learning until they get applied and adapted and we have the opportunity once again to
reflect on experience.
All learning, it seems to me, is action learning. And we don't always learn from
our mistakes; indeed, the best learning often comes from our successes. That may
sound counter-intuitive, but there is a growing body of research underlying one
of my favorite quotes from Marcus Buckingham: "Excellence is not the opposite of
failure. To learn about success you have to study success. Only successful
examples can tell you what excellence looks like."
The best learning, in other words, is not aversive (what we want to avoid) but
attractive (what we want to amplify). Take the study from the 1980s of two
groups of bowlers. Both groups were of comparable ability and both groups were
involved with the same bowling league in Wisconsin. Their desire? To learn how
to be better bowlers.
Researchers filmed the bowlers so they could watch themselves bowl as an
action-learning strategy. What the bowlers didn't know, however, was that the
films were edited differently. One group was shown only the times when they made mistakes
(gutter balls and missed pins). The message: figure out what you were doing
wrong so that you can avoid those mistakes when you go back out to bowl.
The other group was shown only the times when they did well (strikes and
spares). The message: figure out what you were doing right so that you can
amplify those successes when you go back out to bowl. Sure enough, when they
went back out both groups had learned to bowl better. But the group who had
learned from their successes demonstrated significantly more improvement than
the group who had learned from their mistakes.
Many other studies have confirmed the value of learning from success. It is more
fun, more encouraging, and more directly relevant to our goals. By reflecting on
success we learn what we want to do instead of what we don't want to do. And the
brain has a difficult time with not.
Allow me to illustrate. For the rest of the day, I want you to avoid seeing red
cars. Don't notice them or pay any attention to them. And, while you are at it,
don't bump into anything, either. Just be careful and avoid both obvious and hidden
hazards.
Hopefully, I have not consigned you to a day of seeing red cars and bumping into
things. In fact, the best thing you can do is to forget my suggestion
altogether. The more you try to not see red cars or and the more you try to not
bump into things the more you will see and do those things. That's just the way the brain works.
Action learning, then, involves two critical ingredients. First, the discipline
of reflection. Unless we take the time to think about what we are doing, both in
the moment and after the fact, we will not learn and grow from our experiences.
That takes discipline because it's easy to be "busy, busy, busy" all of the
time.
Second, action learning requires the discipline of reflecting on success. It's
called a discipline because learning from success is not our first impulse. Pain is
designed to get our attention. It is a protective mechanism that hijacks our thinking
and takes over in the face of existential threats. That's when we "fight, freeze,
or flee," not to mention "tend and befriend," until the threats are mitigated and
resolved.
Such responses are so primordial that they have come to define human learning,
even when the threats are not existential. We assume that trouble shooting and problem
solving are the best ways to improve quality. Take, for example, our response when
our child comes home from school with a report card, having four "good" grades and
one "bad" grade. What do we focus on and talk about? If you are like most people the
answer is obvious. We focus on the problem.
But school report cards, like bowling scorecards, can be improved more by
focusing on and talking about the "good" grades than by focusing on and talking
about the "bad" one. What happened with these "good" grades? How do
they make you feel? What do you value most about yourself as a student?
What are your best qualities? What helped you to be so successful?
What are your aspirations now?
These are the kinds of learning-from-success questions that have the highest
potential for generating even more success in the future. By asking such questions
we do not deny or
pretend that there are no problems. We are rather seeking to outgrow our problems
through strengths-building rather than to tackle our problems head on. From the
most personal to the most global of problems, we can reflect on and learn more
from the best of times than from the worst of times.
I wish our current political and economic leaders would take this lesson to
heart. With all the doom and gloom of the debt crisis, the budget crisis, and
the employment crisis, not to mention the health crisis, the education crisis,
and the climate crisis, most people are focusing on the problems and what we can
learn from adversity rather than on the strengths and what we can learn from
prosperity.
No wonder we so often find ourselves in a downward spiral! We get more of what
we focus on, even when we tell ourselves that this is definitely what we do not
want. Do not panic is like do not see red cars. Our brains process the panic and
forget all about the not. So we do all the things we don't want to do, which can
often make the crises worse rather than better.
Enter the coaches. If coaches are anything we are thinking partners for the
people we work with. Our primary tools are questions and reflections that assist
people to review and learn from their experiences. The discipline of talking
with a coach is, in and of itself, a great way for leaders to engage in the
discipline of reflection. It is certainly not the only way, but it does
guarantee certain levels of consistency and intensity that are vitally important
to the learning task.
Great coaches take that discipline to the next level by assisting leaders to
stay focused on success. In my experience, that is one of the real functions
coaches play with our clients: we assist them to rise above the fray, to think
about their strengths, to mine the treasure trove of their best experiences, and
to entertain possibilities they might otherwise be too distracted or too scared
to consider.
Back in 1983, Donald Schön wrote a now-classic book titled
The
Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. In that
book, Schön persuasively argued that regular patterns of both
reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action
are the hallmarks of professionalism and the keys to quality.
Schön wrote: "It is this whole process of reflection-in-action which is central
to the 'art' by which practitioners sometimes deal with situations of uncertainty, instability,
uniqueness, and value conflicts." Such reflection "consists of on-the-spot
surfacing, criticizing, restructuring, and testing of intuitive understandings
of experienced phenomena; often it takes the form of a reflective conversation
with the situation."
When such reflection becomes embedded in the professional practices of leaders,
it leads to ever higher levels of quality. Schön referred to this
quality as "knowing-in-action." More recently, this has been described as the
shift from "conscious competence" to "unconscious competence." In leadership
terms, it means we have the ability to make informed decisions, in the moment,
even when we are faced with new and unfamiliar situations.
With clear mental models as to the practices that express our values, strengths,
and abilities, confidence rises and all manner of things become possible. We
move beyond the crises du jour to the important work of envisioning and
designing the future.
Although research into the virtue of learning from success was still in its infancy back
in 1983, Schön was clearly and compellingly making the case for regular reflective
practices as a key part of learning from experience. That case holds true perhaps more
today, with the changes in technology and society, than it did 30 years ago. Slowing down
as the world speeds up, learning about the root causes of success, may well hold the
key to quality for us all.
That is certainly one way to make the case for coaching. If you are finding it
hard to step back and to think about your life and work, if you are getting
increasingly distracted and agitated by the troubles of our time, if you are
more painfully aware of your weaknesses and shortcomings than of your strengths
and success, then entering into a coaching relationship would be one way to turn
the tables around. It certainly wouldn't hurt to give it a try.
Coaching Inquiries: How would you describe your commitment to quality? What
helps you to continuously improve that quality? Are reflective practices a
regular part of your life? How could you strengthen and derive more benefit from
those practices? What part could coaching play in the equation?
To reply to this Provision, use our
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talk with us about coaching or consulting services for yourself or your
organization,
Email Us
or use our
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programs,
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LifeTrek Readers' Forum (selected feedback
from the past week)
Editor's Note: The LifeTrek Readers' Forum contains selections from the comments
and materials sent in each week by the readers of LifeTrek Provisions. They do
not necessarily reflect the perspective of LifeTrek Coaching International. To
submit your comment, use our
Feedback Form or
Email Bob.
Your Provision,
Quality Matters, was an excellent piece of work! I have been developing a
consulting practice for the past 8 years based on action learning and
strengths-based principles, and your comments really resonate with me. I would
add from experience with over 60 such projects that there's no need to ignore
problems and gaps to drive strengths-based improvement. Rather, it's the cycle
of discovering root causes, testing new tools and techniques for addressing
them, reflecting on the impact of those new approaches, identifying lessons
learned, and strengthening what's working that leaves our clients in a strong
place. Keep up the great work! Top
May you be filled with goodness, peace, and joy.
Bob Tschannen-Moran
President, LifeTrek Coaching International,
www.LifeTrekCoaching.com
CEO & Co-Founder, Center for School
Transformation,
www.SchoolTransformation.com
Immediate Past President, International Association
of Coaching,
www.CertifiedCoach.org
Author, Evocative Coaching: Transforming Schools One Conversation at a Time,
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Skype: LifeTrek • Twitter: @LifeTrekBob
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