This year I had again the opportunity and the privilege to attend the SFBTA Conference, which was held in Bakersfield, California.

I had a great time re-connecting with old friends and making new ones.

Some of the highlights of the program for me:

- the workshop A Micro-Analysis of Opportunities, led by Joel Simon, Lance Taylor & Janet Bavelas. A neat application of Micro-Analysis

- the workshop “Solution-Focused Dragon Boat” – Building a Community of Leaders, led by Brenda Zalter-Minden & Robin Hornstein. It was highly interactive and fun, fun, fun. Re-creating the challenges and team-building opportunities of working as a rowing team

- the workshop Diagramming Solution-Focused Practice: Tools for Teaching led by Robert Blundo. A very engaging presentation on how to introduce students to Solution-Focus practice and its unique mindset

- the workshop Can We Really See Co-construction Happening?, led by Janet Bavelas, Peter De Jong & Sara Smock. So interesting to see grounding sequences in conversations and how they put understanding in place. Wisdom nugget by Peter De Jong: “All therapists [from different schools of therapy] co-construct. But they do it in different directions”

- the workshop Value of Evaluation: Creating Powerful Performance led by Haesun Moon. Brilliantly led in a pure solution-focused way, we all learned from each other and ourselves how to do more of what works to make evaluation processes solution-focused

And there were many, many other interesting workshops going on, but unfortunately one has to choose…

thanks to everyone, staff, presenters and attendees, who made this event such a wonderful learning experience!

… and here (photo below) is what happens when you have a bunch of Solution-Focused therapists doing line dancing at the Association Banquet :)

Tags: 2011, Bakersfield, co-construction, conference, evaluation, Haesun Moon, Janet Bavelas, micro-analysis, performance, Robert Blundo, SFBTA, solution-focused team building, teaching solution-focused practice

Dr Atul Gawande

Very often, in explaining what I do, I need to clarify what Coaching is.

People who sell New Agey mumbo jumbo by calling themselves Coaches do not help.

I tried to set the record straight in this post, where I state that Coaching is simply a purposeful conversation designed to help clients improve their performances and move forward with their life/career.

Now, Atul Gawande, in a recently published article in the New Yorker, talks about Coaching and makes the same point – only better, and from the perspective of a Client: “no matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where Coaching comes in.”

Granted, he is not talking about Solution-Focused Coaching but about what I called Behavioral Coaching in the above mentioned post.

Still, the article clearly defines what Coaching is, and it is a very interesting read.

This quote from the article should be framed and put in any office where Coaching is delivered:

“The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury—you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_gawande#ixzz1ZvPXXuJD

Note: I already posted about Atul Gawande, specifically about his Checklist Manifesto book, here: http://www.briefcoachingsolutions.com/checklists-solution-focused-coaching/

Tags: Atul Gawande, behavioral coaching, coaching, coaching client, definition of coaching, mastery, performance, professionals, society

If you consult with businesses or work as a coach for organizations, I am sure you have met this situation time and again.

It is often framed by clients as a “dilemma“, and whoever presents it to you, be it the CEO or the HR Manager, uses apocalyptic tones to describe it.

In the most abstract form, it goes something like this:

“Manager X is a brilliant performer – driven, focused, results-oriented. We are very happy with Manager X’s achievements. However, that same Manager is also definitely not people-oriented, since many members of his / her team quit. Now Project Y [it could be a Organizational Development project, a re-organization, a merger...] requires Manager X to be more of a team player and more people-oriented to better work in this new lean structure. Can it be done?”.

I wonder what you, my reader who is a consultant, would answer to such a question.

My reply to that question is: I do not know.

It depends on many things.

The main one being: what does it mean to ask whether “it can be done”?

If it means: can we change the personality of Manager X, then the answer is no.

If it means: can Manager X develop a new set of skills and behaviors, then the answer is: maybe.

If it means: can Manager X develop a set of solutions based on his or her strengths that will allow him or her to play this new game, then the answer is: probably yes.

In addition, the whole organizational context would factor in heavily in any answer you might give to the “dilemma”: maybe Manager X behaved in such a way because it was reinforced by management and / or by the organizational culture; maybe Manager X believed that results, and only results, was what was asked of him / her; moreover, who exactly left and why? And more importantly, from a Solution-Focused perspective: who stayed with Manager X? What was different with them?

I said that I answer the dilemma with a “I don’t know”.

That is only part of the answer. The complete answer is: “I do not know – I would need to talk to Manager X, his or her boss, and maybe other people working with / for Manager X“.

So I am wondering, dear reader who happens to be an organizational consultant like me: how do you deal with this archetypal dilemma?

Tags: consulting, dilemma, OD, organization, people-oriented, performance, question, result-oriented, Solution-Focused perspective, strengths, the dark side, type-A personality

Your Brain at Work is a pop psych book.

Unfortunately, the category “pop psych” book has been misused and abused in the past, so that classification does not do the book justice.

Your Brain at Work is how a pop psych book should be: well-grounded in research, very well written and offering useful behavioral tips which follow directly from understanding how the brain works. As the cover of the book states: know your brain, transform your performance.

David Rock is really good at making neuroscience’s findings relevant to everyday’s life: each chapter opens with a snapshot of work life (e.g. a person having to make a decision, or dealing with pressure) and how it usually goes (wrong); then the author follows up by explaining why, according to current understanding of the brain, the person in the story behaves as he or she does; the chapter ends with a take 2, i.e. how the story could end differently if the person had understood how his or her brain worked (happy ending). Moreover, at the end of the chapter one can find two paragraphs: one with the title “Surprises about the brain” which summarizes the main points of the chapter and the other one, “things to try”, with some tips to make use of this understanding of how the brain works.

The book is centered around three main insights:
Continue reading…

Tags: David Rock, neuroscience, performance, productivity, SCARF, self-help, Solution Focused, Your Brain at Work

My friend Coert Visser mentioned the book “Talent is Overrated” in one of his interesting postings (here).
I’ve just finished reading that book, and there are quite a few noteworthy concepts in there.

First, though, my critique.
My main complaint about the book is that, as Coert again succinctly put it in a personal note, it should have been titled “Deliberate Practice”.
The author, in an attempt to give more relevance to the concept of “deliberate practice”, sets out by criticizing the notion of talent as an explanation of expert performance.
Granted, the author does a good job in highlighting the limits of talent-based explanations; however, the most one can say about these explanations is that they are incomplete – not that they are not valid.
His overall attack is based on a handful of studies and falls flat: all he achieves to do, in my opinion, is to note that the concept of talent still needs to be worked out in the details and that it is still debated among researchers.
It kind of reminds me of the creationists’ attacks on evolution: since biologists are still arguing about the details of evolution (e.g., punctuated equilibrium), then evolution is false.
The author, moreover, in an attempt to convince readers of the vital importance of skill-development and expert performance, dedicates a full chapter to explain that because companies and banks are awash in cash and money is everywhere, the only area where businesses can build a competitive edge is in the development of human resources.
That chapter written in 2007 before the current financial meltdown can either make you cry or make you laugh out loud.

Having said that, the core of the book is pretty good.
The main idea is that the way to excellence is practice. Deliberate practice.
Deliberate means that:
- it is designed specifically to improve performance
- it can be repeated a lot
- feedback is continuously available
- it is highly demanding mentally
- it isn’t fun
Jogging 5 times a week, same route, same amount of time–that is practice.
It is maintaining an acceptable level of performance.
Running 3 or 4 times a week, alternating between long runs, speedwork, tempo runs and different routes, following a program, monitored by a coach—that is deliberate practice!!
It is about stretching the limits.
In this process, a key role is given to the COACH.

As the author points out:
- an expert coach can observe you in ways that you cannot see yourself
- an expert coach can design a program that fits your needs, based on the body of knowledge on how performance is developed in that field
- an expert coach can tell which specific elements are needed for a specific performance and need to be developed by working intently on them.
Therefore, starting out on a path of deliberate practice is “extremely difficult to do without the help of a teacher or coach“.

The author illustrates these points by using some interesting examples: a study done in then West Berlin on talented violinists; studies done on chess players; stories about football star players.
He also distinguishes between different models of deliberate practice: the music model, the chess model and the sports model.

Interestingly enough, the advantage of practice is cumulative.
I remember reading a book written by a SAS member (Special Air Service, the elite British Army unit) on his experiences with that outfit. He said that the motto of the SAS should be changed from “who dares wins” to “practice, practice, practice”, because of the mind-numbing, continuos rehearsals. Yet that is the very key to their successes: they could not have dared, let alone won, without all that practice!!

The book “Talent is Overrated” reminded me of how much we as coaches need deliberate practice too.
That is why I loved Solutionsurfers advanced brief coaching training program, more specifically the “live coaching days”: 3 days of live coaching with real clients.
Intense; a lot of practice; real time feedback; stretching the limits.
I learned more in those 3 days than in hour after hour of “regular” coaching.
I am looking forward to the next “live coaching days” in April 2009!
Top Gun for Solution Focused Coaches.

Tags: coaching, deliberate practice, performance, talent