On its surface, James Flaherty’s book looks to be a how-to text for a rapidly emerging set of disciplines and practices called Coaching. Don’t be misled. This book is a lot more than that, although you can read it for no other reason, and it will help you improve your practices as a coach (or as a client, a customer of coaching).
Not long ago, coaching meant training athletes, performers, and students. Recently, the use of the term has been extended into the worlds of management, leadership, entrepreneurship, and performance in other domains of life. I remember my initial reaction to hearing Fernando Flores propose in the early 1980s to bring the skills of basketball coaches to management teams and the boardroom. I was surprised at this unexpected appropriation; and, it made a lot of sense. In retrospect, I think that it made particular sense to me because of what I knew about how difficult it is to learn the practices of managing and leading. It is extraordinarily difficult to observe and improve one’s own performance in the challenging roles people face in taking responsibility for the future—especially managing and leading.
The discipline of coaching puts the center of its attention on the question of how a person can help other people develop new capabilities, new horizons, and new worlds of opportunity for themselves and those around them. Put this way, we can begin to see that this role—coaching—will be especially relevant for the coming era. This book is about building relationships among people who are continuously learning about the changing environments in which they live and work, intervening in and moving to set aside ineffective and counter-productive habits, and building new skills, practices, habits, and platforms for collaborating in this ever-changing world.
In the 20th Century, we built enormous organizations around the world in which people were employed as special kinds of irritating and expensive interchangeable parts. Those organizations changed the face of the planet, bringing both valuable and wasteful practices everywhere they touched. To get more efficient and effective we centralized, decentralized, cut costs, outsourced, down-sized, right-sized, and automated. We coordinated manufacturing and logistics through “ERP” systems and dealt with our customers with “CIS” and “CRM” systems. (Don’t worry if you are not familiar with those acronyms; that underscores my point.) Coaching was not an essential capacity in that world; it was not necessary to re-shape the skills of most individual employees. People were trained to perform in roles that had been designed to serve the purposes of the enterprise, and they adapted or they were replaced. We trained people to remember and repeat “information” and follow rules. It was only in the last decades of the 20th Century that various features of the world began to call for the kinds of capacities to deal with the continuously changing environments that this new kind of coaching was invented to address.
James has put the client in the center of his interpretation of coaching in a way that is worthy of our attention. One reviewer says that James does not forget that those who are coached “are human beings.” What does he mean by this? No one would dispute the proposition that coaches work with human beings. But James has very particular interpretations about the kinds of beings he is training to coach, and about the beings that they, in turn will coach. He has worked for many years to develop these interpretations, and they are fundamental to what is so helpful about this book. There is no way to sum them up; you must read the book and make your own sense of what James is doing. However, I want to point to three interpretations that James is writing from that I would not want the reader to miss.
- Human beings create themselves in language, continuously shaping and re-shaping the narratives in which they make sense of their worlds. If you would make sense of another human being, pay close attention to the language and narratives in which s/he interprets him/herself.
- Human beings are biological creatures all the way down. They invent, carry, and express their moods, what they care about, and how they understand the world in their bodies. If you would make sense of another human being, pay close attention to their body, and to how they attend to it themselves.
- Human beings are paradoxical, at once far more creatures of habit than most of us like to think, and at the same time far more malleable. For James this paradox is a bottomless source of wonder, appreciation, inquiry, and amusement. This is a serious book, but you will see James’s humor here too.
These distinctions arise from James’s study of many disciplines. For example, it will be obvious to the reader that he has thought deeply about human language and the ways that we invent ourselves and our worlds in language. This is one of the most distinctive features of the book. In this, he stands on the shoulders of great philosophers and shares their work with the reader. Finally, he includes learnings from his Buddhist practices, the biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and his work as a Certified Rolfer (which he did before becoming a coach and developer of coaches) and makes what he has learned available to the reader in direct and indirect ways.
In the book, James presents ingenious maps for thinking about the multidimensional space in which two human beings come together to produce a shift in the world(s) of one or both. He calls them “models.” The models that the commonsense world gives us for thinking about these questions are, for the most part, bad maps. On her College Board Test, for example, my daughter is asked to write about this question: “Are people more often motivated by money or fame, or by personal satisfaction?” On reflection, it is easy to see that this is a bad question that shares the structure of the old joke, “When did you stop beating your wife?” Don’t be misled when James says that the models he presents are not terribly important. He warns against mistaking maps for territories, and calls those who would label people using models, simply, “lazy.” Here he is speaking in the philosophical tradition of Wittgenstein, who said, “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as non-sensical when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)”1 In the end I agree that you will be wise to discard the models James offers, but before that, they are enormously useful as “ladders” to access new terrain.
At this turning point of history, far too many of our leaders, managers, designers, and others in positions of responsibility for our communities and enterprises have come to take for granted that it is possible to manage and lead other people without attending to questions that sit in the middle of this book: how to intervene in situations in which people are “stuck” in old habits and badly understood situations, how we observe the world around us, and how people learn.
When I am training designers, I often remind them that if they are not skilled and confident in their capacity to diagnose and intervene in the human messes of the world, they will make important mistakes. They will design features for a new world constrained by the limits of their own ability to understand the capabilities of people. Similarly, confidence in your own capacity to be an effective coach is an essential ingredient for making a better team, business, service, and world. As you read Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others and begin to practice what it offers, I predict you will find yourself experiencing expanding possibilities for yourself and those you interact with, along with growing ambition and confidence that you can take on and succeed at projects and goals that before were not possible.
Chauncey Bell
Managing Director
Pacific Northwest Financial Services
Seattle, Washington
1 Proposition 6.54 from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. See http://www.public-domain-content.com/Philosophy/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.shtml and http://pd.sparknotes.com/philosophy/tractatus/section13.html