One of the participants in a focus group session we had
recently with a Kampala based US owned Telecommunications Tower Company, said
at the end of the session that ‘most of the answers came from us’, almost to
his surprise. And another asked, ‘do you have anything to add or were we just
spot on?’. As I reflected on the comment and the question, it reminded me of
one of the mindsets of adult learning, that is adults are inherently
resourceful with a wide reservoir of experiences which people bring to attend to
any problem or opportunity at hand.
And to quote Malcolm Shepherd Knowles, the American educator
well known for the art and science of adult learning, because adults see
themselves as independent and self-directing, there develops a ‘’deep
psychological need to be perceived by others, and treated by others as capable of taking responsibility
for ourselves’’ and if ‘’others are imposing their wills on us without our
participating in making decisions affecting us, we experience a feeling, often
subconsciously, of resentment and resistance’’.
So to get the comments from the participants who felt the
process we used had afforded the opportunity to the group to participate in the
idea generation process with minimal input from the facilitators, was an
affirmation that adults do have the answers and what is needed is a process
that allows the unpacking, sharing and mutual exploration to take place. When
we do this well, we build trust and create the synergy necessary solve problems
and take advantage of significant business opportunity.
However, this process of ceding space and trusting
participants to navigate their solutions have not come easy to me. In my over
twenty years of management and other senior leadership roles in business, the
United States Army, in Executive Coaching and Faculty in Executive Education,
learning to let go, is been quite a journey. It is easy to prescribe solutions
and pontificate on the 12 steps to greatness than to listen and ask questions for
which we have no answer and genuinely look to build trust.
So, what does it take to engage in mutual exploration?
Firstly, it takes a mindset that believes in the inherent resourcefulness of
people. That everyone has the capacity and innate greatness to contribute and
our role as leaders, coaches, supervisors, is to unlock and call out that
greatness. To do this effectively, we must be guided by a set of principles.
For example, we can draw from the Columbia Executive Coaching framework, three principles
that can facilitate this process. These principles are (a) focus on the
participants agenda and not ours (b) Involve participants in the problem
solving and solution provision process and (c) earn the right of the
participant to advance the conversation.
To do the opposite, is to assume we know and proceed to make
prescriptions for problems we have little knowledge or expertise in. It will be
like going to the Doctor who writes a prescription without diagnosis. Or a
sales person who sends a proposal to a client without a meaningful dialogue.
Secondly, we must develop the skill of
asking high leverage questions designed to open the conversation to gain
understanding of the participant context. Here the use of the ORID (Objective,
Reflective, Interpretive, and Decisional) is a form of question and listening
framework designed to surface facts, feelings and to ask about implications and
make decisions. As an Executive Coach, I have found the ORID method very useful
in one-on-one and group coaching sessions because It helps you achieve the
following (a) Surface facts, direct observable data, generate a common pool of
“knowledge” needed to understand what the presenting situation is and why its
important to the individual or group (b) explore feelings and emotions that
connected to the situation – it unlocks the internal context of the
presentation situation (c) make sense and meaning of the situation by examining
assumptions, values, significance and implications and (d) determine the
expressed commitment to future action – what change in conduct will happen
next.
Thirdly, I found the use of a few
tools helpful to facilitate the process of mutual exploration. Sometimes our
conversations require a medium to enable people express themselves in pictures
and stories. For example, in our work with the Kampala based Tower Company, we
used the Visual Explorer (VE) cards developed by the Center for Creative
Leadership (CCL). VE is a tool for enabling dialogue by putting images
in the middle of the conversation. We framed a question around the past and
present context of the organization with regards to its ability to execute on
its business objectives and a second question on what the participants will
like the future to look like.
With limited prodding the participants
came up with a variety of images to communicate the current state and why they
chose those images and built a common understanding of the type of future that
will enable this team to close the gap between the talent and capability of the
team and its results. And as you observe, you can see how a team that has gone
through a process like this will have greater commitment to implementing its
outcome than if that outcome was recommended by a facilitator or outside
consultant. In the end its true that where teams are not involved you cannot
expect whole person commitment, at best you get malicious compliance.
In conclusion, the mindset, skills and
tools necessary for mutual exploration is consistent with the findings of how
our brains work. Recently, we had the privilege of listening to American
cultural anthropologist, Judith Glaser, author of Conversation Intelligence,
among other works, at the International Coaching Conference in New York. Where we learnt that the truth about our
brain’s evolution is that we are designed for ‘creating space’ for aspirations
and dreams to grow through conversations. The neurochemistry of aspirations is
about how different conversations activate chemicals and networks that either
open or close the space for aspirations to grow.
So, we can stay stuck at the level
where we confirm what we know by asking and telling adults what to do or we can
be courageous to move up the conversational ladder by sharing and discovering
with participants through questions for which we do not have the answer. When
we do this, to use Judith Glaser’s analogy of the conversational dashboard, we
move from low trust to high trust, from resistor to co-creator and build a
process that generates transparency, relationship, understanding and shared
success.
