Ed Batista

Technology is Soft

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen and that you see opportunities to help your organization or your community find better ways of doing things, particularly when technology is a factor.

So here's a mental model to help make the process of leading change easier: Technology is soft.

Let me make a brief detour in order to explain what I mean by that.  In the late 1970s Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos developed a framework for analyzing organizations known as the "7s Model" which looks at different aspects of an organization and which I still find highly useful.  (The graphic at left is from BuildingBrands.)  The 7s Model is often interpreted as dividing organizations into "hard" and "soft" elements--the former category includes the three concepts in red at the top of the graphic:

• Strategy
Your high-level goals and how you plan to achieve them.

• Structure
An organization's "blueprints": how people and resources are allocated, how work and responsibilities are distributed.

• Systems
All the ropes, pulleys and gears, so to speak, that get things done in an organization.

These elements of the model are seen as "hard" because they're more easily reduced to tangible artifacts--plans and documents and infrastructure--but that designation also reflects a value judgment in our language.  "Hard" stuff can be complex and difficult, but it's also serious and important.  "Soft" stuff, in contrast, is ambiguous, unreliable, secondary.  (I hope it's apparent that I think this is bias needs to be challenged, and Tom Peters agrees.)

We've traditionally located technology among the "hard" elements of an organization, and that's what usually comes to mind when we think about "Information Technology."  We have IT plans, IT departments (or people whose responsibilities include IT), and, of course, IT systems.  Thinking about technology from this perspective may seem logical, but I believe the implications are profound, unhelpful and increasingly outdated.

Some aspects of technology will always be classic "IT": hardware, storage, connectivity.  But these are commodities.  You get the best price you can for them, and you don't expect them to add strategic value to the organization.

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the "soft" side:

• Staff
Not the org chart--that's part of the Structure--but the real, flesh-and-blood people, and all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and aspirations.

• Style
Management style, or organizational culture: The tacit norms that govern how work gets done and how people interact.

• Skills
The full range of competencies possessed by an organization, including interpersonal skills, learning.

Thinking about technology as "soft," as an aspect of an organization's staff, style and skills, may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly this is where it truly resides (and it's where you'll have the greatest leverage when driving technology-related change.)

Let me illustrate this approach with an story from my work at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:  As a Leadership Coach at the Center for Leadership Development and Research, I'm a member of a team with many interdependent sub-teams that often collaborate virtually on long-term projects involving multiple sets of stakeholders.  When I started at the beginning of 2007, the tools available to support these collaborations were 1) email and 2) shared network drives.  These tools met our most basic needs, but they were hardly optimal, and we found ourselves frustrated with their limitations.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce a wiki, and as the unofficial techie on our staff of executive coaches and organizational development consultants, I was in a position to make that change happen.  But in retrospect I can see that I focused on the "hard" elements of the 7s Model.  I developed a strategic IT plan that included a wiki, I explored in great detail how the wiki would be used and how it would fit into our existing organizational structure, and I spent a good bit of time exploring various wiki platforms to find the best system to meet our needs.

I was able to get it up and running, but adoption by my non-technical colleagues was hit-or-miss.  Some people loved it, but others found it confusing or didn't really understand how  it was an improvement over email.  I think part of the problem was the language I used to introduce it.  I'd say, "I have a new system that'll help us collaborate more effectively."   Well, when you say "new," people hear "change," and they realize that means "more work," at least in the short run.  And when you say "system," people  hear "IT," and they know that means, "someone else's responsibility."  So when you say "new system," what people really hear is "more work that shouldn't be my responsibility in the first place."   Not exactly an appealing message.

So as we were about to begin a new academic year last Fall, I took a new approach.  I stopped worrying about the strategic IT plan--I didn't even update it.  I stopped thinking about how the wiki fit into our organizational structure.  And with the system already in place, I didn't have any technical work to do at all.

Instead, I starting thinking about the "soft" side of the organization.  I thought about my colleagues as individuals.  What were they like?  What were their needs?  How did they work?

I thought about our organizational culture.  Although Stanford has a certain culture, and the business school has yet another culture all its own, the Center where I work is a small, informal, entrepreneurial place where we can't do things by the book because it hasn't been written yet.

I thought about our collective skills--not just (or even primarily) technical skills, but our interpersonal skills.  How do we connect with each other?  How do we collaborate?

So rather than asking my colleagues to conform to a "hard" plan, I began asking how "soft" technology like a wiki could conform to them.  And rather than trying to "train" them on this new system, I began having a series of short conversations--sometimes just 5 minutes--about how they were working and what they were doing.  I took advantage of every small opportunity to help people think about the wiki as an integrated element in our organizational culture, and as an extension of their collaborative skills.

Today, just a few months later, we're the most intensive wiki users in the business school, and we're probably among the most intensive non-technical wiki users in the entire university.  I had to lay the "hard" groundwork to initiate the project, but my sustained focus on the strategic plan, the structure, and the system actually delayed our progress, and the wiki's ultimate success is directly related to its integration with the organization's "soft" side.

The 7th circle at the center of the 7s Model represents Shared Values, the commonly-held aspirations that give an organization a collective spirit, a sense of mission.  And if you value the effective use of technology, and you want your organization to adopt and embody that value, I encourage you to remember this the next time you're seeking to promote change: Technology is soft.

Photo by fotologic.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

7s Model graphic by BuildingBrands.

This post was adapted from remarks I made on May 12, 2008, to the second graduating class of ZeroDivide Fellows.  Congratulations and good luck to all the past and current Fellows, and thanks to ZeroDivide for having me.

Double-Loop Learning

A number of people wind up here after searching for "double-loop learning," a topic I've addressed before while discussing meta-work, executive coaching and feedback, so I thought I'd provide a simple graphic overview.  (Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint file of the images below, 64 KB.)

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Most learning can be described as "single-loop."  We start with a set of goals, values and strategies that yield results.  We assess the results, refine our techniques, and try again.  One loop.

But our goals, values and strategies rest on a set of underlying assumptions that are implicit and unchallenged.  Single-loop learning can help us pursue a goal more effectively by altering our methods, but it doesn't help us determine whether the goal is worth pursuing in the first place.

As I wrote in 2006...

In most circumstances, the learning we undertake is aimed at improving our performance relative to a set of goals and other factors that are taken for granted. Feedback from our performance (or "learning from our mistakes") typically cycles immediately back into our analysis of the strategies, tactics or techniques that led to our performance. This is important work, but it's inherently limited by those initial factors that are taken for granted at the outset and that remain unchallenged by an assessment of the performance results.

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Double-loop learning occurs when we expand the analytical frame to explicitly identify and then challenge any underlying assumptions that support our stated goals, values and strategies.

Rather than only ask, "How can we achieve our goals more effectively?", we look deeper and also ask...

• What assumptions support our goals, values and strategies?
• How can we test these assumptions?
• Having tested these assumptions, should we change our goals, values or strategies?

Again, as I wrote in 2006...

In contrast, if we can pull back and expand the frame of our analysis, we begin to call into question some of the factors that we usually take for granted. Our performance results aren't simply used to assess the strategies that have been derived from those factors--they question the factors themselves.

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I realize that this can seem somewhat abstract, so it may be useful to refer to the posts mentioned above, which discuss double-loop learning in the context of meta-work, executive coaching and feedback. I've also found Mark Smith's essay on double-loop learning at Informal Education extremely valuable.

And continued thanks to Chris Argyris, who first developed the concept of double-loop learning, and whose thoughts on theories of action and organizational learning inform my own work on a daily basis.

Organizational Effectiveness

What makes organizations effective?  For that matter, what do we even mean by effectiveness?  I've been giving these questions some thought recently and the following graphs are the result.  (Here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file, 75 KB.)

I love the Peters/Waterman/McKinsey "7s" Model, but we can extend it in two directions.  First, looking within an organization, if we reduce the model further and boil it down to its most essential core elements, I think we're left with People (or Staff, in 7s-speak) and Culture (an amalgam of Style, Skills and Shared Values.)  Second, if we look beyond the organization--if we ask why it exists and whether its fulfilling its purpose--we begin to assess its Impact, which includes not only profitability and financial sustainability but also the value created for any stakeholders, from a business's employees to a nonprofit's clients.

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My focus on these three elements is also due to their tightly interrelated nature--they all affect the other two in fundamental ways.

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I think one of the least-understood dynamics is the relationship that exists between an organization's people and its culture.  Sometimes it's difficult to even know where to draw a boundary between the two: Where do I stop and where do my contributions to the culture around me begin?  This may be why so many organizations operate without a clear understanding of their culture.  (And to be clear, every organization has a culture: "When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...")

But what's most important to recognize is the dialectical nature of this relationship.  An organization's founders create the initial culture, which then exerts its influence on them in turn.  Future colleagues are attracted to the pre-existing culture because in some way it meets their needs, and so they reinforce it.

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I've also focused on People and Culture because I see these elements as most closely connected to an organization's Impact.  This isn't to say that other elements don't matter--but ultimately people implement an organization's plans, and the culture in which they operate helps them or hinders them.  Talented people can overcome misguided strategies and suboptimal systems, but they can't outrun a dysfunctional culture (not for long, anyway.)

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And an organization's Impact--its ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its purpose and create value for stakeholders--directly affects its ability to attract and retain effective people and to build and sustain a high-performance culture.

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OK, having mapped out the relationships that exist among these three elements, what do they actually look like?  How do we define People, Culture and Impact in effective organizations?

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Here's my definition of effectiveness as it pertains to People.  I emphasize connections with Culture and Impact; interpersonal skills and accountability; self-development and growth.

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Here's my definition of an effective Culture.  I emphasize distributed leadership, continuous learning, openness, and decentralization.  The final quote from Tom Peters deserves further explanation: The 7s Model is sometimes divided into "Hard" elements (Strategy, Structure and Systems) and "Soft" elements (Skills, Staff, Style and Shared Values).  Our business culture tends to value the former and dismiss the latter, and Peters thinks this is entirely ass-backwards.  The "hard" stuff, from strategic plans to complex financial structures, is actually pretty fuzzy and surprisingly easy to fake.  The "soft" stuff--relationships, leadership, interpersonal skills (in short, culture)--is actually pretty resilient and surprisingly difficult to get right.  Hard is soft, soft is hard.

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I don't believe there's a universal definition of Impact--organizations define value-creation in different ways, and they're answerable to different sets of stakeholders.  But I do believe that effective organizations share the characteristics listed above, which enable them to understand, measure and communicate their impact, and to use that information to drive decision-making (cf. Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts.)  At the same time, they reality-check regularly and don't let data dictate decisions.

Effective organizations also know when to give up and move on.  They take a pragmatic approach and never let sunk costs fuel persistence--instead, they've mastered the art of strategic quitting.

Finally, effective organizations have a vision of victory that they're driving toward.  What would it look like to win?  For some organizations (including many nonprofits), ultimate victory means putting themselves out of business because they've succeeded in fully and permanently meeting the need that they were created to fulfill.

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Again, if you're interested, here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file (75 KB).  As with the other models I post here, I consider this a work-in-progress that helps me make sense of the world, and I welcome any feedback to improve it or make it clearer.

Jonathan Knee on Sales, Analysis and Operations

In Must I Bank? on today's WSJ Opinion page (I'm not sure how long that link will remain outside their paywall), Jonathan Knee of Evercore Partners and Columbia Business School astutely narrows down the career options faced by MBAs (and by extension to most business professionals) to three primary paths: Sales, Analysis and Operations:

Like all service professions, investment banking is fundamentally a sales job. Individuals who feed on human interaction, and have natural empathy (sales is about putting yourself in your customer's shoes), do well in sales. Being good with numbers, often assumed to be the key to banking success, will be of little use in getting a big office with a view if you do not have sales aptitude.

Private equity, like hedge funds and other investing jobs, is essentially analytical. These are solitary professions, and one is judged on the quality of the analysis produced. The quality of this analysis is in turn assessed on highly quantifiable metrics – like whether the stock you recommended went up or if the investment in a private company you sponsored turned out well. If the classic sales person is a deeply social being, the typical analytical person is a bit of a loner.

Working at a start-up or any other company is an operational job. Operators must communicate and "sell," both internally and externally, to effectively function in their positions. Operators must also be "analytical" enough to attain the domain expertise needed to achieve credibility in their operating role.

But the defining characteristic of the operating role is a commitment to a continuing level of involvement with the organization's objectives. A sales person makes a sale and moves on. Analytical people make a call or do a trade, and reap whatever rewards that insight yields. Operators are in it for the long haul.

Most jobs fall into one of these three categories: sales, analytical or operational. The odds that the same person would prosper equally in more than one of these environments are low. The personal qualities that each position draws upon are simply too different. Some...introspection in order to identify which category would likely yield the greatest personal satisfaction is an excellent investment.

...Dedicating oneself to any profession...should not be undertaken lightly. Doing so would ignore the unique gifts that each of us has to offer. It would also meaningfully reduce our chances of ultimate personal fulfillment.

You could argue that Knee's three-headed framework is an oversimplification.  But what I find useful is how many career paths can be boiled down to one of Knee's three options and how the framework's simplicity forces us to ask whether we truly understand the essence of a given profession.

I also think Knee's observation that banking is actually a misunderstood sales field (in which analytical skills are helpful but not sufficient) is a comment on our business culture's habitual failure to appreciate the importance of sales (and the interpersonal and relational skills that make a successful salesperson).  As an MBA working in a business school, I see this attitude reflected in how we develop future business leaders--strategy and finance are held in the highest esteem, while sales is something of an afterthought.

In my experience as an organizational leader, I found that operational and analytical skills were useful, but sales skills were essential.  The organization's effectiveness was impacted by my ability to analyze options and to execute operational plans, but its very survival depended on my ability to sell--to build relationships and convince others to invest their time, energy, faith and money.  As we grew, I hired people whose operational and analytical skills were stronger than mine would ever be--but everything started with that ability to sell.

I benefited greatly from the operational and analytical education I got in business school, but I suspect I would have been a better leader after graduation had there been a greater focus on sales, relationships and interpersonal skills, i.e. "soft" skills.

Someone who really gets this is Tom Peters.  From a November 2007 post (his first-ever in all caps, apparently, reflecting his rage):

BOB WATERMAN AND I, IN 1980, DEVELOPED A MANTRA IN THOSE DAYS OF YORE WHEN "STRATEGY [STRATEGIC PLANS] WAS EVERYTHING." WE SAID:

HARD IS SOFT.
SOFT IS HARD.

THE READILY-MANIPULABLE NUMBERS ARE THE TRUE "SOFT STUFF."

THE RELATIONSHIPS-LEADERSHIP-"CULTURE"-"ACTION BIAS" [OR NOT] ARE THE TRUE "HARD STUFF."

I'm hopeful that Stanford's new curriculum and its emphasis on experiential education and leadership development (soft stuff) is a step in the right direction.

The Fundamental Attribution Error Meets the No Asshole Rule

When I studied Organizational Behavior in grad school with Roberto Fernandez (pictured on the left), one of the most important concepts he taught was the Fundamental Attribution Error, which he described as:

Ascribing causality to personal characteristics when causality actually lies with the situation.

This bias, named by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, leads us to award far more credit (or blame) to individuals for successes (or failures) than they deserve.  We see it at work most clearly with high-profile, archetypal leaders--presidents, CEOs, coaches, quarterbacks--who are hailed as geniuses when their organizations accomplish their goals and derided as bums when their organizations stumble.

But the bias is at work in ordinary interactions with our peers and colleagues as well.  We view those interactions through a lens that overemphasizes others' personal characteristics and underemphasizes the systems within which we operate.  As a result, we tend to ascribe positive characteristics to others when those interactions go well, and we tend to ascribe negative characteristics to others when those interactions are unpleasant.

This isn't to say that people are all the same, and different interpersonal experiences are solely the result of systemic factors.  Some people truly are wonderful, and others truly are, well, assholes.  But awareness of the fundamental attribution error helps us to expand our frame of reference, to question the accuracy of our perceptions and (as a result) to select interpersonal strategies that are likely to be more effective in future interactions.

I've been thinking about the fundamental attribution error recently in the wake of an unpleasant interaction with another person at work.  I came away thinking, "Wow, what an asshole" (and perhaps he did as well.)  After further reflection I realized that 1) there were a number of things I could have done differently to improve the outcome, and 2) there were a number of systemic factors at work that affected the other person's response to the situation.

But despite these efforts to hold myself accountable and take a broad-minded view of the other person, it's hard not to wonder whether my initial response was right even it if was biased: Maybe he is an asshole.  And this line of thought led me back to The No Asshole Rule, one of the most thought-provoking and entertaining books on organizational life I've ever read, by Bob Sutton (pictured on the right above).

Sutton describes two tests he uses to determine "whether a person is acting like an asshole":

Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized or belittled by the person?  In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?

Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

By these measures, my counterpart qualifies.  But Sutton goes on to make an important distinction between "temporary" assholes and "certified" ones:

Nearly all of us act like assholes at times... It is far harder to qualify as a certified asshole: a person needs to display a persistent pattern, to have a history of episodes that end with one "target" after another feeling belittled, put down, humiliated, disrespected, oppressed, de-energized and generally worse about themselves.  Psychologists make the distinction between states (fleeting feelings, thoughts and actions) and traits (enduring personality characteristics) by looking for consistency across places and times--if someone consistently takes actions that leave a trail of victims in their wake, they deserve to be called certified assholes.

And I just don't have enough data to draw a meaningful conclusion in this case.  Maybe the systemic factors I'm aware of are even more influential than I realize.  Maybe there are other factors I'm not aware of at all.  Maybe my own missteps are to blame.  Maybe he's a great guy, and I just caught him on a bad day.

It hasn't been a pleasant experience, but it has been instructive.  Reflecting on what I learned from Roberto Fernandez a decade ago, I'm inspired to look beyond my gut-level response and take a larger view of the situation, give the other person the benefit of the doubt, inquire into my own culpability and see the ways in which systemic factors shape our responses to others.  And reflecting on what I've learned from Bob Sutton, I realize that an awareness of the fundamental attribution error doesn't mean that my intuitive response is wrong--it may well be right, but only time and more data will tell.

At the very least, I've learned some valuable lessons about myself and my work environment, I have a heightened awareness of issues I should be paying closer attention to, and I'm better prepared to handle future situations like this one.  Hey, no one said experiential learning was always going to be fun and games.

A Bad Day

I had a less-than-perfect day yesterday, but at least it went better than the one I read about in Dear Abby this morning:

DEAR ABBY: I recently presented a research proposal. I did the best I could and was verbally attacked by my boss. She is often tactless and can at times be cruel.

I tried to defend my research, but perhaps I did it too emphatically and went overboard, because my team member turned off my microphone and apologized to the boss.

I understand some of the criticisms, but what bothered me was that other proposals were more flawed than ours, but were not attacked in a similar fashion. One thing led to another, and I broke down in tears at the table. Luckily, the boss did not see it, but other team members did.

Is showing emotion in public wrong? I tried to hold it in but couldn't. I was insulted and felt terrible for my team. Was crying unprofessional? Should I have run to the powder room to sob -- or would that have made it worse?

TEARY-EYED IN MALAYSIA

Ouch.  Abby, aka Jeanne Phillips, offers some support: "To show emotion in public is human, as long as one does not have a complete meltdown..." but agrees that Teary-Eyed should have left the room and challenges her (him?) to learn from the experience.  So what did I learn yesterday?

I was in a meeting where the dynamic changed suddenly, to my disadvantage, and I didn't have much leverage to alter it.  I was completely surprised by this turn of events, but I knew that yielding to my resistance would have upped the ante on both sides, and I didn't have many chips to begin with.  It was an accommodating moment if ever there was one--but because I've worked hard to overcome my natural tendency to accommodate and to tap into and express my competitive side, it took some effort to do what once came naturally to me.

I'd like to say I did a quick cost-benefit calculation and accommodated as a result of that rational analysis, but I didn't--I just felt the discussion flowing in a certain direction and realized I had to go with it.  I was upset afterwards, primarily because I wished I'd been better prepared for that possibility, but I later learned that one of my counterparts felt I'd handled things well.

I'd like to extract something deeper from the experience than "When meetings hit the rapids, go with the flow," but that's the gist of it.  At least no one turned my microphone off.

Photo by Yogi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Scott Ginsberg on Asking Questions

What kinds of questions do you usually ask people?  We're often drawn to yes/no questions--they're simple and direct.  But when simplicity and directness aren't our only goals, yes/no questions can be problematic.  They surface a minimum of new information because they don't invite the other person into a dialogue and they constrain the boundaries of the conversation.

When we do move beyond yes/no questions, we tend ask why? questions, such as "Why did you do that?" or "Why did you do it that way?"  But why? questions can be heard as "What the hell were you thinking?" and provoke defensiveness.

In the Leadership Coaching class I'm involved with at Stanford, we encourage our students to ask questions that are designed to get the other person actively involved.  Such questions can be challenging and even blunt, but they're also open-ended and compel the other person to reflect before answering.

Scott Ginsberg recently posted a list of 62 useful questions, along with a one-line explanation of why they work.  It's an incredible resource, and I encourage you to read the whole thing, but as I expect to refer back to it regularly, here are the 20 I found most valuable:

10. How are you creating…?
Proves that someone has a choice.

13. How could you have…?
Focused on past performance improvement.

14. How do you feel…?
Feelings are good.

16. How do you plan to…?
Future oriented, process oriented, action oriented.

17. How do you want…?
Visualizes ideal conditions.

18. How does this relate to…?
Keeps someone on point, uncovers connections between things.

19. How else could this be…?
Encourages open, option-oriented and leverage-based thinking.

23. How might you…?
All about potential and possibility.

27. How much time…?
Identifies patterns of energy investment.

28. How often do you…?
Gets an idea of someone’s frequency.

29. How well do you…?
Uncovers abilities.

30. How will you know when/if…?
Predicts outcomes of ideal situations.

31. If you could change…?
Visualizes improvement.

34. If you stopped…?
Cause-effect question.

37. Is anybody going to…?
Deciding if something even matters.

49. What are you doing that…?
Assesses present actions.

50. What are you willing to…?
Explores limits.

53. What can you do right now…?
Focuses on immediate action being taken.

57. What did you learn…?
Because people don’t care what you know; only what you learned.

60. What else can you…?
Because there’s always options.

Notice the structure of these questions.  They're almost all how? or what? questions, which encourage the other person to take a moment and look inside before answering.  They can certainly be challenging--"What can you do right now?" is hardly a softball--but they're also non-judgmental, which minimizes any defensiveness.  Perhaps most important, they're not leading--they don't suggest that there's a "right" answer--which encourages the other person to answer thoughtfully and honestly, rather than framing an answer to please you.  Many thanks to Scott for sharing his insights.

Photo by Erik Charlton.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Three Questions with Mark McGuinness

Mark McGuinness is an executive coach based in London who specializes in working with artists and creative professionals and who writes regularly at Wishful Thinking.  He's also the most tech-savvy coach I know, and he's found a number of innovative ways to integrate technology with his interpersonal work.  As another fan of technology who happened to spend two years in art school as an undergrad, I was thrilled when Mark agreed to do a Three Questions interview with me--thanks, Mark!

1) You describe yourself as "a poet and a business coach," but which came first? Were you writing when you saw an unmet need for coaching among artists and creative professionals, or did you begin to write as a form of personal expression to complement your coaching practice?

Poetry came first. And it will last longest. I never planned on being a coach, I just wanted to write poetry. I got interested in hypnosis as a way of tapping into creativity, and as I like to do things properly I trained as a hypnotherapist. I found myself being consulted by writers who were stuck on their latest novel and actors with stage nerves - they were great fun to work with, and of all the clients I worked with they seemed to get the most out of the sessions. So I started looking for ways of working with more artists and creatives, and developing it as a niche. Most of them weren't really looking for therapy, just a way of kick-starting their creativity, so I started offering professional coaching instead of therapy.

After a few years another coach invited me to do some work with him at Vodafone, which introduced me to the world of coaching in business. One assignment led to another and I ended up doing a lot of work with various organisations, mostly helping managers to become better coaches for their teams. After a few years of that, I decided to put the creative and business coaching together and focus on companies in the creative industries - advertisting, marketing, TV, computer games, web development etc.

I felt reasonably confident of my coaching skills, having been doing it for around 10 years, but I wanted to get more of a sense of the big picture of the industry sector. So I took the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at the Unversity of Warwick, which was a fantastic course - we studied the usual core business topics like strategy, marketing and organisation theory, alongside intellectual property law, theories of creativity and theories of the creative economy. A great mixture of inspiration and business knowledge, that made me look at my business and my poetry in a different light.

2) Your recent e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams does a great job of explaining coaching, but I'm also curious about how working with your particular clientele affects your approach. What do you think you might do differently as a coach because of your focus on creative people?

Well two things I might do differently are not to wear a suit and not to call myself a coach! It's probably no surprise that creative types don't feel comfortable with suits, but I discovered through my work and via my MA research dissertation that a lot of people in creative businesses really don't like the word 'coaching'. They associate it with corporate management-speak, so the image doesn't work for them at all. But when we get down to work, the label doesn't matter, we're too absorbed in looking at the situation and finding new options.

Image aside, a lot of what I do with my creative industries clients is no different to what I would do with any other client. People are people after all. There are a lot of issues around communication, collaboration, teamwork, management and generally dealing with other people that are the same, whatever industry you're working in.

The obvious area that is different is working on the creative process, which we can approach from several different angles. Sometimes we focus on fine-tuning creative thinking strategies. Sometimes people have difficulty getting into the right state of mind for creative flow, so with my background in hypnotherapy I can help them find the right triggers for a particular emotional state. Time management doesn't sound like a particularly creative topic, but I show people that if you don't manage your workload it can play havoc with your creativity. Other times we might focus on the craft element - using your critical faculty to appraise and revise your work. And for me the creative process doesn't end until you've reached an audience with your work, so sometimes we're focused on presenting it to others (boss, client, public) in an engaging way.

Another nice thing about working with creatives is sharing what I've learned from my own practice as a poet. I find that a lot of clients are quite intrigued by poetry, so it can be very fruitful to look for the common ground between poetry and graphic design or singing opera or writing a film script or whatever it happens to be. Clients seem to find that helpful and it's fascinating for me - I get a window on all these creative worlds that I can never enter properly, but I can have a look inside as a visitor and see some of the amazing things people are doing.

3) One of the reasons I've enjoyed your work is your effective use of technology--photos from Flickr, a Facebook group, a Tumblr link blog, prominent links to your feed, etc.  I wish more people in the field did the same, but I know that many coaches and consultants are daunted by the prospect.  How do you decide which new tools are worth using, and how do you implement and support them?

I discovered blogging by reading Seth Godin's e-book Who's There? (PDF, 2MB) and it was such an exciting idea there wasn't a decision to make - I was going to do this and I was prepared to learn all the techy stuff I needed to get it up and running. So I immersed myself in the blogging world out of sheer enthusiasm, reading sites like ProBlogger and CopyBlogger and devouring what they were teaching.

A lot of the other tools came about by seeing cool things on other people's blogs and thinking 'How do they do that?' and investigating from there. These days time is a big factor for me. E.g. I wanted to do a links blog for a while but looked around for something that wouldn't add to my workload. I was already bookmarking pages on Delicious, so I wanted a Firefox extension that would allow me to simultaneously post to Delicious, my Tumblr links blog and StumbleUpon - I found the Mahalo share extension [for Firefox] which does a great job. It means I'm creating a whole new blog without any extra work - result!  [On a related note, see Mark's e-book on Time Management for Creative People.]

If you're thinking of taking the plunge with blogging and social media, the key thing to remember is that it's not about technology, it's about people. That's why they call it social media - the tools are designed to connect people and they do a great job, I've met loads of great people since I started blogging, and the tools are getting more user-friendly as they develop.

Bonus Personal Question: Your first New Year's Resolution for 2008 was maintaining a daily meditation practice.  How's it going?

So far so good! I've settled into a rhythm of meditating first thing in the morning for 15-20 minutes and now it feels like the normal thing to do. I'll admit there have been a few days I really didn't feel like sitting, but I found myself thinking 'Well, you promised your readers you would do it - what are you going to tell them?'. And sat down. So there you have it - the power of blogging!

Joel Peterson on Organizational Culture

Joel Peterson, Vice-Chair of JetBlue, investor and serial entrepreneur, spoke on organizational culture at the Conference on Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few weeks ago:

When you think about topics to talk to entrepreneurs about, culture is one of the last ones you typically think about, because you're in the business of getting something started, it's chaotic [and] the last thing you're thinking about is culture-building.  It's just the most irrelevant topic...and I'm going to try to convince you that it's not as irrelevant as you think.  I was teaching a similar...course a few years back, and I...called on one of the entrepreneurs in the audience and asked him about culture, and he said, "We don't have any culture in our business..."  Well, you have a culture.  When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...  The question is: Do you want to influence it or not?  Do you really want to have a hand in shaping it or not?  You are going to have it, either inadvertently or with some planning and some forethought.

I imagine few readers of this site need to be convinced about the importance of organizational culture, but it's still inspiring to hear a financial heavyweight like Peterson make the case.  (I took a class with Peterson as a student at the GSB, and I've written twice before about thought-provoking concepts that I took away from his lectures.)

Six-Word Memoir

Tagged by Paul Hebert, I'll play along--although I'll take the liberty of adding a 7th word, courtesy of Dennis Hopper and the Golden Palominos:

A little older, a little more confused.

As proof, here's me over the past two days in Point Reyes National Seashore:

Driving out to Tomales Point on Sunday.

At the very tip of Tomales Point, which we only reached thanks to Amy's determination.  (Serious wind that day.)

Today on top of Arch Rock at the end of Bear Valley Creek--I'm smiling because I'm just 6 miles in and don't realize that the remaining 4.5 miles out (on top of yesterday's 9) will hurt.