Ed Batista

Neuroscience, Joyful Learning and the SCARF Model

What conditions best support learning and personal growth?

1. Judy Willis on "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education"

Stephanie West Allen points to a thought-provoking and compelling answer to the question above in the work of Judy Willis, a former neurologist who obtained her teaching credential after a 15-year career in medicine and now teaches at Santa Barbara Middle School and blogs at Psychology Today.

Willis brings an unusual and highly valuable combination of hands-on experience as an educator and a deep understanding of neuroscience to her writing, and her article in the Summer 2007 issue of Educational Leadership, "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education," is one of the most helpful pieces I've read on the subject of understanding the practical relevance of neuroscientific research.

Willis's article is focused on formal education in a classroom setting, but I believe that the findings she discusses have relevance for any experience in which we're trying to impart knowledge, stimulate understanding and foster growth, from a group workshop to an executive coaching session to an impromptu feedback conversation.  I take the liberty of quoting Willis at length here (interspersed with my comments), but I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing:

[W]hen we scrub joy and comfort from the classroom, we distance our students from effective information processing and long-term memory storage. Instead of taking pleasure from learning, students become bored, anxious, and anything but engaged...

My own experience as a neurologist and classroom teacher has shown me the benefits of joy in the classroom. Neuroimaging studies and measurement of brain chemical transmitters reveal that students' comfort level can influence information transmission and storage in the brain (Thanos et al., 1999). When students are engaged and motivated and feel minimal stress, information flows freely through the affective filter in the amygdala and they achieve higher levels of cognition, make connections, and experience "aha" moments. Such learning comes not from quiet classrooms and directed lectures, but from classrooms with an atmosphere of exuberant discovery (Kohn, 2004).

"An atmosphere of exuberant discovery."  I LOVE that phrase!  It perfectly describes my most fulfilling learning experiences.  If I can help to evoke that feeling--in myself and in others--in a workshop or a class or a coaching session, then I know we're on the right path.  I'm reminded of my recent post on being an infectious agent of enthusiasm.  Like enthusiasm, "exuberant discovery" is a contagious state. 

Willis continues:

The Brain-Based Research

Neuroimaging and neurochemical research support an education model in which stress and anxiety are not pervasive (Chugani, 1998; Pawlak, Magarinos, Melchor, McEwan, & Strickland, 2003). This research suggests that superior learning takes place when classroom experiences are enjoyable and relevant to students' lives, interests, and experiences.

Many education theorists (Dulay & Burt, 1977; Krashen, 1982) have proposed that students retain what they learn when the learning is associated with strong positive emotion. Cognitive psychology studies provide clinical evidence that stress, boredom, confusion, low motivation, and anxiety can individually, and more profoundly in combination, interfere with learning (Christianson, 1992).

Neuroimaging and measurement of brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) show us what happens in the brain during stressful emotional states. By reading glucose or oxygen use and blood flow, positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) indicate activity in identifiable regions of the brain. These scans demonstrate that under stressful conditions information is blocked from entering the brain's areas of higher cognitive memory consolidation and storage. In other words, when stress activates the brain's affective filters, information flow to the higher cognitive networks is limited and the learning process grinds to a halt.

Simply put, stress kills learning--and yet so many settings intended to support learning are needlessly stressful.  I'm reminded of Hans Selye's concept of eustress and the resulting awareness that some level of stress--which differs for each of us in different situations--supports optimal performance, but above that level performance declines.  The curve below may not be accurate--I suspect that in reality it's quite a bit steeper for most of us, but it serves to illustrate the concept:

Willis's work is an important reminder to pay close attention to the profile of this curve and to insure that we don't push ourselves and others beyond that point of optimal performance where learning ceases.  Willis continues:

Neuroimaging and electroencephalography (EEG) brain mapping of subjects in the process of learning new information reveal that the most active areas of the brain when new sensory information is received are the somatosensory cortex areas. Input from each individual sense (hearing, touch, taste, vision, smell) is delivered to these areas and then matched with previously stored related memories...

I'm struck here by the potential importance of all the senses in the learning process and the way in which most learning environments fail to make effective use of any but hearing and vision (and even then rely heavily on monotonous lectures and boring lists of bullet points.)  It suggests to me that learning is enhanced when all the senses are stimulated more thoroughly, through movement, vivid imagery and language, and perhaps even taste and smell.

Willis's website is www.RADteach.com, an acronym that stands for "Reach And Discover" but that also has a more specific neurological meaning:

RAD Lessons for the Classroom

A common theme in brain research is that superior cognitive input to the executive function networks is more likely when stress is low and learning experiences are relevant to students. Lessons that are stimulating and challenging are more likely to pass through the reticular activating system (a filter in the lower brain that focuses attention on novel changes perceived in the environment). Classroom experiences that are free of intimidation may help information pass through the amygdala's affective filter. In addition, when classroom activities are pleasurable, the brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the memory centers and promotes the release of acetylcholinem, which increases focused attention.

The acronym RAD can remind educators of three important neuroscience concepts to consider when preparing lessons:

• Novelty promotes information transmission through the Reticular activating system.
• Stress-free classrooms propel data through the Amygdala's affective filter.
• Pleasurable associations linked with learning are more likely to release more Dopamine...

Planning for the Ideal Emotional Atmosphere

Although it is valuable for teachers to be familiar with neuroscientific research and pass relevant findings along to education stakeholders, it is crucial that educators use classroom strategies that reflect what we know about the brain and learning. So how can teachers create environments where anxiety is low while providing enough challenge and novelty for suitable brain stimulation?

Make it relevant.

When stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students. Teachers can reduce this type of stress by making the lesson more personally interesting and motivating. Ideally, students should be able to answer the question, "Why are we learning about this?" at any point in a lesson...

Give them a break.

...[T]eachers can give students a three-minute vacation to reduce stress. Any pleasurable activity used as a brief break can give the amygdala a chance to cool down and the neurotransmitters time to rebuild.

Create positive associations.

Eliminating all stress from students' lives is impossible. However, even if previous classroom experiences have led to associations that link certain activities, such as memorizing multiplication tables, to a stress response from the amygdala, students can benefit from revisiting the activity without something negative happening. By avoiding stressful practices like calling on students who have not raised their hands, teachers can dampen the stress association...

Prioritize information.

It is helpful for teachers to guide students in learning how to prioritize information—how to decide what facts are worthy of writing down and reviewing when studying. When teachers demonstrate and explain how they determine which facts are important, students see how to make those judgments for themselves as they read texts and study. Helping students learn how to prioritize and therefore reduce the amount of information they need to deal with is a valuable stress-buster.

Allow independent discovery learning.

Thanks to dopamine release and the consolidation of relational memories, students are more likely to remember and understand what they learn if they find it compelling or have a part in figuring it out for themselves. In addition, when students have some choices in the way they will study or report on something, their motivation will increase and stress will diminish. They will be more accepting of their errors, motivated to try again, and less self-conscious about asking questions.

Whenever we're helping people learn, whether it's in a workshop, a coaching relationship, or just a supportive conversation, we can feel tempted to tell, to advise, to provide answers.  My experience as a coach has taught me the importance of resisting this temptation, and Willis's final point above helps to explain the neuroscientific basis for this dynamic.  Our brains are wired to learn more effectively when we figure things out for ourselves.  (There's a connection here to the value of experiential learning and its emphasis on the "perceptual order" of our direct experience rather than the "conceptual order" stressed in most learning, in William James's language.)  This isn't to say that we should never tell or advise or provide answers--there are times when that's what's needed.  But when we take those shortcuts, we need to be mindful of their potential to undermine learning.

2. Joyful Learning and David Rock's SCARF Model

Willis's perspective on "joyful learning" is embedded in David Rock's SCARF Model, which provides a useful framework for understanding how our brains respond to social threats and rewards.  Rock's acronym stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness, five domains of social experience within which we regularly encounter threats and rewards that trigger responses in the brain similar to those triggered by physical threats, such as pain and hunger, and physical rewards, such as relief and satiation.

Rock writes in "SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others," (available as a PDF on the Resources page of the site promoting Rock's new book, "Your Brain at Work"):

[M]uch of our motivation driving social behavior is governed by an overarching organizing principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward (Gordon, 2000)...[and] several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks used for primary survival needs (Lieberman and Eisenberger, 2008). In other words, social needs are treated in much the same way in the brain as the need for food and water.

The SCARF model summarizes these two themes within a framework that captures the common factors that can activate a reward or threat response in social situations. This model can be applied (and tested) in any situation where people collaborate in groups, including all types of workplaces, educational environments, family settings and general social events.

Willis's work provides an vivid example of the SCARF Model in action.  As Willis describes the neurology of learning, it's easy to envision specific aspects of stressful learning environments that trigger social threats: Authoritarian teachers and intimidating leaders who diminish others' status.  Unclear lessons and irrelevant exercises that fail to provide certainty around learning goals (or the likelihood of achieving them.)  Excessive structure and a lack of choice that rob people of their autonomy.  A heightened power distance preventing teachers or leaders from developing a sense of connection and relatedness with others.  And favoritism or arbitrary rules that undermine fairness.

Rock's model describes a set of neurological dynamics at work in every social setting, but Willis makes clear their vital importance in learning environments.  Whenever we're seeking to promote learning, it's essential that we structure the environment to minimize these social threats and cultivate that "atmosphere of exuberant discovery" Willis describes above by promoting social rewards.

As teachers and leaders, we need to take advantage of every opportunity to raise the status of those around us.  We need to provide sufficient certainty without stifling creativity, and we need to provide sufficient autonomy without leaving others feeling lost or alone.  We need to foster a feeling of connection and relatedness among the diverse members of a group.  And we must always be fair.

3. Safety, Trust, Intimacy and Learning

Finally, Willis's essay reminds me of my own belief in the importance of safety, trust and intimacy in any learning environment.  As I wrote recently:

The foundational qualities that define every group are the levels of safety, trust and intimacy: Safety =  A belief that we won't get hurt.  Trust = We mean what we say and we say what we mean.  Intimacy = A willingness to make the private public.

When safety, trust and intimacy are established, these qualities support the actions that lead to greater success as a group: experimentation, risk-taking and a willingness to be vulnerable.

When we feel able to experiment, take risks and make ourselves vulnerable, our ability to learn, to increase our self-awareness (and our awareness of others) and to change our behavior in order to achieve our goals more effectively increases dramatically.

Photo by Phineas H.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Self-Coaching Guides, One Year Later

Next month marks the first anniversary of the publication of my Self-Coaching Guides, six compilations of posts on the topics of Communication, Leadership, Motivation, Change, Learning and Happiness.

The Guides have been well-received--hey, they're currently in the top 10 when you search for "self coaching"--and I'm glad people have found them useful.  That said, they're due for an update, and there's plenty of room for improvement--a project I'm planning to tackle this Summer.  The main changes I hope to make include:

• Integrating my increased understanding of neuroscience and its implications for coaching.
• Making more effective use of of the framework that links these topics together.
• And transforming the Guides from compilations into more independent narratives on each topic.

If you have any feedback on how the Guides could be made more useful, please take a look and let me know--I'd be grateful for your input.

A final thought: ALL coaching is ultimately "self-coaching."  No matter how closely I work with my clients and students, and no matter what useful insights may emerge during our sessions, they do the heavy lifting of understanding themselves, tapping into their strengths, and, when necessary, changing their behavior on their own.

Photo by Theresa Thompson. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Attitude, Behavior, Cognitive Dissonance and Authenticity

I recently had this Twitter exchange with Tom Peters:

I refer to that quote from St. Ignatius quite often because I believe it illustrates an important truth about human behavior.  We assume that our attitude causes our behavior, and that we act as we do because we think or feel a certain way:

But rather than being a one-way causal relationship, it's really a two-way street.  Attitude can certainly inform and shape our behavior, but it's a cyclical process, and behavior can also inform and shape our attitude:

This process is rooted in the dynamics of cognitive dissonance--when our attitude and our behavior are inconsistent, we experience discomfort and even distress, and we modify either our attitude or our behavior to reduce the inconsistency.  But as St. Ingnatius and Tom Peters remind us, we don't have to let our original attitude govern our behavior.  We can choose to act differently, and this new behavior can in turn modify our attitude.  "Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come."

These concepts are deeply embedded in the work of Sonia Lyubomirsky and other "happiness researchers," but psychologists and neuroscientists have long observed them at work in other settings as well.  As UC Berkeley neuroscientist Vincent van Veen and his colleagues wrote in 2009:

It has consistently been found that [study] participants [who are behaving in ways that are in conflict with their attitudes] change their attitudes to be more consistent with the counter-attitudinal behavior.  Dissonance has been shown to be a negative emotional state accompanied by autonomic arousal; it has been shown that people change their attitudes and restore consonance to specifically reduce the negative affect.

(Researchers like van Veen are beginning to explore the neuroscientific basis for this process.  The passage quoted above is from a paper by van Veen et al, "Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance."  Here's a direct link to the paper [PDF, 443 KB]  And another forthcoming paper from Harvard Business School professor Amy J.C. Cuddy entitled "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance" apparently explores similar territory, although I've only read the abstract.)

It's noteworthy that choice and free will are essential to the process of altering attitude through behavior.  The passage above continues:

When participants in control groups are able to attribute their counter-attitudinal behavior to payment or coercion, or when the counter-attitudinal behavior has no real-world consequences, conflict between behavior and prior attitudes is reduced, and participants experience less cognitive dissonance and do not change their attitudes.

Some futher thoughts on authenticity in light of Peters' original advice to "fake a good mood": While intentionally counter-attitudinal behavior may have the desired effect on our attitude, beyond a certain point it may also have negative consequences if others experience us as insincere or manipulative, and it's clearly important to be aware of the line that distinguishes "intentional" from "phony."  In addition, there are many good reasons to express our negative feelings and to build safety and trust through candor.  I'm not in the least suggesting that we should repress or hide negative feelings reflexively.

That said, in my experience as a coach, particularly with people who may be experimenting with more intentional behaviors for the first time, we can get hung up on concerns about authenticity and use that as an excuse to justify our choices, no matter how ineffective or unfulfilling they might be.  ("I'm just being honest!" we say, or "I have to be myself.")  But as the dynamic described above illustrates, authenticity is more complex than is commonly understood.

In Managing Authenticity (from the December 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review), Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones make the case that authenticity actually requires intentional behavior and, rather than being an innate quality we possess (or lack) on our own, grows out of our relationships with others and our desire to be more effective in those relationships.  Goffee and Jones focus on leaders' effectiveness, but their work is relevant to all our relationships and interpersonal interactions:

[W]hile the expression of an authentic self is necessary for great leadership, the concept of authenticity is often misunderstood, not least by leaders themselves. They often assume that authenticity is an innate quality--that a person is either authentic or not. In fact, authenticity is a quality that others must attribute to you. No leader can look into a mirror and say, "I am authentic." A person cannot be authentic on his or her own. Authenticity is largely defined by what other people see in you and, as such, can to a great extent be controlled by you. If authenticity were purely an innate quality, there would be little you could do to manage it and, therefore, little you could do to make yourself more effective as a leader...

Let us be absolutely clear: Authenticity is not the product of pure manipulation. It accurately reflects aspects of the leader’s inner self, so it can't be an act. But great leaders seem to know which personality traits they should reveal to whom and when. They are like chameleons, capable of adapting to the demands of the situations they face and the people they lead, yet they do not lose their identities in the process. [My emphasis]

Viewing our initial attitude as "authentic" and using that to rationalize any subsequent behavior makes no sense when we see how readily our attitude can be modified by choosing different behavior.  By the same logic, behavior chosen for the express purpose of modifying our attitude isn't automatically "inauthentic."  Looking through Goffee and Jones' framework, we see authenticity as a quality that we cultivate through lived experience and that we (and those around us) sense subjectively, not the result of a behavioral algorithm that disappears when we act intentionally.

I recognize that these complexities can make it difficult to know what's "right" in a given situation (which, of course, is why we have executive coaches.)  But my larger point is that we have much more power than we typically realize to choose behavior that will affect our attitude, and that we can be more effective and feel more fulfilled as a result.

Infectious Agents of Enthusiasm (Spreading Teh Awesome)

In my last post on my Twitter exchange with Tom Peters I used the phrase "infectious agents of enthusiasm," a concept that has continued to resonate with me and has inspired some practical questions:

What does it mean to be an infectious agent of enthusiasm?

What does it look like in practice?

And what results can we expect?

It occurred to me that one surefire way to spread enthusiasm--an infectious vector, if you will--is a simple expression of gratitude, and that led to the following exchange with a vendor whose services I use:

April 22, 2010 9:27 AM:

I know that people who staff help desks are like cops and lawyers--no one calls you unless there's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.

So I opened this help ticket to tell y'all that...

1) I've really embraced the new [feature], even though I bitched and moaned about it (a lot.)

2) I'm really grateful for (and feel well-supported by) your service.

3) You are teh awesome. Really.

Thanks.

Ed Batista

April 22, 2010 11:02 AM:

Hi Ed,

Thank you so much for taking the time to reach out and share these kind words with us. We've had sort of a tough week here in Support (full moon? Who knows.) and this really made our day brighter.  We wanted to thank you with a 20% off discount on your account, so I've gone ahead and applied that.   Thanks again and let us know if there's anything you need help with.

[Awesome user support person]

April 22, 2010 11:18 AM:

Wow--I certainly had no expectation of a discount, and I'm very grateful.  Thank you!  Teh awesome, indeed. I'm glad I could brighten your day--you and your colleagues brighten mine all the time. Thanks again.

Ed

So, what does it mean to be an infectious agent of enthusiasm?  Among other things, it means creating opportunities to focus on the many positive experiences we often take for granted.

What does it look like in practice?  It's pretty simple--a heartfelt (and unexpected) "Thank you!" can go a long way.

And what results can we expect?  Brightening someone else's day can brighten yours in turn.

Tom Peters, Twitter, Good Moods and Enthusiasm

I'm a big fan of Tom Peters.  I regularly cite these words of wisdom from November 2007 (intentionally posted in all caps to express 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."

PERIOD.
END OF STORY.
[I WISH.]

I've learned a ton from his slides, which he makes freely available.  And his tweets are to the point and thought-provoking.

So these two exchanges were a high point of my day yesterday:

A colleague saw this and DM'ed me, "I love the world of 2010. Blows my mind on a regular basis."

Agreed.  And these exchanges serve to reinforce my perspective on the issues Peters raised, which I see as closely related.  We can be infectious agents of enthusiasm, or of any dynamic we want to express in the world (so choose wisely.)  And while enthusiasm--like leadership--can't be "taught," we can help others learn about the sources of their enthusiasm, tap into them and cultivate their ability to access those feelings more readily.

Grant McCracken on Brainstorming as Intellectual Improv

Following up on my recent recommendation of Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer (as well as my appreciation for Grant's acknowledgment of the strategic importance of empathy), I wanted to highlight one more thought-provoking concept in the book: Brainstorming as Intellectual Impure.  Grant describes a brainstorming session convened by Denise Fonseca, who is currently director of global business and consumer insights for Coca-Cola:

[pp 135-137] Fonseca has assembled people with various kinds of expertise.  Most were from the academic world.  They do not play well with others.  They object, cavil, quibble, carp and niggle.

Fonseca gave us fair warning.  She said something like,

There is one rule in this room: No no's.  You may not contradict, dispute, or disagree with the things you hear here.  I am going to enforce the "no no's" rule with my M&M's.  When I hear you contradict, dispute or disagree, I am going to pelt you with an M&M.  Or several M&M's, depending on the severity of your offense.

I listened with interest.  And I tried my best.  But years of academic training got the better of me.  I caviled, quibbled and disputed several times.  The first M&M struck me in the lapel.  The second bounced off the notes in front of me.  The last one was a direct hit, caroming off my noggin.  (Nice shot, Fonseca!)

The "no no's" rule comes as a surprise to a lot of people.  It seems like a recipe for chaos.  Isn't caviling the very method of quality control?  Actually, it isn't always.  Too often it's the way academics jam the airwaves against new ideas.  But the point of this undertaking is not quality control, it's idea generation.  When what we are looking for is a sheer profusion of possibilities, no no's is the path to riches.

Good brainstorming is an act of intellectual improv.  A group of people agree to break the normal rules and reservations of interaction and "go for it."  Their objective: to go places they could not get on their own...

But how are we to separate the good from the bad ideas?  The good news is that, in good groups, bad ideas go away by themselves.  No one picks them up.  No one remains their champion...

One of the conditions of brainstorming is a "nonproprietary" approach from the participants.  The moment an idea escapes our lips, it belongs to the group...  We have to learn to say goodbye.  We get credit in general for our performance...but otherwise ideas end up belonging to everyone.  This is sometimes the hardest lesson for academics to learn...

Once we learn to say no to no, we have to learn to say yes to yes... Brainstorming works best when we commit heart and soul.  It works best when we engage in a kind of improv.  The first positive rule of brainstorming is just what it is in improv: Take up every pretext and run with it.

---

Further Thoughts on Group Process

While I do find Grant's belief in the power of brainstorming compelling (and have said so before), this counterpoint from Johnnie Moore is worth bearing in mind:

Personally, I like methods that allow...people a flexibility to work at different paces and [use] different ways of interacting. I tend not to use the word "brainstorming" as for me it's too suggestive of a relentless fast-pace. With more time for reflection, people sometimes generate ideas that are somewhere in the fascinating gaps between one point of view and another. And I like rules-of-thumb more than absolute instructions for how we might all choose to play together.

Ultimately I think it's most important to be mindful of the overall group dynamic.  For example, do we tend to "object, cavil, quibble, carp and niggle," like Grant's academics?  Then a formal set of brainstorming parameters, such as a hard-and-fast "No No's" rule, might give ideas time to breathe before they're suffocated.

It's also worth considering where the group is in the decision-making process.  Do we need to begin eliminating options in order to reach closure?  Then the time for brainstorming is over, and we need to transition into an entirely different process--but until we reach that point, perhaps we need a set of agreements that will help us stay in idea-generation mode.  Sam Kaner's framework for decision-making is a simple but very useful tool in this regard:

Finally, I'm reminded of Grant's elements of reinvention, an extraordinarily thoughtful list of the dynamics that characterize change.  Put all these concepts together, and they comprise a great set of tools for stimulating idea generation, reinvention, and change while also helping a group ultimately move forward and reach closure.

Coaching and Narrative Therapy

One of my most rewarding projects this past year has been collaborating with Prof. Carole Robin and fellow executive coaches Andrea Corney and Ricki Frankel on the development of a new class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business to be called Taking Stock and Moving Forward. The purpose of the class is to provide students who are about to graduate with a structured opportunity to "take stock" of what they've learned about themselves during their two years in business school and prepare to "move forward" into the next phase of their lives and careers.

A hallmark of the class is an emphasis on the choices that we make in life, a stance that both holds us accountable for the results of those choices and allows us to assume greater responsibility for our own fulfillment. To explore this concept further, Carole recently wrote a paper entitled "On Choice," which includes a section on "narrative therapy":

Narrative therapy posits that our identities are shaped by the accounts of our lives found in the stories or narratives we tell. The bridges of meaning we build with others through conversation helps us develop new perspectives and shape events into new, more hopeful narratives; listening to and telling stories about ourselves and our lives shape new realities...

The [narrative] therapist's task becomes to help clients engage in making sense of their lives, which is far different from explaining their behavior. The belief is that in the course of telling and re-telling one's story...alternatives to the troubling story, the problem-saturated story, emerge... A narrative therapist does not much care about causes of problems. Instead, the focus is on conversations that generate multiple possible ways to move forward once a problem has arisen... [T]he therapist's task is to create the conditions for all these voices and all these stories to be "heard" so that new tales can be told.

While you may be wondering what the relevance of narrative therapy is outside a therapeutic context, the fact is that any kind of story-telling about our lives is an opportunity to see that story in a new light and thus reshape it... In my coaching practice, I often see clients recognize that how they describe an event shapes the choices they see (or don't see) in front of them.

As I wrote last year when discussing the parallels between coaching and gestalt therapy, "Executive coaching isn't therapy, and good coaches are aware of the distinction."  However, I continued, "This doesn't mean there's always a bright line distinguishing the two," and I see the processes Carole describes above at work in my own coaching practice, and I'm struck by the parallels between her description of narrative therapy and my approach to coaching. (No surprise, given how closely I've worked with Carole in recent years and how much I've learned about coaching from her.)

First and Foremost, Coaches Listen

My most important task as a coach is to listen. This may sound simplistic, but it's essential to understand both how difficult it can be to truly listen and what a powerful effect it has on us when we feel truly heard. The difficulties we face as listeners include:

• Tuning out our "self-talk," the internal dialogues we conduct with ourselves, often formulating a response to the other person before they've actually finished speaking....
• While still making use of our intuitions, the hunches that our pre-conscious brain makes based on a whole range of sensory data we pick up from the other person...
• And always conveying to the other person through everything that we say and do (particularly our non-verbal expressions when we're not speaking) just how deeply we are listening so that they do truly feel heard.

More than anything else I do as a coach, the steps that I take to make my clients feel truly heard create the conditions for a productive and meaningful conversation.  And in some of my most successful moments as a coach, listening is really all I'm doing--and it's enough.

Coaches Don't Explain--They Help Make Meaning

Despite the fundamental role of listening in coaching, I still have plenty to say to my clients and students--but I'm not explaining their lives and experiences to them.  Instead, I'm helping them interpret, re-interpret, and ultimately make meaning out of those experiences.  It's critical to recognize the distinction between these two alternatives.

To "explain" is to set ourselves up as a source of objective Truth and to impress upon others the validity and accuracy of that Truth.  But Truth is elusive at best, and potentially nonexistent, in any interpersonal experience.  Your "truth" and my "truth" don't need to be the same; they don't even need to overlap.  So seeking to "explain" anything as a coach is a short cut leading nowhere.

In contrast, helping to make meaning is very different process.  Once again, listening comes first.  The person I'm coaching may simply need to tell their story to someone who will allow them to feel heard, and in the process of hearing their story spoken aloud they come to understand what it means, or they arrive at a new meaning.  Or I may play a more active interpretive role and reflect possible meanings back to them--but how I do so is important.  I'm making full use of my intuitions and my hunches, and I pay very close attention to the feelings and thoughts that arise within me as I'm listening, but I hold onto the meanings that I'm creating very loosely.  When I offer them, they're hypotheses, suggestions, possibilities--not Truth.  And so any meaning that emerges from these conversations is ultimately owned by the other person, not by me.

Coaches Focus on Solutions, Not Causes

Last year's Harvard Business Review report on executive coaching included this table:

Coaching	Coaching & Therapy	Therapy
Focuses on the future	Paid to ask the right questions	Focuses on the past
Fosters individual performance in a business context	Tackles difficult issues at work and home	Diagnoses and treats dysfunctionality
Helps executives discover their own path	Focuses on individual behavioral change	Based on medical ethics

I find it useful because it highlights the close relationship between coaching and therapy while making some crucial differences between the two disciplines, but it's clearly an oversimplification, particularly by suggesting that therapy focuses exclusively on the past while coaching focuses on the future. My clients and students sometimes talk extensively about their pasts, and obviously people in all forms of therapy sometimes talk extensively about their futures.

But a dimension that's not fully reflected in this table is the extent to which a discipline focuses on causes vs. solutions.  Many forms of therapy seek specifically to understand and uncover the root causes of a client's behavior and life experiences, but as Carole notes above, narrative therapists don't "much care about causes of problems. Instead, the focus is on conversations that generate multiple possible ways to move forward once a problem has arisen."  And that's just what I do as a coach.

Conclusions

My intention here (and in my piece last year on "gestalt coaching") isn't to equate coaching and therapy.  I'm not a therapist, and one of my most important responsibilities as a coach is to be aware of the differences between the two disciplines so that when I'm working with someone who might need the support of a trained clinician, I can refer them to an appropriate resource.  But in our care to make that distinction, I want to be sure that we don't overlook the many parallels that exist between coaching and specific forms of therapeutic treatment, particularly gestalt therapy, narrative therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy.  Coaching clearly has a relationship with these disciplines, and while I don't believe coaches need to be (or even should be) be clinicians, I do believe that more fully we understand those relationships, the more effectively we can serve our clients.

Update: David Drake of the Center for Narrative Coaching appears to be working directly at the intersection of coaching and narrative therapy, and he describes what he does in greater detail in two posts from earlier this year, So, What Do Narrative Coaches Do? and What Do Narrative Coaches Do, Part 1.  (Hopefully Part 2 will be available soon.)

Photo by Poldavo (Alex).  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

The Strategic Importance of Empathy

In my work as a coach, empathy--defined by Merriam-Webster as "understanding and vicariously experiencing the feelings and thoughts of another"--is a foundational skill, and my effectiveness is inextricably tied to my capacity to empathize (which is why I seek to understand and transcend my limitations.)

So it's gratifying when someone other than a coach talks about the importance of empathy, particularly in a business context.  Last week I recommended Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer, and in addition to supporting his advocacy for that new profession, I want to call attention to his case for empathy as an essential capability in business:

[pp 128-129] In the twentieth century, the corporation was so large it created its own weather system.  General Motors, IBM and Coca-Cola could shape the world to their will.  And in this world it was enough to be really analytically smart.  Now we have to know the world outside the corporation.  We have to know worlds alien to our own.  We have to know worlds that proceed according to other assumptions.  Without empathy, these worlds are opaque to us.

The news has reached even the Harvard Business School.  When faculty members Srikant Datar and David Garvin consulted the b-school world, they were told that MBAs needed more "self-awareness and the capacity for introspection and empathy."  This is good news, but I am a little puzzled why they continue to call these "soft skills."  In fact, empathy is frequently the blade that finds the right insight, extracts from it the real strategic and tactical opportunity, and crafts it into a final, compelling form.  Is this really a "soft" skill?  (And what does it say about the b-school community that it uses this patronizing language?)...

The CEO of Delta Air Lines, Richard Anderson was recently asked how business school should change... As he told the New York Times, "We measure, study, quantify, analyze every single piece of our business.  Business schools in the United States have done a phenomenal job of creating the capability.  But then you've got to be able to take all that data and information and transform it into change in the organization and improvement in the organization and the formulation of the business strategy."

We may think of empathy as the ability to see the bigger picture that will transform the corporation inside and out.

In my role as a Leadership Coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I'm directly involved in the effort to help MBAs develop more "self-awareness and the capacity for introspection and empathy," and something the GSB gets right--partly by design, partly by accident--is the rich array of opportunities for our students to cultivate these qualities.

The designed aspect is a function not only of the GSB's "new curriculum" and its emphasis on leadership and communication skills, but also of the school's decades-long commitment to its Interpersonal Dynamics course, a transformative experience for the majority of the student body (including me, way back in 1999.)  That said, the accidental aspect derives from my sense that, despite all the progress that's been made, some of our most important work in these areas still happens on the margins of the institution, in happenstance conversations and relationships, and, to Grant's point above, all of this work is still easily dismissed by some as mere "soft skills."

I'm reminded of a November 2007 post by Tom Peters (which he actually wrote in ALL CAPS to signify his passion):

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'd readily add "self-awareness and the capacity for introspection and empathy" to that last list--none of them are easy to develop.  I'm also reminded of Charlie Rose's 2007 interview with Bill George:

Charlie Rose: [Leadership] can be taught and learned?

Bill George: Learned. I teach now, and I don't think you can teach leadership, I think you can learn about it.  I think you can learn about yourself.  It comes from within, from who are you inside and what makes you tick, and what are those tapes playing in your head about what you want to be and what your limitations are.

(later in the interview)

Bill George: In this century, leadership has changed.  Leadership is not about getting people to follow you, the "Great Man theory," follow you over the hill General George Patton style.  That idea is out.  To me, the great leaders today are able to align people around a sense of purpose and values and get that consistency all around the globe, and then empower other people to step up and lead.  And I've found that in organizations that are really effective at generating leaders, there are thousands of leaders because people empower them to step up and lead.

And just how do we develop leaders who can "go within," who can "align people around a sense of purpose," who can "empower other[s]"?  By helping them to cultivate their self-awareness, their capacity for introspection, their ability to empathize.

Peter Drucker on Excellence, Careers and Planning

Most of my clients and students are seeking to be more effective and fulfilled as professionals or are in the midst of a career transition--or both.  A resource to which I've referred people for years is Peter Drucker's brilliant essay Managing Oneself, and it's time to do so again.  Here are a few key excerpts and the questions that they inspire in me:

On Excellence

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.  It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.  And yet most people--especially most teachers and most organizations--concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones.  Energy, resources, and time should go instead into making a competent person into a star performer.

So ask yourself, What are my strengths?  Where could I improve from first-rate performance to excellence?  Where should I be focusing my energy, resources and time?  Just as important, where am I wasting effort trying to improve from incompetence to mediocrity?  (I'm reminded of the value of Seth Godin's concept of strategic quitting.)

On Careers

[M]ost people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.  By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths?  How do I perform?  and, What are my values?  And then they can and should decide where they belong.

Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong...

Equally important, knowing the answers to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, "Yes, I will do that.  But this is the way I should be doing it.  This is the way it should be structured.  This is the way the relationships should be.  These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am."

Having assessed your strengths, the next questions to ask are: Under what conditions do I do my best work?  What do I require in a work environment to perform at my best?  What structures, what relationships, what expectations allow me to deliver excellence?  Conversely, what conditions make it more difficult for me to deliver excellence?  (I find David Rock's SCARF model a very helpful tool in understanding why some conditions support my own ability to deliver excellence while others have the opposite effect.)

Continuing with Drucker's framework, the logical next question is: What are my values?  But what do we really mean by that?  The definition of any given "value" is inherently subjective--and even if we arrive at one that works for us, what does it mean to put that value into practice?  Here's a process to reach an actionable definition of your values in this context:

• Draw up a list of terms that you define as "values."
• Specify the meaning of each value by telling a story that demonstrates that value in action, preferably an actual event from your own or an observed experience.
• Having illustrated each value this way, ask yourself:

What intrinsic rewards are the result of this value?  In what ways does it fulfill me?

What extrinsic rewards--what forms of status or compensation--am I willing to sacrifice on behalf of this value?

How important is this value to my self-identity?  How different would my life have to be for me to abandon this value?

• Use the answers to these questions to narrow your original list of terms down to no more than five--and preferably three.  The results are your core values.

On Planning

Successful careers are not planned.  They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values...

A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific.  So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half?  The answer must balance several things.  First, the results should be hard to achieve--they should require "stretching," to use the current buzzword.  But also, they should be within reach.  To aim at results that cannot be achieved--or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances--is not being ambitious, it is being foolish.  Second, the results should be meaningful.  They should make a difference.  Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.  From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.

The answers to your questions above don't constitute a plan, but they're certainly an important form of preparation.  Even if don't yet know what you want to do or what opportunities you'll say "Yes" to, these answers should help you begin closing doors and should allow you to start saying "No" to opportunities that aren't aligned with your strengths, your methods of working, or your values.

So now, whether you're seeking to make a transition or simply to be more effective or fulfilled in your current field, look out over the next 18 months, and ask yourself: What can I accomplish in that timeframe?  Will these goals require me to truly stretch?  Will they truly make a difference?  And how will my results be visible and measurable?

As always when it comes to planning, I find comfort in the (reputed) wisdom of Gen. George Patton: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week."

Acknowledgments

I encourage you to read Managing Oneself in its entirety, available as a PDF from Harvard Business Review or as the closing chapter in Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century.

Thanks to Jim Collins and Jerry Porras's Building Your Company's Vision for their essential framework on identifying core values.

Thanks to Thaler Pekar for her thoughts on The Trouble with Values and the importance of stories.

Derek Sivers on Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Derek Sivers does a nice job extracting leadership lessons from the Dancing Guy at Sasquatch.  That's right, this guy:

Sivers writes:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore - it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

And what proves Sivers' point about the importance of standing alone even further is that Dancing Guy was dancing for quite a long time before he finally sparked a movement: Other videos show him dancing for at least 20 minutes before the video above was shot.

It's noteworthy that the guy Sivers dubs the "First Follower" technically wasn't first.  Those other videos show a dozen people interacting with Dancing Guy before First Follower comes on the scene.  Most of those others seem self-conscious, including one man who's egged on by his friends shooting the video to actually mock Dancing Guy--not that Dancing Guy cared.

What distinguished First Follower wasn't that he was first in line, but that he shared Dancing Guy's passion, his unselfconscious playfulness.  He wasn't first, but he was the first to stick around, and that's what made the difference.  As Sivers concludes:

If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.

Be public. Be easy to follow!

But the biggest lesson here - did you catch it?

Leadership is over-glorified.

Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he'll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We're told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

(Sivers echoed aspects of this theme in a talk he gave at SXSW: "The biggest secret of promotion is that it's all about them--it's not about you.")