I'm Baz Stokes - and I don’t fit neatly into one box.

 

On the surface of it, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool military helicopter instructor with over 20 years of experience teaching high-end operators to do the hardest things in a high-stress, high-consequence arena. Teaching their instructors to teach in that arena – the complex, uncertain, messy world of low-level combat operations – is very different to teaching in a classroom or a training school. There is no one right answer, but the wrong one will have huge consequences – as a result I’ve learned to lean into the discomfort of not knowing, to trust the people I work with and to believe that a combination of talent, grit, humour and a desire for better will see us through. It usually does.

 

​I’m still in that world, still doing that role day-in, day-out. But working as a professional coach, as a supervisor, or outside the military in AI scale-ups – these are things that have broadened and rounded my thinking and my work. Some contexts need a softer approach, some need more edge, but all the people that I work with want to really push towards the limits of their capability in some way. Whether you’re a data scientist who has become a first-time manager, or a professional coach who wants to feel as sure-footed in the rest of your portfolio business as well as you do in the coaching room, I understand the desire for wanting to be just that little bit better. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t good enough already, but there’s something more to give. Somewhere.​

 

Talent alone isn’t enough – you need to be able to understand and apply the knowledge, not just perform it. The question is “can you take what you learned in one context, understand the underlying lessons, internalise them and then adapt them to a new environment?” Beyond that, can you take that understanding, inspect it and use that new knowledge to change the way that you think about all of your tasks?​

 

Are you ready for development that moves beyond performance improvement; beyond questioning our assumptions and strategies and into the uncomfortable work of reflecting on the principles, values and beliefs that fuel not just us but the whole system. Moving beyond “am I doing it right” or “am I doing the right thing” to explore “why am I doing this and what does the answer tell me about who I am and who I could be?” Because lasting, fundamental change only comes at this triple loop level – above that you are improving but not evolving.

 

​Inspiring stuff, but that is not easy work – it’s hard, tiring, and frustrating. But also rewarding and spine-tinglingly exhilarating when there is one of those moments that appears out of nowhere, when you suddenly become aware of a new idea at the edge of your thinking. I love that challenge, complexity and uncertainty. Not a LinkedIn ready VUCA tag-line, but the sort of thing where you really feel it, where I stand on the edge of something with a client and step into the unknown together. You know where you want to get to, and you’re trusting to the strength of the relationship and to the shared experience and knowledge to keep you on track.​

 

There is a real joy in working with something challenging: the teaching of teachers in a complex and high-stakes environment; pushing at the edge of what is sensible and coherent, making connections between areas that when they spark, they really catch fire. But just as often they fizzle out, either because the idea wasn't right or the context wasn't ready. Occasionally they blow up in my face, but that doesn't always mean it was a bad idea - let's dissect it together, look at the wreckage from different angles, gather the black box and interrogate the data. There's always something to learn - we can always be a little bit better, even when we are already bloody good.​

 

I hold professional qualifications in individual coaching, team coaching, coaching supervision, teaching, mentoring, instruction, leadership, innovation and training systems design. But that tells you that I’m qualified, not whether we would work well together – that’s what the first conversation is for.​