The Philosophy
Development falls short because the metrics that organisations measure and optimise for aren’t the ones that really matter. Worse, this misalignment often isn’t visible to the organisation – they don’t realise that the stated and revealed preferences don’t match. Helicopter crews who can execute skills in isolation but don’t trust their own judgement and decision-making can pass training courses without ever having the full set of skills to conduct the actual job – people learn the skills that they are assessed against, so if the organisation tells people through its actions that discrete skills are the thing that matters, that is where the focus goes. This is a structural deficiency, not a people one.
There is a rare but very specific moment that exists in having your foundational assumptions revealed to you. Really good development works at the double-loop level – ensuring that you are doing the right things, analysing whether they are still the right things and realigning if appropriate. The moment where a coach realises that there is an alternative to the feeling of having an external policeman waiting to catch them every time they step outside the bounds of pure coaching, or when the organisational trainer of instructors realises that the question was never about how to create better instructors, but rather that bridging the existing skill gaps in the organisation needs a new approach to instructing. Now they aren’t training instructors, instead they are developing the breadth and depth of capability that the organisation always claimed to have through teaching a cohort of people to challenge the stated assumptions of the organisation.
This is rare enough in development work, but the foundational change for people and organisations comes one step beyond – when you stay within that question and rather than latching onto the revelation you sit and explore what it means about you and the organisation that you have never asked that question before.
"What else have you missed? What opportunities could this open up now?"
A combination of a deep weight in the pit of the stomach at the realisation of what could have been, and a tingle across the skin about what is now possible. If it’s not intimidating and thrilling at the same time then you aren’t there yet. When you find it, you want to immediately tell someone - that one person who really gets it – because the possibilities are thrilling and scary at the same time and you need to share them with someone but not everyone is ready to hear it and you can’t stop the ideas tumbling out. This level of work takes longer, needs patience and embedding and can be a difficult sell to a hierarchy who want quick results, but this work takes time. You can have it quick, you can have it cheap, or you can have it done well, but at best you have two of the three.
That relationship – the one that you need in those moments – is what I aim to create wherever I can. You know you’re there when, as a coach, you give a poorly-judged intervention and the response from the client is immediate, unfiltered and honest: “that’s a bit strong”; “I think you’ve joined dots that aren’t there”; “those are your thoughts, not mine”. But the relationship is strong enough that they can then sit with it, think about it, and the second response is more nuanced. The safety in the ideal relationship allows the first reaction, and that releases some of the pressure/tension that the poor question created – if the pressure isn't released then there may well not be space for the more reflective response, and things stall. Its psychological safety taken one step further – not just safe enough to share, but safe enough to push back. The work that I’m asking the client to do with their system, to challenge the assumptions underneath the questions that are or aren’t asked, is surfaced in the moment. The relationship is a practice ground for what we are talking about. The ability to hold serious ideas and challenges with lightness, to laugh at ourselves and our dilemmas – this doesn’t diminish the work, it enables it. Mischief, inventiveness, playfulness – these are the elements that lift the work from being something that you do to being something that you can’t wait to do.
This is a relationship not unlike a pair of rock climbers. Much of coaching and development is like top-roping, climbing with the rope always above you, present even if you can’t feel that comforting tug on the harness. It gives the experience of climbing but the presence of the rope above means you never have to train the mental side, the resilience to operate on your own, to deal with the exposure. Lead climbing still has safety points, a belayer, and anchors that you place yourself, but there is genuine risk involved as well - not existential (we aren't soloing) but definite risk. The limits are more often mental than physical when lead climbing. When you are doing longer, remote, multi-pitch climbs you need both people to share the burden of leading at different times. You climb carrying a bag with your gear rather than doing it unencumbered. Being able to do the challenging climb carry all your “stuff” is much more empowering than having to leave it at the bottom to be able to perform.
Developing self-sufficiency in challenging places isn’t about giving you answers, or even about helping you to find better answers for yourself. It’s about honestly interrogating why you ask the questions that you do, examining the reasons and then sharpening the questions as a result. When you ask better questions, when you dig beneath the surface and even below the first or second layer then you surface what really matters. You start to touch on the things that are actually important rather than what we say are important. Sitting at the intersection of many different specialisms, still delivering a lot of them inside the high-stakes world of military aviation, helps me to see connections and integrations that a true specialist wouldn’t. Being part of such different worlds at the same time exposes you to wider perspectives, and means that the lessons you draw aren’t from what you used to do, but from what is happening right now. Integrating across disciplines might be harder and messier but that doesn’t mean it isn’t better.
It’s both art and science. The science provides the foundation, the rigour, the underpinning. But beyond a certain point you have to feel when the right time to make the intervention is; you have to know when the relationship is strong enough for you to bring the conversation up short and not damage what you have built. These are things that can be explained, codified and taught given enough time and practice, but everyone will employ the techniques differently. Taking the knowledge and making it yours in the moment of delivery – there’s a real joy to that, the act of working together in the moment. Almost like a dance, or improv of some kind – sometimes fear too, because you don’t know what you will find or how things will land, but you are defining the “right thing” through the lens of the individual relationship rather than a sanitised credentialling lens and so that risk is the right thing to do in the moment.
This is freedom – freedom to be energetic, irreverent, to reach for the right tool at the right time regardless of where you learned it. Freedom to follow where the work needs to take you without fear of the invisible policeman. Freedom to trust yourself, your client and your decision-making, fully and without qualification. The responsibility is heavier, for everyone involved – when you take the decision to strike out on your own path you bear the responsibility for your own route-finding, and for keeping everyone safe. That change in thinking is triple-loop in action – not only being totally responsible for your own actions and decisions, but responsible for adapting the way you think about how you make those decisions in the moment. That’s a responsibility that I actively seek out.