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Innovation to Impact

Selecting a Coach: Lessons and Tips for Performance

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An interesting thing happened to Emma Raducanu, the teen tennis star who came from being ranked 150th in the World to winning the U.S. Open in 2021, in the first tournament she competed in since that win: she lost in straight sets. Raducanu had steamrolled through the entire US Open seemingly out of nowhere to win the tournament by beating Layla Fernandez, another young woman also having a remarkable run from being almost unknown to the finals.

What happened? For starters, she fired her coach. This was the same coach that had helped her to get to the podium in New York. The reason? She believed she needed a coach to help her stay at the top, not just get there.

While it’s too early to tell what the implications of Raducanu’s decision was it seems to mirror what happened to another promising young tennis star, Eugenie Bouchard, who did something similar after tasting some early success and has since fallen far down the world rankings never to recapture that early success (yet). An effective coach can make a substantial difference in the performance of a person or an organization but only if there is a clear-eyed view to what a coach does and does not do.

The decision to fire or hire a coach can have lasting effects on performance and yet these effects are often misunderstood. Here we break down what you can expect from a good coach and what to look for when things don’t go well.

Knowledge

Coaches bring together three kinds of knowledge together in working with their clients: process knowledge (how to get things done), technical knowledge (specific knowledge about skills, tools, and their application), and content knowledge (knowledge about the topic that we’re trying to address).

Combined with praxis (creating learning through action loops) a coach weaves this all together with their client.

Knowledge Practice

Practically, knowledge involves having a coach with experience and an ongoing commitment to learning. It’s why we call it practice, it’s about ongoing work to keep up on the latest knowledge and sharpening skills. A strong coach should be doing this with their work and supporting you in doing this with yours.

Strategy

Coaching can involve a variety of factors that can facilitate performance. The first of these is strategy. It is here that we often see the tangible effects of coaching with athletes, other individuals, and organizations. Here, the coach is involved in developing a strategy or in its execution. If you change the coach, you may very well change the strategy. Good strategy is alignment of purpose, vision, resources, and execution and a coaching change might shift how any or all of these are realized in practice.

Strategic Design

Strategy is about design – it’s a conscious intentional plan made into reality. Good coaching is about ensuring that there is a plan, the plan is executed, that it is adaptive and developmental, and that there are sufficient evaluation mechanisms to help you learn and grow. You cannot have a strong strategy without an evaluation plan to know whether you’re moving closer or farther from your goal.

Focus

Related to strategy is focus. Coaches often help their clients focus on specific things and away from others. This is done often by learning about what is holding attention in the first place. What is an organization focused on — both fears and hopes? This is very much about training for a mindset, not just a skill set. There is a big difference in avoiding what you fear compared with moving toward what you want.

An organization with a defensive mindset might be more likely to focus on how to protect market advantages or the avoidance of risks.

An organization with a opportunity mindset may still acknowledge risks and fears, but may focus its energy on getting to where it wants to go in spite of the challenges.

Mindsets for Change

Assess your coach on their ability to build the kind of relationship that allows them to learn how best you learn, how you see the world, and to create a profile of your mindsets. No coach should assume you have any particular mindset or that you use it consistently in the situations that matter. Great coaches pay attention to what you do and why you do it.

Motivation & Systems

Another coaching issue is motivation. This is the soft-skill process of keeping someone energized and brings together all of the other components within a system or structure. Motivation is about cultivating a ‘spark’ or ‘fire’ in someone to encourage them to take action. Systems are in place to help create habits so you don’t have to rely on motivation. Motivation requires a lot of energy and the benefits are many, but good systems are even better because they make behaviour change easier to do because they scaffold and anchor behaviours on to habits.

For example, people don’t usually have to feel motivated to brush their teeth or drink water when they are thirsty.

Coaches put in good systems and create a means to motivate their clients when those systems aren’t in place or when they are not enough.

Motivational systems

Combining the right kind of inspiration with systems that sustain that energy over time so you don’t have to rely on it all the time is key. Avoid coaches who focus only on motivating without creating systems to reduce the reliance on high-energy things like motivation to carry you forward.

Selection

We lastly want to say that a coach is a partner in your success. A great coach succeeds when you succeed. They are to be partners in your success, not just a consultant. As such, relationships are very important as much as anything else in this list. Find the fit and recognize that it might take some time to find that fit and to put the practices into place.

For Emma Raducanu, this initial setback might be a bump in the road to finding the right coach and the right fit. It could also be the start of a fall backward like we saw with Genie Bouchard. Time and good care will tell.

Coaching is part of what we do and we take it seriously. If you’re looking for someone to help see things differently to better do things differently, we can be your partner. If that’s what you need as a leader or an organization, let’s talk.

Photo by Moises Alex on Unsplash, Josephine Gasser on Unsplash, and Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

Bundles and Stacks

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Two powerful approaches to creating healthy habits are to bundle or stack behaviours together, by design. If we can learn to connect what we do in small ways to other things we can make big changes more easily.

For innovators seeking and making change, these two approaches can help break down a big goal into small, manageable actions.

Bundles

A bundle is a way of tying together two behaviours that don’t normally go together for positive benefit. It takes something you dislike and pairing it with something you like. For example, imagine doing uncomfortable rehab exercises while watching your favourite TV show. Maybe listen to your favourite music while doing your taxes.

There are many activities in our work that are tedious, unpleasant, or undesirable to do. By bundling those with something you do enjoy it can make those unpleasant tasks easier to do.

Consider the barriers to your service that might be unavoidable: how can you bundle those with something positive? How can you make the worst, but necessary, aspects of what you offer, better?

By considering a bundle, we can design for positive outcomes in spite of issues we cannot design around. This is particularly relevant for healthcare (e.g., dental visits, medication taking) or activities requiring paperwork or queuing.

Stacks

A stack is pairing small activities together to produce a larger effect. For example, consider listening to podcasts or e-books while running. This allows you to learn and exercise at the same time.

Another example is drinking a glass of water every time you check your email. This one accomplishes the goal of keeping you hydrated while ensuring you don’t check your email too often (preventing frequent trips to the bathroom).

We can design our ‘stacks’. Practically, this means creating an inventory of jobs to be done and pairing them together when possible. By simply knowing what has to be done we can create stacks that get tasks done together.

Design Considerations

The key to both activities is to break down what has to be done and mapping it out. This can be done using simple paper, sticky notes, a whiteboard, or tools like Miro or Mural. This activity has the added benefit of articulating what has to be done. It is a useful awareness-building exercise to reveal all the tasks and subtasks involved in our work.

Once completed, consider pairing tasks and activities together. What pairs might work? What systems can we put in place to help make things easier?

After pairing, the next step is to prototype and evaluate Try things out. If you wish to drink water with email, consider setting a glass or your favourite mug beside your computer. Create the prompts to remind you to try things out. These are new behaviours so it may take some time to get it right. If, after many attempts, the behaviour hasn’t changed (the bundle didn’t take, the stack didn’t work), try a different one.

The key is to keep trying. Whether this is for individuals or organizations, the key is to keep trying and learning. The more attempts you make, the more you will learn and the more likely you will succeed.

This behavioural strategy is both simple and easy to try and test even if changes are often difficult. If you need help in making these changes and designing for them, contact us – this is what we do.

Sensemaking in Crisis

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Sensemaking is a social process that helps us make sense of data, information, and knowledge in a time of complexity. It’s used often in innovation contexts when we are fitting data to a unique situation.

The RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) a UK-based charity and think-tank has recently updated and revised its collective sense-making framework which provides a clear example of ways to consider change-making and leading in times of crisis.

The 2×2 framework, presented below, helps to frame activities that may have stopped or started during a crisis and what activities we may wish to amplify, end, abandon, and re-start.

Developmental Thinking

What the RSA framework embodies is what we call developmental thinking. This is the kind of thinking embedded in Developmental Evaluation, design and innovation. This thinking is about taking information and feedback from the activities in the system and making adaptive, strategic decisions to keep the organization developing (evolving) through learning.

Learning is about taking action based on new information and in some cases — such as those in complex situations with lots of change and activity — this learning must come from sensemaking. It tells us when to stop, start, pause, and wind-down activities.

The RSA proposes conducting this sensemaking over time through a process that is akin to developmental design and developmental evaluation through the crisis which, in the case of events like COVID-19, might be protracted and evolve. As noted below, it also recognizes that sensemaking is tied to systems thinking where events (the most visible parts of a system) are actually built upon larger sets of behaviours, structures, and paradigms.

To make use of this requires a monitoring and evaluation system tied to an overall developmental, design-driven process. It’s not difficult, but it does require substantial mindframe shifts and organizational supports. Yet, the payoff is that your organization is adaptive and working with what’s happening and what’s emerging, rather than stuck trying to make what used to work come alive in an environment that has not only changed, but might be different altogether.

If your organization needs help in reshaping your work to make the most of what you have and pivot to what’s needed next, contact us. This is what we do.

Using Theories for Change

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The concept of Theory of Change is meant to provide program planners and evaluators with guidance on how to make sense of the mechanisms that guide how something transforms. Theory of Change as a technique is usually visual, participatory and consultative in nature, and is something that is developed alongside the program itself. What is given less attention are the change theories that underpin a Theory of Change.

Confused? You’re not alone.

Clarifying this is critical if your Theory of Change is to have any meaning.

Change Theories & Theory of Change

Change theories are based (largely) on psychological and sociological evidence applied to human behaviour at different levels. These levels include:

  • Individuals
  • Groups (e.g., teams, families)
  • Organizations
  • Communities
  • Societies & Systems

Some change theories will apply at all of these levels, while some are designed more specifically for a specific level. For example, Kotter’s 8-step model for leading change is primarily an organizational change theory.

Change theories are meant to describe what is to change and explain how change is to come about. These serve as the bedrock for what a Theory of Change is meant to convey. A Theory of Change links the structures and resources tied to a specific program, unit, or process with various change theories to explain why it should facilitate transformation.

Design Considerations

While we might have a viable change theory, we might not have a strong design. We often see organizations that seek to make changes that their programs or policies were not designed to accomplish. For example, cognitive rational change theories are built upon the basic assumption that knowledge informs attitudes and beliefs which influence behaviour.

If your program or service doesn’t have a design that facilitates information accessibility that allows your end user (those who are the focus of your service) to understand and use that information, it’s unlikely we will see change. Just-in-time knowledge delivery (e.g., doing a Google search) implies that people have the means (e.g., tools and technology), the literacy, the skills, and the opportunity to access and use that knowledge, otherwise it’s not likely to facilitate change.

Being able to locate a family doctor isn’t useful if you can only do it at a time and place when such a professional isn’t needed.

Theories of Change can help us plan our programs and service offerings and plot the points of impact, but without good change theories and design considerations it’s quite possible we won’t achieve what we set out to do.

Want to learn more about how to develop Theories of Change and what an understanding of social and behavioural science and design can do to help you learn and create impactful programs? Contact us. We’d love to connect.

Evaluation for Change

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Change is everywhere it seems and while it can be said it is the only constant what we are seeing is an increase of change on a massive scale.

However, as the protesters across the United States, Canada and beyond are making clear: there is a big difference between talk of change, the process of change, and the outcome of change efforts. Evaluation can be a powerful tool to help us distinguish these things together as they can be conflated too easily.

Here are three things to consider when seeking to make these distinctions that can be applied anytime, but become more salient when focused on large-scale change efforts where much is happening simultaneously.

Document your baseline

A baseline is a starting point and while it would be great to have data from yesterday, if we are seeking to gather change-related data today that means this is your baseline. Too often baselines are forgotten because any effort to measure or track change needs to answer the question: change in relation to what?

How? Pick the most convenient, proximate moment to gather data. Aim to capture descriptive data of what is happening, time data (see below), and also any numerical aspects of the phenomenon you can. These can be such things as cases of something, number of participants involved, descriptions of the current situation. From this, you can later build a backstory that can help lead to the present moment.

For example, George Floyd was arrested and killed by a police officer on May 25, 2020. It is possible to use that as a baseline for what came next and later build the backstory by showing the many different incidents of a similar nature that may have happened locally, nationally, and beyond to illustrate historical patterns of things like police behaviour, protests, violence, racism or otherwise depending on what changes one seeks to make.

Gather real-time data whenever possible

It’s tempting to gather data after an event (e.g., protest, policy decision, etc.) has taken place (and sometimes that’s unavoidable), however, there is much evidence that we lose perspective and critical information in our post-event reflections that often fail to capture critical details of what actually happens. Aim to get data whenever you can as early as you can.

How? During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen many examples of this with live reports from doctors, nurses, and other caregivers working the front-lines of healthcare responses. We’ve seen infectious disease specialists giving interviews on television, exchanging data and opinions via email and Twitter, and through first-hand accounts of citizens dealing with the various policy decisions made. These micro-narratives can make for a strong experiential case for what is happening and what effects the event is having. Reviewing social media posts, proposing online diaries (e.g., selfie video testimonials) or using ‘speakers corner‘ sites or physical booths to allow people to document what they feel, think, say, and do in real-time will provide a more accurate and adaptive means of understanding what is happening as it happens, rather than just retrospectively.

Timestamp your data

Time is a critical contextual factor that can help us understand what happens, why it happens when it does, and to better make sense of the outcomes. The Greeks classified two types of time: Chronos (‘clock time’) and Kairos (‘relative’ time). Determining what time (as in an hour, date etc..) can help you to organize things in chronological order and see relationships between change-making efforts. Relative time — proximity — helps us see the effect of certain activities in relation to others.

How? Modern recording tools often have this built into them, but for the evaluator it is important to record when things happen and document the sequencing of things. Big events like the two we’ve used — the race riots and pandemic — have so many moving parts that it quickly gets difficult to remember retrospectively what happened in what order. This is critical if we want to develop a theory of change or explain what happened as part of the change process.

These three things are all simple and can be done with tools like phone cameras and gathering things in a spreadsheet. More sophisticated ways are available as well and, ideally, there is a method and plan prior to a change initiative taking place. But as we’ve seen, sometimes change just happens. If it does, you’ll be ready to capture it and learn from it before it comes to pass and be able to tell if it doesn’t.

Stay and be safe.

If change is something you need help understanding and documenting, don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us. Evaluating, supporting, and guiding change efforts is what we do.

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash