Cense

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

Developmental Evaluation, Learning and Innovation

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What does it mean to undertake a developmental evaluation (DE)?

DE is simply another way to say evaluation for learning and innovation. That’s really all it is in practice, although anyone looking to do DE might want to look a little closer to see if it really is the right approach for them.

In this post we look a little closer to help you understand what it means to do evaluation for innovation and what developmental evaluation has to do with it.

Understanding Innovation


Innovation is a word that can mean much and requires clarification when it’s used because of this. When we speak of innovation, we refer to this definition of learning transformed into value through design.

Developmental evaluation is a concept that was first put forward by Michael Quinn Patton through many books, articles, and other teachings. It’s now become a popular approach within social innovation and the public sector.

DE is often referred to as a means to strategic learning because rather than assume the conditions of whatever is being evaluated (e.g., program, policy) are stable, it assumes some level of complexity. This is dramatically different from what most other forms of evaluation do where the assumption is the ‘thing’ being evaluated is stable – it’s the users of that thing that might change.

Because DE is focused on learning it assumes that there will be some kind of change with the actual process of learning itself on the way from one state to the next. 

Understanding Design’s Role in Innovation

What DE does not do well is account for the role of design in supporting innovation. If we come back to the definition of innovation presented earlier, design is really the means by which innovation occurs. In most of the literature on DE the matter of design is not discussed much, if at all. 

With much of DE the assumption is that those doing DE know how to take what they learn and transform it into value. From our experience, this is an assumption that rarely holds up. The reasons are many, but most central to this is that most people think of design as beginning from a standing start when in practice much of what do when we innovate takes place from a moving position.

We sometimes refer to this as developmental design, but more appropriately expand how we see this relationship between DE and design as something called Design-driven Evaluation. In this case, design and evaluation are intimately connected and the processes of using both to mutually inform one another are embedded in the innovation process. 

Understanding Evaluation’s Role in Design & Innovation

Evaluation is the means to provide the necessary feedback to contribute to innovation. Evaluation determines the quality of the design in achieving its purpose. If your design is meant to change behaviour, evaluation is the means to assess whether that happens and to what degree.

Evaluation also is the means to document the circumstances in which this takes place to help you assess whether the implementation of your innovation goes as intended. Without evaluation, your innovation is a wish, not a result. Evaluation is the means to determine what the results of your innovation are. 

Evaluation is also the means to assess the quality of your design work. It’s one thing to develop something and put it out in the world, but is it any good? Is it fit for purpose? Many innovations fail to deliver value because they don’t provide the means to learn about the quality of the design itself. They don’t achieve a positive impact because they were never designed to in the first place. 

To innovate is to learn and to learn is to evaluate. Design is what ties them all together. 

Next time you’re looking to embark on a new program of activity, create a new product, it’s worth considering how these all go together and whether DE alone will help you to get there. 

For help in generating powerful design-driven approaches to innovation and evaluation, contact us. We can help

Mind Maps For Complex Projects

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A mind map is a powerful, simple organizing tool that features a lot of information on a single page. We use mind maps and other visual tools to communicate relationships between ideas, people, project components and topics with our clients and partners. We present a short introduction to how and why you might want to use mind maps in your work.

A mind map is a visual representation of a project that links actors and actions together. This article focuses on using mind maps, not creating them.

Below is an example from software provider Lucidspark (which is a tool for creating mindmaps) that illustrates what a mind map is and how it can connect ideas and actions together.

Visualizing our Relationships

A search of Google (or any other search engine) will find thousands of visual examples of what a mind map is. There are few ‘essentials’ for mind mapping, which is among its most attractive features.

A complex project is one where there are many things happening at the same time, at different time scales, and involving many interdependencies and actors. That’s just a way of saying: there’s a lot going on.

It doesn’t matter how you organize your mind map only that it is useful. That means it provides information that you can make decisions with and act on. If it does that, it’s a good mind map.

Once we have that in place, the mind map allows us to examine the relationships between the nodes and topics to assess their fit. The expression ‘getting on the same page‘ reflects an ability for all of those looking at the document to have a similar representation of what’s on that page. The mind map allows us to verify relationships between entities, determine gaps or inaccuracies, and explore different ways of connecting things together.

There may not be a single ‘master’ map that is better than all, but there may be a map that is more useful than others.

How to Use Mind Maps

When we use this with clients and partners on projects we aim for the following:

  • To examine the assumptions involved in the project
  • To explore alternative relationships of fit and see if the map is the best representation of what we are looking at
  • To guide the project and keep the topics on track
  • To provide a building block for connecting ideas together (in ways that weren’t done previously)
  • To map out a system of relationships
  • To use colour and visuals to surface feelings, thoughts, and other emotional aspects of the project that might influence the strategy or outcomes

By creating a visual representation we see the whole project and the relationship context. Relationships are the key in any complex system. When we visualize these relationships it allows us to see how the actions in one relationship can affect others. Visual maps can aid us in anticipating possible effects.

(Note: We don’t use the term ‘unintended effects’ – just effects because in complex systems it’s too hard to predict cause and effect with any degree of accuracy).

We continually refer back to our maps to help ensure we are accounting for all relationships of importance throughout the project and not just those that have the most amount of activity within them. It’s incredibly difficult to track this in our heads or in something like a spreadsheet or text document.

Mind maps can be great tools to visualize a lot of information and get you and your collaborators on the same page when it comes to understanding what is going on in a complex system and program. Try it out — they are easy to create and simple to use.

If you want to use this approach to visualizing your programs and using this to help you innovate, contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

Knowing Thyself: Colleagues, Coaches and Consultants

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Self-knowledge is a great asset, however the reason we often hire an external consultant is because we know a part of ourself so well that it becomes difficult to see other parts of who we are.

We obviously have a bias toward the role of external consultants because that’s what we do, but we also recognize that part of role that we are often asked to play can be filled by different people or sometimes the same person playing many of them.

We refer to three C’s: Colleagues, coaches, and consultants. These are not mutually exclusive from one another and can be separate or combined. In each case, however, the role is focused on specific tasks that we want to highlight in helping you identify what best serves the particular situation or problem set you face.

Colleagues

Perhaps the most neglected role of the three are colleagues (or peers). A colleague is someone who works within the same field, department, team or organization as you and can provide feedback and perspective on the work you do and your performance. Because they know the work, they can speak to technical issues very well. However, because they are close to the work (and maybe you) they may include the same biases and limits to perspective as you do, too.

Colleagues offer the following:

  • Deep knowledge of the situation, context, and circumstances of the work. They know what you know and experience what you experience. There is little need to spend extra time empathizing with your situation.
  • This familiarity allows for more quick-to-start and nuanced conversations about issues.
  • Familiarity also allows for great compassion: it’s easy to talk with your peers about issues that might seem too far removed from others.
  • This familiarity also brings the same ‘blind spots’ and potential prejudices around actions, behaviours, policies, and possible outcomes. This can limit what is ‘seen’ and what is proposed.

Coaches

When you think of the highest performing athletes do you think about their coach? They all have one.

Athletes know the value of coaches because it’s only through that blend of expertise, motivational energy, and shared commitment through feedback that they can improve. The same is often true for organizations and individuals.

A good coach provides:

  • Someone on your team who is committed to the same project as you. Their success is yours.
  • Expertise in performance and how it relates to your specific industry or context.
  • A more intimate relationship in that they are focused on you (or your organization) and thus is more sensitive to its ‘moods’ and rhythms than someone who is more distant.
  • A coach has a separate role from who they support so, unlike with colleagues, there is less confusion and more clarity about what specific benefits a coach can and will provide without the potential for it to be conflated.

Consultants

A consultant is like a coach in that they bring an outside perspective – even more so.

A consultant is someone who is freed from the specific demands associated with the role, outcomes, and processes associated with your work and offers expertise and a different perspective on what you do. Many times we are so engrossed or familiar with what we are doing that we are unable to see new possibilities or consider alternative pathways for working.

Consultants provide many distinct benefits:

  • A consultant may not have specific domain expertise as your organization.
  • Alternatively, a consultant may have deep expertise in the domain you work in, but less in specific processes. They might also possess both. In every case, their value is in separation from the day-to-day activities of your work. This provides a more dispassionate view of your work. (Note: we don’t believe it’s necessarily more objective, just different — we all have biases).
  • Consultants can provide tactical and strategic advice much like a coach but without the closeness to their client and the same investment in the work. This isn’t to say that consultants care any less for the success of their clients, rather they are not part of the team and thus are not affected by the same fears of failure or concerns as a coach is.
  • Because consultants work at a distance they also are more likely to be versed in methods, tools, knowledge and practice skills that allow them to work well with groups who are unfamiliar to them (yet are similar in need or content expertise). This allows them to be bridge-builders within and across organizations and networks more easily.

Having others help us to know who we are, support our work, and provide expert advice is invaluable. Whether you are seeking to “level up” or simply maintain your focus and performance consider bringing in someone who can help you go further and cheer you on.

Whether its your peers, a coach, or a consultant you’ll find that long journey to excellence and innovation is far less lonely.

If you work with human services and systems and want someone who might serve to motivate you and help you to learn, we might be able to help. Contact us and let’s talk about coaching, consulting, and community.

Innovation Case Studies

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If you’ve ever taught a course on an applied subject matter you’ve probably considered introducing case studies.

Case studies are systematic accounts of an activity and aim to provide evidence to illustrate or support an example of something. This might be to show a problem-solving approach, an introduction of a new technology, or demonstrate a particular implementation success or failure.

The case study approach is a core of what Harvard Business School uses and has been replicated in the Harvard Business Review and many other business journals. Harvard even has a structured method that has been adopted by business schools (and other faculties) worldwide.

Case studies are meant to provide us with guides based on practice to help us think through things, follow, or avoid. While this might be true in the abstract, our experience is that they are far better at stimulating discussion in class settings, but lousy at providing innovators with real guidance on what to do.

Partly, this has to do with the stories that are told and partly it’s because of the questions that are asked of the case examples themselves.

A New Case Study Approach

There is another way to approach case studies for innovation.

Innovation is always context-dependent. Complex contexts are those where there is a lot going on at multiple scales, intensities, and connect many different entities like people, organizations and networks. Increasingly, this is what describes the context in which innovators work.

This represents many if not most markets, public policy landscapes, schools, and care institutions today. If you’re involving humans, you’re involving complexity. This requires an approach to understanding and making sense of what happens that accounts for complexity. Consider the Cynefin Framework as a guide in assessment of what kind of situation you’re in.

So it makes sense that case studies — which are designed to take lessons from one context to apply broadly — reflect lessons tied to what’s special about a specific context and not try to reflect too many others.

By understanding what’s special we can better understand what’s general by allowing us to recognize the patterns that make something different and common not one or the other. It sounds simple, but it’s actually something that is lost in the current case study method.

We offer some questions to consider when you look at any case study — including the ones that you write for yourself – to better get value from an case to apply to your own situation. These questions can help you to get to a sense of where an innovation sits within a system and what barriers and facilitators were in place to shape the context, the actors, and the situations that define a case (and are often neglected).

Questions for Cases

For the sake of brevity the term innovator is used to reflect an individual, group, or organization who undertake the design, creation, implementation and ownership of the innovation — which can be a product, service, or policy.

  1. What kind of relationships or ecosystem is the organization/innovator a part of? (Innovation doesn’t exist in a vaccuum — it’s critical to understand what influences were available to shape the culture of innovation creation)
  2. How were these relationships leveraged, connected, or served in the development or execution of the innovation? (Innovations are a culmination of relationships in their creation, growth, and realization into a market to different extents, but never without them so they ought not be ignored).
  3. How was the innovation implemented? (This helps us understand the viable actions that were taken and how much was dependent on other things, what role happenstance (luck) played, and what degree the plan met reality)
  4. How much risk did the innovator assume? (This allows us to gauge how much motivation, fear, and pressure the innovator was under)
  5. What was going on in the immediate environment during the development and implementation of the innovation? (This reflects situational, policy, climate, and local contexts)
  6. What learning processes were put in place? (This speaks to the matter of sustainability and determines if this is likely to be a one-off or something that might be sustained)
  7. What outputs, outcomes, and impact was achieved? (Did the innovators capture what was produced and what effect it had on the world around the innovation, not just whether it was sold or bought)
  8. What evolved? (Scale isn’t about just ‘more’, but whether it evolves to meet the needs)
  9. What is the fit and the purpose? (Innovation is all about fit for purpose and these need to be articulated to assess whether or where it fits and what the purpose(s) are)
  10. Is there a ratchet? (A ratchet is something that gains leverage the more it’s used. Is there something that allows the lessons of the innovation development or the innovation itself to take something — the organization, people, or product/service/policy further with leverage?)

Try asking these of any case study and you might find what’s missing and what you can ask of your own work to learn more, do more, and innovate better. Case studies often reflect ‘one-off’ events that are highly constrained and not always transferable in what can be learned and applied. By asking these questions you might find answers that can help you make more from your own situation.

If you want help asking and answering these, contact us and we’d be happy to help you.