Describe sometime in the future. You decide how far and the context of this future scenario.
In this future place, you are living a fulfilled life - professionally, personally, financially, and physically - you decide what is important to you.
Describe what you will be doing in the future state. Where you are and who you are with.
There are good number of coaching books out there. If you are interested in incorporating more coaching skills into you relationships I have put together this reading list to start you off.
You will work a few years with Design in an organisation before you realise a large part of your job is to encourage organisational change.
This observation is something that I share with all of my design students.
They are usually surprised by this at first.
When you work with Design, you almost always create something new or a new way of working. This is often ambiguous, messy, and very different from how organisations work presently.
This almost always leads to frustration and resistance.
This fall, I started a new job, which means I have re-entered working in a larger organisation. It has been four years since I worked in such an environment, and I spent the last few weeks understanding the complexity that results when 500 people work together.
When I was younger, this created stress for me, but now being curious and okay with not knowing is something I enjoy.
We learn best when we are struggling with something.
How do you keep stepping out to the edge, so you are still struggling and learning?
Recently I was in a situation where I literally had no idea what I was doing. So for much of the engagement, I used my instincts and made many, many mistakes.
I kept moving on.
Management is a business skill.
If you want to become a better manager, read books about it, attend school and think rigorously about it.
Leadership, on the other hand, is a human skill.
To become a better leader, you need to be determined to be a better human. To do this you need to understand who you really are and develop some objective insights and who you really are.
I have always viewed design as a transformational activity.
You are introducing something new into the universe with a specific intent. We need to ‘be’ something new to create something new. While I often focus on the ‘doing’ or the activities of creating something, the real benefit for me has been the deeper understanding of myself through the process.
It is the ‘becoming’ not the ‘doing’ that is key to achieving transformational results.
During the conversations, I have with Design Leaders the question of how to manage difficult discussions comes up a lot.
These leaders find themselves managing many stakeholders and this often results in not satisfying someone, most of the time.
Although there is an individual need to make these discussions easier I think there is an organisation benefit as well.
The ability to handle difficult conversations well is a prerequisite to organisational change and adaptation. Businesses have spent the last twenty years focusing on process and technology improvements, and now there’s not much left to cut.
November is always a very special month for me.
It is the halfway boundary of my year that allows time for reflection and gratitude.
For the last 15 years, I have been doing CAT scans of my lungs to check for tiny metastasis. Your lungs are very vascular organs, and if cancer is swimming around in your body, they typically show up here. The frequency has shifted, and the last few years are now every six months. November and June.
This is a photo from a year ago that I ran across after one of my many online meetings.
It was a good meeting but the angles of this photo summed my perspectives at the time. Living inside screens and speaking into strange devices.
I recently starting to have some in-person meetings and workshops and realised it gave a familiar but very different perspective.
Perspectives can be very powerful things and something that I often use in my coaching.
A few weeks after I had passed my oral exam and finished coaching certification a close friend asked me a question:
‘What is the single most important thing you have learned from becoming a certified coach?’
I had to think about this a good bit since it was really difficult to distil everything I learned down to ONE thing. A better question may have been
‘What area of my life has NOT been influenced through this process’
When I was first diagnosed with bone cancer in my leg the doctors did everything they could to save my leg from amputation.
The first set of operations was to remove cancer from my knee by replacing my knee with a mechanical version. I remember this was a painful, tough operation that took a long time as I was sedated for many hours.
I had an excellent Physical Therapist named Suzanne who was 50 kg of pure energy.
One day after a session, when I was happy to be able to bend my knee 5 centimetres more than when I walked in and I felt like puking she looked at me and said:
‘You are one of the most resilient patients I have ever had’
For most of my clients, I share a model early on that has been very effective for me to build my mental capacity to manage emotions. This is an important foundation.
Sometimes you need to get MESSy
To be of service to someone is to see that person as a whole — heart, body, mind, and spirit. In other words, people are not the problem they are going through. Your parent is not cancer. Your friend is experiencing unemployment; she is not unemployed. Seeing someone as a whole helps to explain why service is a relationship of equals. We all experience suffering just as we all experience joy.
When I work with people to define goals I ask this question:
‘What do you want and how will you know you have achieved this?’
In the response to the question, I consider two aspects - who are you ‘being’ when you achieve these results - how are you showing up and what personal characteristics are you demonstrating. This ‘being’ can often involve some sort of clarity or personal transformation that needs to occur. Alongside that is what are you ‘doing’ as a part of reaching these results. The latter is the easy part for most.
Over the holidays I ran across some photos from a presentation I did shortly after I was amputated in 2005.
I went from being a normally active person that ran and cycled to an above knee amputee cancer survivor.
I remember this was an ‘in-between’ time. for me You can’t go back and forward was dark and unknown.
Laying in my hospital bed I really didn’t know what to do and thought ‘Well, this isn’t going to grow back, so I better get used to this and go forward’.
The term Pedagogy and pedagogue come from the Greek paidos ‘boy, child’ plus agogos ‘leader.’ We tend to usually say something is ‘pedagogical’ if it is easy to understand and teach. The underlying assumption is that if it is easy for children it is easy for adults to learn.
But the thing is adults and children don’t learn the same way. There is another similar word ‘Andragogy’ that describes how adults learn.
Previously I wrote a post on the use of Appreciative Inquiry and the role of coaching in managing individual stakeholders in an organisation. This is effective on a individual level, but as organisations grow the communication points increase and become highly complex
Often you need a way to view the entire landscape of stakeholders in order to develop a strategy for implementing design efforts. I have found that viewing organisations as systems can help identify the key stakeholders, their relationships, and help develop a strategy to implement design from an organisational perspective.
For the last six months, one of my roles at the Design Consultancy, Black Lizzy, in Stockholm is to coach all consultants. When I had discussions with company and they described their focus on the well being and development of the individual consultants, I knew this was something that resonated with me and I wanted to support. The consultants are primarily different types of Designers (UX, Visual, Service) and Product Leaders.
I have a confession.
I am not keen on trying new things all the time. Fear of failure and looking stupid are my biggest fears. I was recently listening to Brene Brown and in her wisdom uses this acronym:
FFT - ‘fear of first time’ or if you choose ‘fu*king first time’ (I tend to use the later)
In my discussions with designers and design leaders a recurring issue that comes up is failure. Working in complex environments like today’s organisations I view failure as necessary to the experimentation process, and critical for learning and adapting.
At the same time, I see on an individual level as well as organisations a real fear of failure. (I can confirm this in myself).
During my conversations with design leaders, I often emphasis the power of asking question of their stakeholders more then speaking specifically about design. This has a few advantages. By asking questions you are demonstrating that you are curious and this creates and empathic relationship.
This is a resource list that I have created as part of the Berghs Design Leadership course. This list is designed to help Design Leaders understand the core principles of Complexity and Systems thinking so that they may apply them practically within their organisation’s in the context of leadership and design.
Engagement is important. Research from ADP Research in 2018 of 1000 full-time employees in 19 different countries clearly indicates that employer engagement is determined by experiences someone has on a team level. Workers who say they are on a team are 2.3 times more likely to be fully engaged than those who are not.
When starting any kind of change effort we tend to focus our attention on the destination or outcome that we (hope) to achieve when we are done. Change itself is situational; it is the external event that is taking place, a new strategy, a change in leadership, a merger or a new product. This is often in response to external events. It can happen very quickly.
In 2001, I was diagnosed with an unusual type of bone cancer in my left femur. I was very fortunate to have excellent health care that discovered this very early. In the years since the first diagnosis, I have had a considerable number of treatments, all designed to save my leg and my life.
As we start our Easter weekend I have been thinking about ‘transformation’ a lot recently.
‘Digital transformation’, transformative leadership, ‘transformative’ startups. If you aren’t transforming you are somehow missing out.
Human’s consistently use stories to manage the information we are exposed to. Without noticing it we develop simple stories made up of a hero, beginning, middle and end. We connect these stages through simple cause and effect.
One of the most important goals for me as a educator and facilitator is to figure out how much new information people will take away with them. I am always on the lookout for ways to increase the efficiency learning as well as the retention.
When designing a class or a facilitation session I spend some time identifying the learning outcomes I would like to achieve for the participants. I then spend some time organising the content together with the exercises for practice or repetition.
2018 was the year I got serious about subscribing to email lists. I have been on a few lists through the years previously and found them valuable, but typically canceled them when I literally drowned in emails or the amount of self-promotion got too great (this is a very fine line). I also limited my lists so that I actually have time to read and digest the content (Reading in Progress - RIP- limit 5-6). It is also worth noting that 4 of 6 newsletters (exceptions: Dense Discovery and On Hiring) are also podcasts which I can highly recommend.