Analyse Your Business

Raghoo Potini shared some key insights from the Book "Flash Foresight" By Danil Burrus, which I thought was a great framework for analyzing one's business. 

"A flash foresight is a classic eureka! moment, like Newton's discovery of gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree . Actually the Flash Foresight triggered by the application of one or more of seven simple principles covered in the book .Let me cover two big ones.

TRIGGER #1: START WITH CERTAINTY: There are two distinct kinds of change that we can use to find certainty:1. Cyclic change2. Linear change
Cyclic change: provides us with all sorts of certainty .When it is autumn, you can predict that, within six months, it will be spring. Humanity has identified more than 300 distinct cycles that allow us to predict the future accurately. 
Linear change: A simple example of linear change is your age. Your life progresses in one direction. No matter how well you take care of your health, you are not going to start aging backward. Linear change is where the real action is, precisely because it is not a repeating pattern and therefore creates entirely new circumstances and opportunities. 

Hard trends and soft trends: A hard trend is something that will happen; it is a future fact. A soft trend is something that might happen; it is a future maybe. Here's an example about Hard trend and soft trend. The 78 million Baby Boomers are now flooding health care system in the US. Again, notice where the hard trend is, and where it isn't. The increasing numbers of Boomers who will need medical care as they get older is a hard trend, because those numbers are fixed and cannot be changed. But the projected shortage of doctors and nurses to provide that care is a soft trend, because it is something we can change if we see it and decide to act on it.Action:  

Make a list of all the cyclic changes that are affecting your business. Make a list of the linear changes that will have an impact on your life. Make a list of all the hard trends that are taking place in your industry, so you know what you can be certain about. Make a list of all the soft trends that are taking place in your industry, so you can see what you can change or influence. Ask yourself, "What do I know will happen in the next few weeks, months, and years? And how can I innovate to take advantage of what I now know for certain about the future?"

To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .To anticipate the world ahead, Lets see some hard trends in technology space .

Dematerialization. As technology improves, we are reducing the amount of material it takes to build the tools we use. For example, laptops are getting smaller, lighter, and more portable, even as they become more powerful.   Virtualization. This means taking things we currently do physically and shifting the medium so that we can now do them purely in a virtual world. Using software, we can now test airplanes, spaceships, and nuclear bombs without actually building them. Virtualization has transformed the world of business. Amazon is a virtual bookstore, and eBay is a virtual yard sale.   Mobility. With the advance of wireless technology, we are rapidly becoming untethered from everything. Our mainframe computers became desktops, then laptops, then palmtops, then cell phones.   Product intelligence: Imagine you're driving down the road, and a light blinks on your dashboard: One of your tires is about to go flat. Your GPS speaks up: "Service station with an air hose in three miles; take the next exit." How does your car know this? It's intelligent. It has smart tires, and it's networked.   Convergence. Filling stations and convenience stores converged in the 1980s; in the '90s, so did coffee shops and bookstores. Today, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and information technology are all converging. Products are converging, too. The modern smartphone is an e-mail device, a camera, a video camera, a music player, a GPS device, and more. Action: Ask yourself, What problems will my company be facing in the next few weeks, months, and years? What problems will our customers be facing?" Then look for creative ways to solve those problems before they happen.

TRIGGER #2: ANTICIPATE: When a competitor offers lower prices, you are forced to change how you do business. Being preactive means putting yourself into opportunity mode, looking at problems before they occur, and then preventing them from happening in the first place. It means, instead of reacting to change that happens from the outside in, creating change from the inside out.

These five technology trends all the result of three interlocking hard trends. The first digital accelerator is processing power. The second digital accelerator is the growth of bandwidth, the third digital accelerator, storage."

Stories to Coach With: A Leap of Faith

Often while coaching, we come across situations where clients have got stuck - feeling powerless to do anything to change. At such time a useful non-invasive coaching tool is storytelling.  According to Margaret Parkin, author of Tales for Coaching, storytelling can help clients to reflect on their own story in their own way, and search for what the message means to them personally. Here is a story I found recently. 

A Fighters Saga

Girisha is from Karnataka, the son of a poor farmer. Unfortunately, for Girisha, he had an impairment in his left leg which made him walk with a limp. Life was hard for Girisha whose father had to struggle to meet make ends to meet the needs for the family of five. Inspite of the hardship, his father always encouraged him to take up sport. With his father's blessings and his unstinting support, Girisha represented his school at 10 years of age. And this year, 2012, battling all odds, he was the winner of the silver medal for high jump at the Paralympic Games held in London!

This success did not come easily to him.

Though without a job to support him financially, Girisha actively pursued his passion for sports and participated in games meant for, and against able-bodied athletes. One day, someone noticed his passion and talents for sports and suggested he start participating in special games meant for the disabled. In this arena, competing against people who too were disabled, Girisha's potential came even greater to the fore, and he was selected to train at the Sport's Authority of India centre at Bangalore.

Those years were very depressing years for Girisha. Though he was winning medals at the nationals, nothing seemed to be working for him. Living alone in a big city like Bangalore, he struggled to manage his life and passion for sports. They were trying times. The money he received as financial support by an NGO just was hardly  enough to cover his living expenses, leave alone the expenses of an escort, and he had to do everything himself. Many were the times when Girisha felt intensely lonely and seriously thought of giving up sports and taking up a job instead. Fortunately for him, and for India, he was dissuaded from doing so by his coach Satyanarayana and motivated him to stay on and give the Parlympics a shot.

He did - and achieved the distinction of winning for India its first medal at the games. The silver medal he won happens to be only the eighth medal won by India at the games and the first in eight years.

And now the good times have started rolling for Girisha! The government authorities have decided to honour him with a Rs. 30 lacs cash award for his feat. As for his father, his faith in Girisha's potential and perseverance in supporting him inspite of financial odds, has been vindicated. Since the time he won the medal, Girisha's father's phone has not stopped ringing. The entire village had gathered at his house as soon as they heard the news, and they rejoiced with him. The people from his village have now decided to felicitate him with a grand reception on his return from London.

Girisha's ecstatic father has only one wish - he hopes his son inspires other parents to support their differently-abled children in taking up sport. Or any other vocation of their choice. Thoughtfully, he reminds them not to think of the hurdles - just as he has done all his life.

10 Reasons Why I Am Passionate about Coaching

I subscribe to an interesting newsletter by E.R. Haas, whose outfit provides virtual training products for personal and professional excellence. His recent newsletter had the subject line; The Power of Why will change the way you look at business success. Intrigued, I opened the newsletter, because I must tell you, I have been struggling with this 'why' business for a long time now! Long have been the hours I have spent thinking of why I am so passionate about coaching. Unfortunately, every statement I had thought of had sounded like a motherhood rather than  a statement which captured the key drivers of my passion. Things had come to such a pass where doubts had started to creep into my mind of the sincerity of my passion! And now this newsletter had come along to rub salt into my wounds! Or so I thought, as I decided to see what this guy Haas had to say. And I must say what  he had to say, pushed me finally into getting down (once again) to find answers to the question which had haunted me all this time about why I coach. And this time I finally managed to crack it!! Here is how my moment of epiphany happened. 

The Eureka Hour!

The trigger of stimulation in Haas's newsletter was a video of a TED presentation called 'Start with Why: How Great Leaders inspire Action' by Simon Sinek. Sinek spoke of what he called the Golden Circle, which looked like this.

According to Sinek, everybody knows “what” they do 100%. Some know how they do it. But very very few people or organizations know WHY they do it. (he was telling me!) The answer, Sinek said, wasn't about making a profit, that was the result. It was the “why”, why do you do it, why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should people care. Simple yet profound, and it immediately got me researching (aka google) my unanswered question of 'why I coach' with renewed vigour. My search led me to a presentation by the Master Motivator Tony Robbins called Why we do what we do, in which he talked of the "invisible forces" that motivated everyone's actions. I spent the entire evening mulling about what Robbins had to say. I slept over it, and the first thing the next morning, as soon as I woke up, was this sudden blinding clarity! A clarity about all the reasons why I was so passionate about coaching! All of them seemed to want to burst forth like a dam burst! The best thing was, I could relate every one of the reasons to something that had actually occurred sometime in my coaching situations! I immediately put pen to paper and started jotting down my thoughts. And here is what I wrote: 

I coach because it enables me to make a difference to people’s lives. I do this by helping them:

1. Discover things about themselves they weren’t aware of

2. Feel they are worth it

3. Convert inertia in their efforts at success into impatience to get going

4. Add new meaning and depth to their relationships

5. Make their life and work feel more fulfilling

6. See  their life and work situations and events in new ways

7. Create their own processes to learn, grow and evolve

8. Create relationships between what they are aware of about their life and work, and what they were not aware of in those contexts

9. Get new insights in the patterns of their behaviour 

10. Put things into context by connecting past life and work events with present actions, behaviours and attitudes

Most importantly, the nature of the challenges my clients face, give me insights into those of my own.Their efforts and commitment to overcome their challenges give me the motivation and the learning to act on those of my own. 

And the bottom line - my clients’ every ‘ah aah’ moments give me SATISFACTION, their successful outcomes FULFILLMENT and the learning, ENRICHES  my life.

Thank you Haas, Simon and Tony!

Know and Use the World's Oldest Goal Setting Tool

Some among us are of the view that spirituality, philosophy and such other intellectual pursuits are activities to be reserved for the last stage of our lives, which our ancients described as Vanaprasthaashram, or, life in the woods. But consider the life of Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher, whose philosophical work influenced the likes of Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Though by inclination a philosopher, throughout most of his life, he was actually involved in managing his family's pencil company and even invented a new way of making pencil leads. He just thought that making money should never be his life's overriding purpose. He believed, "To have done anything by which you earned money merely  is to have been truly idle or worse." Merely being the operative word. This life-changing thought came to him from two years he spent in the woods contemplating nature and spirituality. 

For those of us who consider any amount of time, (least of all two years in the woods!), spent in contemplating one's life and goals as time spent unproductively, here is a suggested way to combine the philosophical with a practical approach.

Planning the Four Goals of a Balanced Life

Our ancient seers articulated the objectives of humankind asPurusharthas, Purush being  the person and Artha being the objective. The four Purusharthas were defined as; Dharma, Artha, Kama andMoksha. Dharma: righteousness or  duty, Artha: wealth, Kama:  desire and Moksha: liberation. Priya Banati, a keen student of Jyotish, Yoga and Ayurveda gives an interesting contemporary interpretation to the four Purusharthas in one of her blog articles. She defines them as:

Dharma: Doing what best fits your individual aptitude in the context of your familial and societal responsibilities. Dharma comes from a Sanskrit root that means ‘to establish’ and hence is the path through life that establishes an individual as a stable, productive, satisfied human being.

Artha: Resources or more commonly wealth. It includes all our intentions around the acquisition of adequate means for self-support to live life fully. Both money and knowledge when used for self-support falls under Artha.

Kama: The innate urge to relate to others. Commonly interpreted as lust, Kama is actually much broader than that and relates to how we build and nurture relationships with other human beings.

Moksha: The freedom, or the quality of being able to free oneself from the mirage that dharma, artha and kama are able to provide enduring satisfaction.

Everything we do in our life (ie, the sum total of our desires) rolls up to meeting one or more of these four purusharthas. So how do your 2012 resolutions map to these four goals? You are likely to find that much of your resolutions are really focused on one of these purusharthas. If so, then spend some time reflecting on the other purusharthas and ask yourself what you can do to help address them in 2012. Almost all humans need to achieve all purusharthas to at least some degree if they hope to achieve a life well lived. A simple and practical method of applying the wisdom of the ancients to our contemporary lives is illustrated by the following example: 

Suppose one of your intentions this year is to buy a car. This primarily falls under Artha – ie, acquiring material possessions / wealth for self-support

Remember, the more clearly you qualify your intention, the easier it is to pick the predominant bucket for that particular desire. For example, if the reason for buying a car is so that you can go from being an Auto driver to a Taxi driver, then this desire falls somewhere between Artha and Dharma. However if this is a car that you’d like to gift to your daughter for her 18th birthday, then it falls more in the Artha – Kama space. Predominantly though, buying a car falls within Artha.

Desires that fall within Dharma:

Change jobs

Seek a career change.

Start a family

Have a child

Have a second/third child

Run a marathon

Get fit

Lose weight

Desires that fall within Artha:

Get employed

Find a job

Start a business

Do a degree

Take an exam

Improve my financial prospects

Investing in property, shares etc

Desires that fall within Kama:

Get married or seek a long term relationship with someone

Get a promotion

Get voted into office

Make new friends

Engage with Government policies.

Desires that fall withing Moksha

Be more proactive.

Adopt positive thinking.

Recycle regularly.

Give to charity.

Provide free service.

Develop one’s spiritual strength.

Practice Yoga.

The Prescription for a Happy Life
What happens to you in this this year is colored, based on your purushartha lens. If your shares are not doing well, viewing them from an Artha lens will surely bring disappointment – However viewing them through a Moksha lens will help in your spiritual growth. Using the purusharthas in this way, will not only you to decide on your actions but more importantly, act as a tool to help you accept what is happening to you.

The Power of Inspiration

Some experiences in our life have the power to shape it forever. Here are two real life stories of people whose experiences in their early years left a permanent mark on their thinking and actions.

Vineet Nayar's Jalwa (charisma)

Thirty years ago, Vineet Nayar, vice chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies was a student of a new batch at XLRI. He and his batchmates had just settled in for the first day in class when 50 adivasis stormed into the classroom and ransacked it before vanishing into thin air. None of the students were hurt, but the professor, Father McGrath, lay in a pool of blood. Even as the students were recovering from their shock, Father McGrath rose to his feet and announced that it was a staged show. "I want you to write sit down and write about what you have just seen," he told them.

The event left an indelible stamp on the young Nayar. "If you want to say something say it in the Father McGrath way so that people never forget about it, or don't sat it at all,"  was the mantra he carried from the experience. Nayar had understood with blinding clarity, the power of communication and the learning went on to form the cornerstone of his leadership style. Today, whether it is the 88,000 employees of HCL Technologies, customers, vendors or the public at large, Nayar makes it a point to get his message across with energy and elan. For instance, at a recent employee conference, he shook a leg to the Bollywood number Tera Hi Jalwa with co-workers before announcing the numbers. Plus, he has eight internal networking platforms and four external ones through which he communicates to his world of employees and stakeholders. These include Meme, HCL's equivalent of  Facebook through which he interacts with 67, 000 employees and Twitter where he sends Tweets daily and has 9000 followers. Its as if Father McGrath is still maintaining a constant vigil on him!

Mashelkar's Aag (fire)

In the case of R.A. Mashelkar, former Director at National Chemical Labotatory at Pune, the inspiration came first from his mother. Mashelkar had a difficult childhood and his mother, who worked as a maidservant, could not support his college education. But she gave him the courage to face life in times of adversity and taught him how to stand tall and not give up on principles. With her inspiration,  he not only went on to to be a rank holder in the Matriculation examination, but also win many other laurels in public life. The other inspiration was his teacher, Principal Bhave. During an experiment on how to find the focal length of a convex mirror, he held the glass till the paper caught fire. Then he turned to young Mashelkar and told him that if he could focus his energies like that, he could burn anything. This two experiences became the cornerstone of his life philosophy and also his leadership style.

Among other things, Mashelkar's personal experience of ascendance from dire circumstances, shaped his thinking that there is no limit to human endurance and achievements except the limit you put on yourself. On the other hand, his experience of Professor Bhave's convex lens experiment, shaped his leadership style forever. It  convinced him of the power of concentration and focus, When he came to CSIR, which was a network of 38 laboratories, he saw that they were competing with each other and there was zero collaboration. His convex lens style of leadership led him to initiate several collaborating programmes, including one which had 19 labs working together. Mashlekar is now hailed as the man behind India’s scientific intellectual property rights (IPR) revolution, a visionary administrator, an inspirational orator and one of the most humble scientists of his times. His mantra; focus your energies and you can set the world on fire. 

Call to Action

Both Nayar and Mashelkar know who the architects of their life philosophy and leadership style are. Do you? If not, here is a set of questions to reflect on and make you to think:

• Think of all your greatest heroes and heroines, for some of us, as in the case of Mashelkar, it may be our parents, or it could be one of our teachers and it could even be an event.
• Who do you look for inspiration in your daily life?
• Who influences your work and your profession the most?
• Who is the front runner in being your role model?

I'll be happy to hear your experience!

Planners and Doers

Alan Cohen is an inspirational writer and author of The Daily Dose of Sanity. I read a page a day from the book for, as the blurb on the book says, my "five minute soul recharge." I find every thought  inspiring and often profoundly insightful. Today's 'soul recharge' was about how a participant at one of Cohen's seminar asked him for a good spiritual community to join. The lady appeared very interested and also took notes of the details Cohen gave her. Later that night, one of the seminar sponsors asked him whether the lady had inquired about spiritual communities, when Cohen replied in the affirmative, the sponsor told him that she has been doing this for years, and she doesn't follow up."She just likes asking," he concluded.

The lesson Cohen draws from the incident is, while the lady certainly craved community, she had more of an investment in the question than the answer. She symbolized the part all of us have that would rather seek than find.

Quite like one of my coaching clients, let us call him J, who was more of a planner than a doer. In the course of every coaching session, he would get some brilliant insights into some aspect of his life or business, and he would duly note it down as an action point. Come next session, when I would ask him the status on the action points he had noted the last time, he would always say   that he hadn't attended to them. After several such incidents, I finally asked him if he ever, even referred to the notes he so enthusiastically made at every session. His reply was another "no!" No wonder it took him one year to recruit a person for a critical position - he would call the same person time and again and never be able to take a decision!

My coaching lesson was that some of us have a greater emotional investment in the intellectual exercise of planning than in the uncertainties of the results of the execution of the thought. 

On The Highs and Lows of Human Nature

Anything on human nature has always fascinated me. Why do we do the things we do, is the question that arises in my mind as I read about feats of bravery as well as cruelty. As happened recently with two incidents - one which left me in utter awe and the other with a feeling of revulsion. 

The High

Monument to William Hartley

Let me begin with the story I found profoundly touching and inspiring. It was a snippet in the Economic Times about how the band on the Titanic played on to lift the spirits of the passengers - even as the ship was sinking. Every one of the seven musicians went down with the ship. On researching more, I discovered that Bandmaster Wallace Hartley, just 33, and the others knew full well that they were doomed. By all accounts, not a one of them ever even donned a life jacket.

We'll never know what was in their minds. But play they did. And played, and played. At first, they played upbeat tunes in the first class lounge. Later, they moved out on deck and played as passengers desperately tried to escape. Finally, they played one last song, and shortly after . . . they were gone forever.

The Low

Adolf Eichmann

Soon after having read this moving story - and the contrast was striking - I read about Eichmann of the Holocaust notoriety. Eichmann was an extermination administrator for the Nazis, in charge of transporting Jews, and in this capacity deported 430,000 Hungarians to their deaths in gas chambers.

He continued to do so even after the official order from Heinrich Himmler, the German Chief of Police to halt the extermination and to destroy all evidence of it. He did this to avoid being called up for active combat duty! Eichmann, it appears,  had abdicated his will to make moral choices, and thus his autonomy. Eichmann claimed he was just following orders, and that he was therefore respecting the duties of a "bureaucrat".Before they joined the Nazi Party and rose through it's ranks, Adolf Eichmann, a school dropout was a sales clerk and his boss Himmler a chicken farmer. What could have made these two perfectly ordinary human beings do such monstrous things? 

To Question or Not to Question. That IS the Question

Hannah Arendt, a cultural theorist has an explanation believes that the great evils in history, including the Holocaust particularly, were not perpetrated by by rabid fanatics and sociopaths. Rather, they were  ordinary folk, who unquestioningly accepted twisted theories and political propaganda of a state or an organization as being perfectly normal.

Even if this theory were true (she has been attacked by critics as being extremely naive), what could have prompted Wallace Hartley and his team of brave musicians to play as the Titanic sank? Hartley, (he planned to stop working on ships after his Titanic gig) and his band were no victims of political or any other propaganda. Nor were they moved, affected or influenced by the power of the panicking passengers. They just played on and went down with the ship. They were not under orders nor did anyone tell them to.

In the corporate arena, one often hears of executives kowtowing to bad business practices (Satyam, Enron, Lehman Bothers etc.). They, like Eichmann, appear to have abdicated their will to make moral choices, and thus their autonomy. On the other hand we have the brave service staff of the Taj in Mumbai, who during the terrorist attack, went beyond the call of duty to escort guests to safety. In doing so, many of them gave up their lives.

What prompts either behavior? God alone knows!

Coaching For Ethical Dilemmas

Recently, I came across an article from Fast Company, The Nine Faces of Leaders which dealt with the attributes FedEx uses to identify it's potential leaders. Among the nine,one was Integrity. Now Integrity to my mind, is colored with shades of both moral as well personal values, as a result of which,  Integrity based leadership-decisions are likely to be fraught with personal and professional  conflict. Having written my last blog piece on the subject of Managing Value Conflicts, I was curious to understand the  definition of this attribute, and since the Fast Company article gave only an edited version, I decided to explore a bit more for the complete version. This, I found, was how FedEx explains this leadership attribute

Integrity; A leader with integrity adheres to a code of business ethics and moral values, behaves in a manner that is consistent with the corporate climate and professional responsibility, does not abuse management privilege, gains trust/respect, and serves as a role model in support of corporate policies, professional ethics, and corporate culture. 

In my experience as a coach, I have found clients having to deal with conflicts managing their personal vs. business values everyday in the memos on their desks, in their engagement with difficult employees and in their negotiations with their clients. Finding it challenging to adhere to a code of business ethics and moral values, they look to a coach to help them work through their conflicts. I have often found coaching in these situations to be less than easy. How, exactly, should I help them clients think through their ethical issues, what questions should I be asking, and what are the factors I should consider? 

Hence my attempt to create my personal framework for coaching clients with ethical dilemmas.Hope it helps you too!

The Five-Step Ethical Coaching Framework
Manuel Velasquez is a professor of Business ethics and the author of a widely used text book.In their article Thinking Ethically: A Framework for Moral
Decisions Making he and his associates describe
five different approaches which philosophers down the ages have developed to deal with moral issues. 

More important, he and his co-authors offer a useful 5-step framework for coaches to help their clients explore ethical dilemmas and to identify ethical courses of action.

Step 1: Recognize an Ethical Issue

1. Could this decision or situation be damaging to someone or to some group? Does this decision involve a choice between a good and bad alternative, or perhaps between two "goods" or between two "bads"?
2. Is this issue about more than what is legal or what is most efficient? If so, how?

Step 2: Get the Facts

3. What are the relevant facts of the case? What facts are not known? How can I help the client  learn enough about the situation to make a decision?
4. What individuals and groups have an important stake in the outcome? Are some concerns more important? Why?
5. What are the options open to client for acting? Have all the relevant persons and groups been consulted? Have?How can I help client  identify creative options?

Step 3: Help Client Evaluate Alternative Actions

6.  Ask following questions to help client evaluate the options:

• Which option will produce the most good and do the least harm? (The Utilitarian Approach)
• Which option best respects the rights of all who have a stake? (The Rights Approach)
• Which option treats people equally or proportionately? (The Justice Approach)
• Which option best serves the community/organization 
  as a whole, not just some members/employees/stakeholders? 
  (The Common Good Approach)
• Which option can lead client to act as the sort of person he wants to be? (The Virtue Approach)

(For details on the Approaches click here)

Step 4: Make a Decision and Test It

7. Considering all these approaches, which option could best help client address the situation?
8. If the client told someone he respects-or told a television audience-which option he has chosen, what would they say?

Step 5: Help Client Act and Reflect on the Outcome

9. How can the client's decision be implemented with the greatest care and attention to the concerns of all stakeholders?
10. How did the decision turn out and how can I help client review learning from this specific situation?

Coaching for Ethical Practices

Dov Seidman is a consultant who helps corporates develop values-based cultures, he believes that in the 21st century, it is no longer what you do or what you know that counts most. It is how you do what you do that has become the greatest source of advantage. We are deep into what he calls the 'era of behavior'. 

By using The 5-Step framework coaches can help their clients to work through their moral and value conflicts, and shape behaviors for conceiving and re-conceiving how they can build for growth. 

Managing Value Conflicts

Morals are deeply held beliefs-usually based on cultural traditions, long-held family and religious teachings and long-lasting memories of personal experiences. Because of its deep-roots, moral conflicts tend to be intractable and long-lasting.makes negotiation or compromise extremely difficult. In some cases, new forms of communication can help to heighten understanding of the world-view and overcome the moral conflict. By making a distinction between morals and values and redefining or reframing the conflict and focusing more on attainable interests and less on non-negotiable positions can help to seek negotiable outcomes rather than win-lose outcomes. Even if the moral conflict cannot be eliminated, it sometimes help to focus on something of an overarching importance. 

As happened with Gandhiji.

What Got Gandhiji's Goat

Gandhiji, a strict vegan, preferred to avoid any animal products. But the range of protein sources at that time were limited - soy was just getting known widely, and Gandhiji did not favour consumption of most dals and legumes. In his early life he often tried milk-free diets, and his position hardened after he came back to India and learning of the cruelties that many dairymen here practiced on their cows to increase milk yield. He took a vow then to avoid drinking milk and tried to find substitutes. But none seemed to work, and without other easily digestible vegetable proteins, his health started to get affected rapidly.This came to head around 1918 when a combination of the stressful Kheda Satyagraha campaign, and the milk-free diet caused him to develop a range of ailments that really threatened his life. The doctors he consulted insisted he had to drink milk, but Gandhiji felt he could not break his vow, and in letters he wrote to his family then, he seemed to be fully prepared to die for this reason. 

Practical Solutions
Kasturba knew that unless she thought of something - and fast, there was a distinct possibility of Gandhiji's health taking a turn for the worse. She knew that her husband had refused to drink buffalo milk, as being too close to cow's milk, but how about goat's milk? On hearing her proposition, Gandhiji thought about it for a while and agreed he had not been thinking of goats when he made his vow, so perhaps it could be alright. This was splitting hairs, as he acknowledged with some shame to correspondents like Narahari Parikh, but he argued, "The fact of big loopholes having been left in my vow is evidence of their utter sincerity." 

But was it in fact splitting hairs and did Gandhiji have any reason to be ashamed? I thought about this for a long time and decided he had no reason to. For, what Gandhiji had done was make a distinction between Morals and Values. Morals tend to be established rules of conduct that do not vary.  They provide an nonvariable (in theory) guideline as to what is right and what is wrong. Morals do not have a hierarchy while Values do. Values therefore, imply degrees.  For instance, Gandhiji may may have valued his cause for better treatment of the cow as also the life of a human, but obviously, held the value of one higher than the other. 

Gandhiji was a passionate proponent for the cause of saving the cow

So, though he never wavered in his unshakable moral belief in nonviolent protest and religious tolerance, when it came to his vow, by valuing human life (including his own) over his cause for better treatment of animals. He had redefined and reframed his values conflict and by agreeing to drink goat's milk, had focused more on an attainable interest - fighting for India's freedom, and less on non-negotiable position of giving up milk altogether. 


Learning: By combining ideals with a practical spirit one can choose negotiable outcomes rather than win-lose outcomes. Even if the moral conflict cannot be eliminated, it helps to focus on something of an overarching importance.

Coaching Using Principles of Behavioral Economics

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, Thaler and Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, explain, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The goal of Nudge is to demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. The person who creates that environment is, in the authors terminology, a choice architect. 

Reading more on Nudge in the various web references gave me more and more the feeling of just how remarkably similar the role of a choice architect is to that of a coach. Here's why: 

• Anyone  who indirectly influences the choices people make, the authors say, can be called "choice architect". A coach does exactly that, hence he is a  "choice architect" too.
• Choice architecture, can be used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves) without forcing certain outcomes upon anyone. This is one of the basic tenets of coaching. 
• The tools described by the authors (though differing in nature and application) sound very similar to the ones a coach would use. For instance, the tools highlighted are: 
• Expecting error (the coach tool: empathy) 
• Understanding mappings (the coach uses assessments to map client needs) 
• Giving feedback (a primary coaching tool)
• Structuring complex choices (the coach is a clarifier)
• Creating incentives. (the coach uses small wins as incentives so client is motivated for the big wins)

The remarkable similarities set me thinking. How could one incorporate the discipline of behavioral economics on which the book is based, with the practice, and business, of coaching?

This article is my attempt to do just that.

Applying Principles of Behavioral Economics to Coaching

The use of behavioral principles is fundamental to any coaching practice. Behavioral economics can help coaches understand better what every coach always understood, albeit unwittingly: That people are not rational.  Any new understanding of people's behaviour can only give coaches a better understanding of how exactly coaching works. Or how they can make it work better. 

Stephen Covey the personal development guru applied his mind to why humans behave the way they do and what they could do to avoid human susceptibilities that lead to wrong decisions. The result was his book The 7 Habits of Effective People, and the first of the seven habits is Be Proactive. Proactive people, says Covey, are those who are in control of themselves and do not surrender to a stimulus in the external environment but use their personal power to deal with the stimulus, whether people or situation. How are they able to do this?

Stephen Covey's Proactive Model

Proactive people know that there is a gap between a Stimuli and Response and within that gap is their freedom to choose the right response to maintain control over their self and be above circumstances.

What about people who are not proactive? Often, resistance to change is the result of lack of clarity because of a conflict between the rational and the emotional mind which comes in the way of allowing any change to stick. Ideas, and in turn change, is effective when it stays with you over time and changes the way you think.

Weaving the two models together- Thaler and Sunstein's derived from behavioral economics and Covey's based on new age theories of personal development, could, I realized, help create a useful model for coaching: Nudge Coaching

In his Proactive model, Covey talks of the four tools humans have at their command to effectively exercise their freedom to choose. The four 'hot buttons of pro-activity' being:

1. Self-awareness
2. Imagination
3. Conscience
4. Independent Will

Through the process of Nudge Coaching applied to each of the four 'hot buttons of proactivity', the coach would be able to resolve the conflict between the rational and emotional mind, and makes change happen.

The Nudge Process of Coaching 

Choice architects, according to Thaler and Sunstein, can have considerable power to influence choices. Or to use our the authors preferred language, they can nudge. The authors explain this term as "...any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." Most important from a coaching point of view - nudges are not mandates.  

Coaching clients are busy people who are trying to cope in a complex world and cannot think deeply about every choice they make. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes leads them astray. The Nudge Coach brings organization and structure to the contexts in which people take decisions. Choice architecture does not seek to reduce choices - just influence them in order to improve the client's lives, as judged by themselves. Humans are susceptibile to various biases and hence the way an issue is framed makes a huge difference to the success of a coaching engagement. In other words, people are nudgable. In the Nudge coaching process, a coach helps clients to structure their choices and create strategies that makes it easier for them to do things that improve their lives. He uses four types of nudges to achieve these coaching goals:

1. Nudging Client Self-awareness: Faced with important decisions about their lives, people often make pretty bad choices—choices they would not have made if they paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and complete self-control. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes lead them astray. The explanation, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is rooted in some well-documented human behavioral quirks that are amplified by information overload and trying to cope in a complex world. All this leaves people with little time to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The Nudge Coach helps create awareness of their cognitive abilities and the resources available to them for better self-control.
2. Nudging Client Imagination: Sunstein and Thaler have spent a lot of time thinking about how people can be encouraged to make better decisions, and they offer some intriguing ideas. Their central thesis: People will make better choices if they are given a clear and well-designed set of options that acknowledge and offset human idiosyncrasies. For helping client's design and structure the options available to them,  the coach has to take into account his knowledge of behavioral science. By helping to rightly structure the choices available to the client, a coach helps to nudge clients to do the 'right' thing.
3. Nudging Client Conscience: Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains that the ideas of right or wrong, good or bad exist only among humans. No animal is good or bad - only humans would pity the antelope being being made meal of by a predator such as a a cheetah in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are greedy, unlike animals, who stop eating once their stomachs are full. Thus says Pattanaik, humans have the capacity to be worse than animals (greedy) and better than animals (generous). And it is in these subjective choices - greed vs generosity, right vs wrong and good vs bad that the coach, by structuring choices available to the clients, helps them to to improve decisions about their health, wealth and happiness.
4. Nudging Client Will: One of the basic tenets of behavioural economics is that people do not always take rational decisions. They have  status quo bias and change doesn't come easily. For reasons of laziness, fear, and distraction, many people will take whatever option requires the least effort, or the path of least resistance. All these forces imply that if, for a given choice, there is a default option—an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing. The solution - helping coaching clients first make their choices, and then hold them accountable to their choice. Holding them accountable can at times  make the client feel challenged. A useful approach to overcome this is the one akin to the program in gmail. Every time a user mentions the word attachment but does not include one, prompts a pop-up, “Did you forget your attachment?” Similarly, by reminding the client of his commitment to the choice he has made, the coach can nudge the client will in non-threatening manner.

The Nudge Coach

By keeping an eye on the four nudges, a coach aka a choice architect can improve the outcomes for clients on their journey of the head and heart to fulfill their potential.