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.

How to Evolve as a Coach

Shaping your coaching style and methods is an art form - the way an artist develops, evolves and creates a painting; or a composer creates music.  In an article in Psychology Today, Douglas LeBier says one way to do this is to stretch towards new challenges. When you challenge yourself to stretch towards a higher level of your abilities, you also increase your overall well-being. 

Research indicates that the capacity for self-evolution -- of your personality, mental capacities, relationships and actions in the world -- is based on conscious intent. So how do you shape your intent and what are the ways a coach can stretch himself? The Pasteur's Quadrant can help shape plans. 

Ways of Research

In the Pasteur's Quadrant, author Douglas Stokes describes a classification for research projects that, simultaneously, are fundamental for the advancement of knowledge (finding meaning) and are relevant for immediate applications (utility). Each of the scientific quadrants identified by Stokes can be important to a coach as focus areas of intent. Let's see what these quadrants are.

The Pasteur Quadrant

The Niels Bohr Quadrant: The work of the theoretical physicist, Niels Bohr, is an example of the quadrant in which researchers search for fundamental knowledge or meaning, with little concern for application. 

The Pasteur Quadrant: The research of Louis Pasteur, whose studies of bacteriology were carried out at the behest of the French wine industry, characterizes the work of scientists who select their questions and methods based on potential relevance to real world problems. 

The Edison Quadrant: The work of Thomas Edison, whose practical inventions define the 20th century, exemplifies the work of scientists whose stock and trade is problem solution. They cannibalize whatever basic and craft knowledge is available, and conduct fundamental research when necessary, with choices of action and investment driven by the goal of solving the problem at hand as quickly and efficiently as possible.

A Coach's Evolution Paths

The Pasteur Quadrant is of special significance to coaches, as it helps them decide the paths to tread for their evolution as coach - should the quest be for meaning or for utility? Which direction should a coach's stretch for new challenges and when? A second graphic I found here can act as a useful compass. 

Coaches are mostly solopreneurs and as such, left to their own devices to inspire themselves toward new goals and objectives. They need to find ways to refuel with new knowledge, new abilities and skills, and get inspiration from somewhere. They need to insert some goals into their “mind-drive” to fuel motivation. Learning something can enable coaches do one of the most fulfilling things in the world - contribute in new and exciting ways to help their clients achieve their goals. By seeking new ways and abilities of working, a coach can feel energized and recharged - all of which can have a direct impact on their coaching outcomes, if not on their incomes.  

With the Pasteur Quadrant serving as inspiration, here are some ways you can evolve as a coach.

• Search for Novel and Creative Solutions:

Objectives: Explore new as well as utilitarian coaching solutions. Invent new technology and discover knowledge that will benefit the types of clients you service. For experienced and senior coaches this means use of the bold, novel, and unconventional approaches to the core practices and technology challenges in this area.

Applications: To Coach and Produce better and better results. Success in practice Inspires more success and fulfillment.

Benefits: Refueled with new knowledge, new abilities and skills, 

• Explore Applications of Immediate Relevance: 

The Objective: Research projects that are highly complementary to the immediate needs of your current clients.
Applications: To find tools and techniques to coach and produce results for ongoing assignments..  
Benefits: Sharpened existing abilities and skills

• Work on Projects of Potential Economic Impact: 

The Objective: Direct impact on your coaching revenues and which has the potential of sustainability beyond the current needs of your current coaching niche.


Applications: To produce coaching products and delivery with an eye on the future.


Benefits: Inserting  goals into your “mind-drive”. 

• Research Areas for Dissemination and Communication:

The Objective: Write articles, blogs and academic papers for the development of the coach community at large. 


Applications: To share and/or teach to increase one's knowledge and build credibility as coach.


Benefits: One of the most meaningful things in the world - share and teach others

• Design Products/Tools/Techniques for Pilot Deployment: 

The Objective: To advance the state of the art of coaching technologies through field testing on a pilot scale.


Applications: To keep oneself inspired and motivated by creating and testing experimental coaching  tools. These Pilot deployments may have direct impact on your potential revenues and for dissemination and communication. 


Benefits: Validation of new knowledge, abilities and skills, 

These are all paths I have personally tried and tested over the years as a coach. Do tell me whether they work for you too.

References:

http://openeducationresearch.org/2009/01/pasteurs-and-edisons-quadrants/

http://www.shmula.com/how-to-add-value/1813/

http://www.nevermindthemanager.com/2009/08/how-do-you-provide-value-at-work/

Journey to a Coaching Insight

Innovation was a term which had aroused my curiosity, and also bothered me  for a long time. The word was commonly understood as standing for something new or something novel - an understanding that did not satisfy my curiosity and therefore added to my bother.. For instance, I have always believed that my approach to any work I do, whether it is fixing things around the house, creating  new marketing strategies in my corporate career, or the tools and methods I use in my coaching have been uh, creative. I dreaded to use the word 'innovative' as a description of my methods, even to myself! This was because, in my mind the word stood for something radically different, and at the same time it also meant something incremental, creative or better. As you can see, the two were poles apart and just not reconcilable! Peter Drucker's definition of innovation as "Change that creates a new dimension of performance" was no help either.

Enlightenment Happens

Then, I happened to read an interesting article by Brianna Sylver in Businessweek, What does "Innovation" really mean. And enlightenment dawned! I understood just WHY the word innovation had bugged me so much. The word, Sylvers pointed out, had been used to describe everything from the Apple iPhone a new template in Microsoft word (or our very own jugaad)! How could one term be used to describe such vastly different things? The problem, Sylvers explained, lay in the lack of qualifiers. The term was used to mean 'ground-breaking  or world shattering' (iPhone) as well as a situation where the object of change became 'better than what it was before' (MS Word). Ah, so there it was, the cause of my discomfort and lingering dissatisfaction was  all because of the lack of qualifiers! This was Step1 in my journey of understanding of innovation. 

At about the same time, I came upon two definitions of innovation that helped me take a few more steps forward in my understanding.

The first was its description by Dr R.A. Mashelkar, Chairman  of the Innovations Foundation of India as "moving from best practices to next practices." The other was it's description as a "solution designed to address a particular pain point." by Navi Adjou of the University of Cambridge. While Adjou described 'pain points'  as the improvements made in technology, poor skills or processes, I was not quite sure what Next practices meant. On doing some research, I found Best practices were those that only allow you to do what you are currently doing a little better. On the other hand, Next Practices called for imagining what the future would look like; identify the big opportunities; and build capabilities to capitalize on them. In other words, Next practices were about creating your own future rather than relying on the innovation of others.

After churning this understanding of innovation in my mind's blender, I came with the following two definitions (in my coaching context):
Best Practices: Means solutions to the client's pain points uncovered through discussions with clients or assessments. These practices for improving skills and processess may (but not necessarily) be picked up from what competitors or industry leaders have employed successfully. 


Next practices: Means looking beyond typical sorces of information like successful past strategies or even strategies that industry leaders are currently using. It means looking at future challenges and developing a strategy with new solutions and services. Requires coach in helping client imagine the future and look at ways to capitalize on the opportunities. Next practices are innovations meant to address such opportunities that create new dimensions of performance.


To Journey's End
But my understanding was not yet complete. I still had to figure out how exactly all this played out in my coaching practice, which the image below did. 


My coaching practice, I noted,  was directed at 3 levels

1. Individual (Owner/Business head), 
2. Work group (Key Decision-makers and/or executives)
3. Business (Working at both the above levels to impact whole business)

The process innovations co-created by the coach and the client and/or his team were across a continuum from Best practices to Next practices. We traveled the continuum in three ways:  

                             Best Practices....................Next Practices

                                       

1. Streamlining: Understand client's pain points. Look at, and adapt best practices of competition to address the pain points. 
2. Surfacing: Tap into client's vision for his business, or if one does not exist, help to develop one. Visualize opportunities in the context of the vision and co-create ways of capitalizing on them. Give concrete shape to the aspired future through an Action or Project plan..
3. Inventing: Help 'invent' the future. Co-create the next practices to ensure successful outcomes. 

The net result of coaching efforts directed at meeting current needs and/or aspired future are felt at 3 levels of the client's business:  

1. Structure and/or Culture: A Structures and/or Culture in sync with the desired goals.
2. Roles: Better understanding of  Leadership  and Employee roles  in sync with desired goals.
3. Procedures: Tools and techniques for Strategy development, Customer relationship management,  Communication, Collaboration and other critical areas of business success.

End of Journey. Beginning of Another

This leg of my journey - figuring out the what and how of innovation in my coaching practice, was now complete. I had started out by trying to address the discomfort I had felt with the use of the word innovation, and ended up, not only a wonderful understanding of it, but much more! I now had, not only a proper definition of innovation in my mind, but had understood the difference between Best practices and Next practices. Most important of all, I had understood exactly how all this played out in my coaching practice! 

Further Reading: Seeking Out “Next Practices,” the Next Generation of Best Practices

The Theory of Coaching

At the beginning of the last century, two men raced to be the first to make it to the the South Pole - Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott.  While Amundsen used dogs to make his journey, Scott decide to make use of ponies and motorized sleds. What shaped their decisions on how to make it to the South Pole? Their different set of experiences and the ability to learn from them. Authors Sengupta and Heyden in their blog, The Leadership Lessons of the Race to the South Pole,  describe how these differences doomed Scott and handed success to Amundsen.

From his own experience as well as those of others,  Amundsen learnt that successful explorers are cautious. They remain flexible, and are ready to adapt targets and plans in light of conditions. When conditions are not right, it is better to turn back rather than rely on hope and luck. He believed that bad luck is often the result of insufficient preparation. This was his theory. 

On the other hand, Scott was a naval officer most of his life. Although he was to become synonymous with the Antarctic, his ill-fated 1911 venture was only his second polar expedition. However, despite the lack of experience of such climates, Scott was disinclined to rely others who knew similar terrain. Among the decisions which were to prove fatal for him, was the one not to use dogs for sledges, despite advice from both Amundsen and the pioneering polar explorer Fritjof Nansen. Instead, he relied on two options that had not been tested in polar conditions: ponies and motorized sledges. Neither proved well adapted. Scott's military background also played its part. Like all military men he was competitive. Since he was engaged in a race, he pressed on, despite worsening weather conditions.Scott compounded these decisions by making logistical and organizational mistakes that reflected a failure to appreciate from his previous experience just how unforgiving polar conditions are. 

When people face uncertainty, say Sengupta and Heyden, experience, the ability to learn from it, obsessive planning, and a willingness to alter course will trump determination and courage every time.

Shaping Theories from Experiences

Growth, as an American entrepreneur once famously said, means change and involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown. In The Growth Imperative, author Clay Christensen a professor at Harvard, writes of how we often admire the intuition that successful entrepreneurs seem to have stepping from the known to the unknown, and build growth businesses. When they exercise their intuition about what actions will lead to the desired results, they  really  are  employing  theories  that  give  them  a  sense  of  the  right  thing  to  do  in  various circumstances.  These  theories  were  not  there  at  birth:  They  were  learned  through  a  set  of experiences and mentors earlier in life, as did Amundsen. 

According to Christensen, what brings predictability  to  any  field  is  a  body  of  well-researched  theory—contingent  statements  of  what causes what and why. Executives often discount the value of management theory because it is associated with the word theoretical, which connotes impractical. But theory is consummately practical. The law of gravity, for example, actually is a theory—and it is useful. It allows us to predict that if we step off a cliff, we will fall. 

Even  though  most  managers  don’t  think  of  themselves  as  being  theory  driven,  they  are  in reality  voracious  consumers  of  theory.  Every  time  managers  make  plans  or  take  action,  it  is based  on  a  mental  model  in  the  back  of  their  heads  that  leads  them  to  believe  that  the  action being       taken       will       lead       to       the       desired       result. Amundsen's mental model was dogs and skis should speed his journey to the South Pole. Scott's was different - which led to his decision to use motorized sleds and ponies.  

The       problem, writes Christensen, is  managers  are  rarely  aware  of  the  theories  they  are  using—and  they  often  use  the  wrong theories  for  the  situation  they  are  in.  It  is the absence of conscious, trustworthy theories of cause and effect that makes success in building new businesses seem random. No  matter  how  well  articulated  a  concept  or  insight  might  be,  it  must  be shaped and modified, often significantly, as it gets fleshed out into a winning business plan.

Rarely  does  an  idea  for  a  new-growth  business  emerge  fully  formed  from  a manager's head. And this is where a business coach comes in. He helps clients to shape and modify his theories and construct well formed mental models.  

                                                                                         Source: Quantum Leap

Unlike the Therapist, Consultant and the Trainer, who use prescriptive processes, a Coach (both Life and Business) helps his client clarify, construct and validate theories through a 3-stage generative process.

1. Co-create descriptions, or characterizations of the phenomenon client wishes to understand.
2. Co-create classifications of the phenomenon into categories in order to highlight the most meaningful differences.
3. Co-create articulation of a theory of what causes the phenomenon to occur and why

Through this generative process, the coach helps clients avoid forming both life and management theories. The result - minimal chances of client observing one or two successes, assuming they have seen enough and proceeding impatiently to implement them.


And perhaps, end up committing mistakes such as those of Robert Scott.

Links

1. A Chapter from Christensen's The Growth Imperative
2. The Leadership Lessons of the Race to the South Pole
3. The Difference Between Coaching and Consulting. 
4. How the Coach Helped the Keen to Grow Butterfly.