My favourite coaching tools: SMART Acronym Another Update

What the heck!? The SMART acronym again?

SMART - 3rd Time Lucky?

I thought I had all this simple stuff figured out. By 2012 I was willing to post my original thoughts and approach to SMART Goals/Objectives in the original post: http://change-challenge.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-favourite-coaching-tools-smart.html. It had evolved from my own practice as a delivery team lead, management student, and, later on, my first 2 years of agile training classes, coaching individuals and teams, and supporting departments through successful transformations.

Through 2016-2017, after supporting more transformations and agile adoptions with much more variety I realised some useful nuances to this multi-purpose tool had emerged by working with it in so many different ways. So I put out my update - http://change-challenge.blogspot.com/2017/10/my-latest-smart-acronym-update.html and thought "that's done now!".

Silly me. When is learning ever done? And so it was again. Late in 2018 I was on a totally non-agile, non-software, non-management, non-"normal" experiential psychology course. As we approached the end of the course we were asked to come up with 1 (I really like 1, and only 1, "there can be only 1!") SMART objective to help us take the next 1-2-3 steps after the course ended.

Whilst I was considering my objective, something else clicked into place for me that I'd been overlooking. Well 2 things actually. :-)

1, The confidence-risk level could be assessed with the "A" for "How Achievable?".
2, The alignment to purpose/direction/bigger picture could be assessed with the "R" for "Really-make-a-difference-in-the-direction-we-are-going?".

The A

An achievableness on a scale of 1-5, from improbable to highly probable ... we get a sense of how much risk the individual, team or group is willing to tolerate/try move through. Often it's okay (great!) to "try" for an easy win with a 4-5 level of confidence. Sometimes it is better, for learning or even to save the company, to try for something harder to do (with a friend, coach or mentor especially to support!) in the 2-3 range. So many "it depends", so little time to elaborate experiences here! :)

The quantification of achievableness is important when considering the alignment of this objective/goal to the purpose of the individual, team or group. Sometimes we could do the easy thing which is highly certain, we are confident in our capability to achieve it, and it will have no,  negligible or insufficient impact on achieving our purpose.

Such highly certain successful outcomes could be a waste of the one thing we always run out of, that no money or anything else in this world can get more of: time.

Using the R to confirm that we're aligned with purpose is really useful. Yet being aligned with purpose could expose us to a context, circumstance, super-ego, mindset or organisation "change anti-bodies" - "historical baggage" often - that do not really make it easy for us to align our efforts to our purpose and pursue that wholeheartedly. And it's good to reflect on this before, during and after - there is so much growth possible by understanding this "stuff" deeply!

The R

Reality. Realisation. Becoming real. That which is real. Turning deep desires (especially one's purpose) described by abstract thoughts or ideas into abstract words and then into "real world". Something really shifted in me that day in 2018, and I don't know why or what the final effect will be. Essentially it was around my previous interpretation of "responsible person assigned".

I really believe something better can be done with the acronym here. I have seen "realistic" in many places in the past - as in "the goal/objective is achievable and realistic". Or "actionable and realistic".

SMART Objectives Aligned To Team or Individual Purpose Creates A Desirable Tension Around Potential Which Then Unleashes Huge "Action" Energy To Achieve The Change In The Real World

What shifted for me that moment was that it could be better used as "really aligned to purpose". This is imho much stronger / more energetic / more focussed. For any objective or goal. And if its a tough thing to change, we absolutely need to believe we're going through the tough bit to get to a better place, else we will give up. And that defeatedness because of giving up can be a really worse place to land up.

With Specificness (as per my 2017 SMART update), it's easy to include the responsible person there as an attribute/quality that makes the change even more Specific. Similarly with tight "Measured by" criterion set that matches that Specificness.

OKR's (Objective, Key-Results) try to approach this slightly differently. But there is overlap that I guess I will draw out in the future when my thoughts and experiences are clearer.

Einstein apparently said something along the lines of - given an hour to solve a problem he'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem [in detail, in depth, from multiple perspectives, etc] and 5 minutes attempting to solve it. That way you'd be more certain which part of the problem your solution addresses well or not as well, and what other potential things you could change or try with another attempt later if need be. The solution matches the problem. Often - because it is in our nature, society and expectations from others - we solutionise too quickly and what we come up with may be good, but misses the original problem. A great shot that misses the target...is just a great shot. Same time, same cost, same effort. Miss. Absolutely useless in the context that mattered before the shot was taken.

Thankyou! As always happy to hear your thoughts on the above! Be careful out there, AND don't be too serious - fun provides a lot of goodwill and positive energy to achieve goals!

How to get it done in organisations

I was attending a course during 2016. Attending were a whole bunch of people from many different walks of life, and many different organisation experiences and levels.

Out of the blue, one of my fellow trainees was explaining how they, in their role of working with many organisations on big business-to-business transactions, had discovered a very useful approach to getting things done in their own organisation, as well as client organisations.

"Want something done? Give it to a busy person"

This statement about "how to get it done" in large organisations drew quite a negative reaction from within me.

I realised the statement was right and wrong at the same time.

Busy people have figured out ways to give and to create more value to the organisation - by being of good service, they are asked to do more and more. They figure out ways to do more and more - usually alternative work practices that make them more streamlined / efficient. They become extremely knowledgeable across the whole organisation - knowing who's who, and who to go to directly and for what. Also importantly, they know which avenues to not even bother to try - saving everyone time and frustration.

So...the statement still makes me feel a bit ill, but I also recognise the truth in it. Many organisations I have worked within are literally functioning mostly as a result of these very busy network nodes.

For managers and leaders - look after your ever-busy people - they are busy keeping things moving in the right direction. You may not know what keeps them so busy - but perhaps that's where a little more curiosity and study will be quite revealing!

My favourite coaching tools: Free online Kolb Learning Styles Assessment

Caveats:
As always when dealing with any kind of model that helps us communicate and understand the abstract world of our minds, our existence and relationships with each other, nicely summarised by George EP Box: "all models are wrong, some are useful".

This is a free assessment, and there are several others that you can freely download. I liked this one as it is a "1 stop shop" document that you print out, fill out, score quickly on the reporting sheet, and finally receive additional insights at the end. And anyone can complete this simply and quickly. 

Required:
Internet access
Printer and 8 pages
Quiet space
10-15 minutes

Step 1:
Give the link or 8 page print-out to the coachee: Kolb Questionnaire. Again I think the best time to do the assessment is in the morning, before work really starts.

Step 2:
When the assessment is complete, the coachee and you will have the coachee's 4 Kolb styles - Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist allocated to very strong preference, strong preference, moderate preference, low preference or very low preference.

You now have material you can use to support the coaching goals and plans where learning is required. You also have the approach you need when explaining concepts to the coachee - a real time saver and much more enjoyable experience for you and the coachee as compared to approaching from the worst angle.

Personally, once I realised what my preferred/natural Kolb learning approach was, I realised how I could learn better and more quickly in the same amount of time.

The future no longer belongs to those who learn the fastest. The future now belongs to those who learn the right things the fastest. Kolb learning styles assessment is just another practical tool to help me and my coachees discover their best learning method, and give us some "Slack" to identify what are the right things. Really useful stuff!

Agile In A Nutshell Part 4

About 1 year has passed since I posted my first attempt (Agile In A Nutshell), and very quickly after that one, the second (Agile In A Nutshell 2) and third (Agile In A Nutshell 3)!

And, along the journey this past year, reading through some more random bits of Alistair Cockburn's blog and Martin Fowler's blog (which I always find nuggets in) it occurred to me that Alistair mentioned during his Heart of Agile advanced agile training course a few things.

To the best of my recollection Alistair told the story of how on day 1 of the 2001 first meeting of the 17 folks who wrote the Agile Manifesto, Alistair was facilitating the choice of the word to describe what they were trying to describe. 8 people diverged, and then converged onto "agile". 8 people diverged and converged onto "adaptive".

I wonder now, looking back, what would have happened to the software industry if "adaptive" instead had won the final coin toss / selection process. Of course adaptive is a harder "sell" as it seems so ordinary and so ... common sense.

And that's my point. Yes, "quick and nimble" is the right word to describe what is desirable from any (not just software delivery) process. That would be awesome if all processes we encountered in our moment to moment experience was quick and nimble.

And people would totally freak out with happiness if the process was also adaptive to the specific context it was applied in, correctly by the people applying it.

And that's what the promise of agile is, adapative-quick-nimble. Able to move in a direction at speed, and change direction (due to an unanticipated target movement) without loss of speed. And, achieving that as a organisation of people where information is real-time communicated and hence looking at the organisation as a social organism, it becomes much more responsive to its environment it operates or lives in. That's where the challenge and the benefits lie. The organisation/organism that adapts fastest and best to its changing environment lives to see another day, and if it gets so good at being responsive that it actually achieves an insight into the requirements of the future, and achieves that before any competitor, then its thrives to outlive them another day.

Because marketing is a zero-sum game. Those who learn the right thing the fastest, lead, and then win.

For more nuts, see What Is Agile For! Thankyou!

My favourite coaching tools: SMART Acronym Update

So I've been using SMART/S.M.A.R.T. for quite a while (http://change-challenge.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-favourite-coaching-tools-smart.html) to help everyone understand the specific Task / Action / Goal / Objective clearly, so that success can be pursued by several people committed to achieving it together!

SMART Acronym Updated!

And along the way, I've come across Tom Gilb, and his 4 foundation rules for improving Specification Quality:

1. Every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph is clear to intended readers (RB: and lowest common denominator MUST be considered here: the newly joined member of the team)
2. Every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph is unambiguous (RB: so a glossary is a darn good idea, especially in abstract knowledge work, aka software delivery; note glossaries / data definitions / configuration libraries were a big thing in software since the 1960's at least)
3. All qualities are quantified (RB: so not faster/cheaper/better/blah...instead: Unit of Measure clearly defined, the meter clearly defined, the current state or measurement clearly noted, and then the future state survival and/or target and/or stretch and/or wish thresholds are expressed)
4. No solution language unless the document is specifying the solution (RB: keep the language in the problem domain/space ie common business layman's terminology)

And through Tom's teaching, Lord Kelvin's "To Measure Is To Know".

Thinking about all the lessons learned, and helping many individuals and teams move towards their desired future states, I've been modifying the SMART I use to mean the following these days:

    S - Specific (following Tom Gilb's #1 and #2 rules)

    M - Measured By (following Tom Gilb's #3 rule)

    A - Achievable (as a sanity check of the S&M against the R and T coming soon)

    R - Responsible person to agitate that this SMART is delivered is <...> (a single person is a must, if only to remind those who have to do the work, or even better, the person who is going to get the Task / Action / Story / Work Done!)

    T - Timebound on or before  

For Retrospectives

If this is a SMART Action that a team is generating from their Sprint or other Retrospective, as facilitator I encourage the Timebound to be on or before the next Retrospective (which the team commits to knowing and understanding what dd-mmm-yyyy that is!)

For Management Tactical or Strategic Objectives

Again the management team commits to the next planning date dd-mmm-yyyy for the Timebound element and we block out the calendars to ensure that happens! Nothing drains morale and energy than constant slipping of important - especially Strategically agreed important - Tasks/Actions/Objectives.

For Individuals or Delivery/Product Teams I'm Coaching

Exactly the same as Retrospectives or Management: we're all talking about changing the Current Reality to the Future Reality. Usually though, individuals are setting target states for the end of the current or next month - ie shorter windows in which to achieve shifts of consciousness and/or behaviours that impact or lead to the outcome they're trying to achieve.

Thankyou for supporting! Let me know how you do!

Agile In A Nutshell Part 3

Okay... I don't know if you noticed... but it is really really hard to really curate an agile in a nutshell post that is quick to read, grasp and move forward. This is partly why I avoided much agile postings over the past decade - it's a very very long piece of string (or rope to hang oneself with)!

:)

The previous 2 attempts at this (Agile In A Nutshell and Agile In A Nutshell Part 2) I like and I teach fluidly. But I also add the following nugget when I am teaching.

Where did these agile manifesto, the 12 agile principles, and especially those 10,000 odd agile practices (half of them technical/technology focused like pair programming; and half of them people/organisation/management/process focused like standup meetings) come from?

Well it's clear where the agile manifesto was written and by whom in 2001 - 17 world-recognised software engineering consultants, coaches, managers and all importantly - practitioners.

And it's clear as well where the agile principles were written and by whom in 2004 - the same experts that formulated the agile manifesto.

But what about those 10,000 agile practices?

The agile practices have been observed by team members, team managers, coaches, consultants, and other observant people ... of high performance teams. These observers have then documented them online, or in books, and have presented them at conferences as well as internally. 

This means that we're still discovering practices all over the shop/place that help organisations become quicker and nimbler.

In my opinion, the smartest organisations are recognising their own unique practices that are giving them competitive advantages, and keeping them secret. The even smarter organisations are making their unique practices transparent and world-wide accessible because they realise others may contribute small tweaks that give even better performance - ala open source.

They also recognise that thinking is really hard to replicate and their organisation as a whole organism is thinking differently and hence behaving differently. Behaviours are easy to observe and replicate, but does not mean you will get the benefit.

Countless stories abound how GM documented all the things Toyota was doing in their factory in Japan and tried to replicate in the US - but failed. And we see that quite a lot industries - competitors hire people from the other organisation (or the same consultancy!) and then try to copy what worked elsewhere - and it usually fails expensively, spectacularly, and hurts a lot of employees, shareholders and stakeholders.

The simplest way to deeply understand this is a story about a piano made by a world famous piano maker. A wood furniture carpentry company decided to move into the piano manufacturing business as they had the same required tools, they could buy the same materials, and they thought they had the same skills required. So they bought a piano and dismantled it, making notes and designs about how to assemble. Then they assembled it back. But once it was back in "1 piece" there was a problem. It did not sound like it had. So they tried to manufacture a new one from their instructions. And they succeeded in making a pretty good replica of a real piano, but once again there was the problem - it did not sound right. So they got out of the piano making business (wisely). They lacked the "secret sauce" of being musically minded and aware how all the complexity of sound generation, amplification, transmission integrated with the different moving complicated parts of a piano.

And that's also what agile is - the practices help - in the same way that knowing what the keys of a piano are what notes. But playing a piece of beautiful music on a piano is differently from knowing things about music and piano operations. Yes the analogy does stretch to "practice is required, and feedback" to get them right.

But more importantly it is the secret sauce - it is the agile mindset that causes these agile practices to evolve into something unique for the organisation and its context. Some practices are individual targeted (like disciplined arrive on time to meetings), some are pair targeted (like pair programming to create, quality assure, reflect, learn, and make better realtime), some are team targeted (like whole team planning game), some are larger organisation targeted (like town hall meetings), some are senior management targeted (like go-and-see/use-your-legs reporting walks). And on and on :)

It is much more important to be agile than to do agile!

For more and deeper thoughts about agile check What Is Agile For You What Is Agile For Us. Thankyou!

Agile In A Nutshell Part 2

Okay, so I tried (really really hard) to capture the essence of the vast topic "agile" in my Agile In A Nutshell post earlier ... but something is bothering me. Really.

So I hope you don't mind if I give a second dimension to this massive multi-dimensional concept! This stuff is BIG!

Agile In A Nutshell - Agile Is Now An Umbrella Term

Agile as a mindset and a movement started out in the software development and delivery space. But my first brush with "agile" as a concept was when I was studying business management in South Africa around 2003. The South African management textbook that mentioned "agile companies" stated that the future of businesses relied on them becoming more agile to keep up with customer needs. Although this was after we had implemented much of eXtreme Programming (XP), it was still before (because South Africa has/had very slow internet connectivity, and expensive imported books were scarce) the big software movement really got going worldwide.

I reckon it is likely that the line in that South African management textbook had been inspired by The New New Product Development Game written by the great management scientists Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in 1986.

But skip to the here and now nutshell point:

Agile is now an umbrella term to mean all of the agile manifesto, agile principles, agile frameworks, agile practices, agile tools, agile approaches.

Basically, any abstract or tangible thing that helps an organisation or an individual, be quicker or nimbler, in delivering value to the end customer. Usually this begins with the mind/thinking framework being applied by the people to the challenges they're responding to.

In other words, it is more important to be agile, than to do agile. For more practical thoughts on agile checkout my collection of teaching/learning agile at What Is Agile For. Thankyou for supporting!

Agile In A Nutshell

By the dictionary definition:

agile - quick and nimble

This is totally normal for a gymnast or a professional athlete in a sport like basketball, squash, surfing - one has to be in a constant state of dynamic balance. Able to go in a direction at speed, and also to change direction without loss of speed.

More like a fish! Catching prey (Opportunities!) using its deep swimming skills (Strengths!) (Capabilities!!). Evading being prey (Threats!), especially from its upstream or blind sides (Weaknesses!).

(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats being the words behind the useful business and delivery technique called SWOT analysis!)

Agile In A Nutshell Is A Mindset Of A [Successful] Fish (?Nemo?)

Unlike a cheetah - the world's fast land animal with really impressive speed, acceleration and space required to hit [terminal] velocity statistics! (terminal for the prey, that is, not for the cheetah!)

Agile In A Nutshell Is Not Being A Mindset Of A Cheetah, That Misses Its Prey!

What this means for a person in an organisation - not much. It's not so useful to be the one dynamic balanced player in an organisation where no one else is. The capability is usually lost in the inertia of the group that is not thinking, deciding, and moving in the same way.

But, for an organisation that is truly agile - like a high performance team - the benefits are great. The whole organisation is quick and nimble - able to chase market opportunities, and able to shift product, features, target new markets, respond to customers, manage crises well and innovate constantly because everyone is playing the same game together.

That's what people are after. The agile models, frameworks, practices, principles and everything else are just helpful indicators along the journey to creating and organisational culture, and a team mindset that produces great results.

It's more important to be agile, than to do agile.

How many people does it take to create an agile organisation? All of them.
Where do you start? Every leader - formal and informal.
Which leader do you start with? Wherever you identify the "early adopter" psychographic.
What do you whilst you're not agile enough yet - ie not quicker and nimbler that the market place or your competition? Introspect and reflect on ways to become quicker and nimbler, and hope you still have enough time to prevent your organisation's (inevitable) extinction.

How do you control the feelings of anxiety or panic? Develop your own capabilities so that you are quicker and nimbler and have skills that are transferable to other industries or competitors that are quicker and nimbler than your current organisation.

That's being agile, in a nutshell! :-)

Agile In A Nutshell Is Quick And Nimble Mindset

For more, check out What Is Agile For! Thankyou!

My favourite coaching tools: The CIA Of Any Situation

Control Influence Accept was taught to me a few years back by one of the team leaders I was coaching in agile mindset and approach to team and delivery. I am not sure where it originated as a consequence and searches on Google have been non-satisfactory.

CIA For Control Influence Accept Any Situation

Essentially, as the C-I-A was explained to me, every situation that one finds oneself in (as I explain to coachees), one asks upto 3 questions in the order Control - Influence - Accept (CIA):

Question 1: Can I Control this situation?

If yes, then Control it (by using your management position or leadership)!
If no, then ask the next question,

Question 2: Can I Influence this situation?

If yes, then Influence it (by working with your network, expanding your network, orchestrating and asking your network for assistance in changing the situation)
If no, then ask the next question,

Question 3: Can I Accept this situation?

If yes, then Accept it (by opening your heart and open your mind and embracing it, so that your new personal reality becomes your new personality)
If no, then you have only 1 healthy choice - to leave the situation.

Failure to Accept the situation, and not leave this situation will cause you stress and all the negative consequences that stress brings. It will lead to negative behaviours and cynical comments leaking out, causing you to be mis-labelled further deepening the pygmalion effect and negative vicious reinforcement cycles. (see my post on labels being applied to people and more importantly how you can help the team "fix" the problem)

So you can use the CIA for personal coaching, and you can use it for team coaching quite effectively as well. I typically use it for helping teams understand if the potentially SMART-ifiable productivity improvement and/or happiness improvement actions they have proposed within the team's periodic Retrospectives are actually Achievable.

I did see several parallels in Stephen R Covey's excellent The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where he discussed the 3 spheres that we live and work within as concentric circles. The Control Sphere is the smallest space, followed by the Influence Sphere, followed by the Accept Sphere. Basically we need to realise how little in life we do control, versus how much we think we control. An example he uses is the common illusion of control when driving in our carefully selected vehicle...and getting stuck in a traffic jam. We think because we can control our music selection, volume, air temperature and fan speed, we have control, but actually we have to accept that the dynamic system of the traffic on the roads is in control, we have very very little in reality.

I am planning on adding another 2 posts to extend the conversation and observations I've had about this CIA over the past 5+ years, so keep an eye out for the followups!

Thankyou for reading! I bumped into a previous team member after 6 years, and he is still using this fantastic tool with his own teams ever since!

My favourite coaching tools: Zimbardo's Free Personal Time Perspective Assessment

Caveats:
A reminder that all my favourite coaching tools - free, online, or other - need to be applied with the sensible cautionary advice from statistician George EP Box: "all models are wrong but some are useful". Remember also that this is about "them" and their perception - not you! I make sure to tell individual coachees, teams and team leaders these things before giving them homework or some brief presentation on Zimbardo's Time Perspective theory.

I was fortunate in 2014 to attend a Professor Philip Zimbardo talk where he introduced (me) to several topics including the The Time Paradox: Using the New Psychology of Time to Your Advantage (UK) (or US). With the Time Paradox, Zimbardo's research and theory focuses on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) sufferers and how the new theory of time helps them "catch up" with their new current reality. Another great book about PTSD and help for sufferers is from Peter Levine - Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (UK) (or US) - which explains somatic experiencing and was my first introduction to the 3 instincts humans face when stressed - the familiar "fight", "flight" AND the 3rd one "freeze". The research in this space is amazing and continuously evolving to help us understand us and to help those who suffer.

I recommend both books to anyone in any situation - not least because sooner or later you will experience 1 or more of the top 10 stressful events in life and having any knowledge to help you deal with them is invaluable. And also because modern life is so full these days of multiple minor stressors and we've learned that all the minors add up substantially even without a top 10 stressor.

And upon receiving some feedback on this tool, I believe both books are mandatory reading for any coach deploying this free test.

Prof Zimbardo is a wonderful speaker - if you get the opportunity to watch/listen/learn - take it! Stories from his (in)famous 1971 Stanford Prison Study (anyone who studies psychology or those who want to try understand how war atrocities are committed by normal people reads about the Stanford Prison Experiment) and his own early childhood facing near certain death in a hospital ward surrounded by other dying children (amongst other very memorable anecdotes) are incredible.

Here's a much condensed Ted version of his new theory of time talk.

I believe the theory can be applied to anyone no matter what their current psychological disposition is. I mean - who wants to live a half-step behind, or a half-step ahead of current reality? Who wants to be sure they are actually "living in the moment"? I reckon everyone, upon reflection, sees the benefit of being present, preferably present in the moment.

In my coaching practice - I meet a lot of people who want to know. They have deep questions about some past event or current lifestyle "choices" they seem to fall into habitually. They want to know if they are practicing enough mindfulness meditation. They want to know if they are truly self-aware. How does anyone but the Buddha know? Anyway, my clients - like most people - want to know if they're okay! (yes they are, and not because I suggested that they completed an online test!)

Step 1:
Go to http://www.thetimeparadox.com/surveys/ - print the graph manually and keep for later. Or better still, you can save it on computer, my Macbook has a great and good-enough editing tool in the form of Preview!)

Step 2:
Do both free online tests!

• Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory - 61 questions - takes 10-30 minutes
• Transcendental-future Time Perspective Inventory - 15 questions - takes 5-10 minutes

Step 3:
Manually plot the assessments on the survey graph paper or pdf

Step 4:
Discuss the gap between the "Ideal Time Perspective" and the coachee's results.
This is critical to get right - it is the coachee's understanding and interpretation of the gap that matters, and it is the coach's role to suggest options to improve ONLY if required.

With more self-awareness of their time perspective, the coachee opens up possibilities to understand more about their historical events that affect their perspective on their workplace as well as how their vision of the future pulls them to a good place or not based on their behaviours. From there it is possible to figure out the steps to take to change as required.

For the coachee, this view can be used as input to their coaching plan, to set some goals to acquire new skills and new behaviours (eg too much Present Hedonism might be an indicator of too much "good time, live for the moment" attitude and not enough time invested in the future thinking or planning and from there creating).

Step 5:
Several people find watching The River of Time video - inspired by the time theory - calming, reassuring and helps them to slow down enough to catchup with current reality.

I recommend also to complete Johnson's free online personality test as well as the free online Belbin test.

Additional Resources:

• Philip Zimbardo - The Secret Powers of Time is a 44 minute youtube video that has about half of the content I originally learned during the talk I attended.
• RSA Animate: The Secret Powers of Time is a 10 min youtube video that has less content again, is focused on the theory, and the infographic drawn real-time is wonderful!

My favourite coaching tools: Free International Personality Assessment from John A Johnson

Caveats
The elusive quest to find out who we are on the inside. There's no single answer. Or even a set of reliable answers that create a complete picture - not least because we are too complex, but also because we shift around all the time based on our context which also shifts around all the time.

But there are certain behaviours which do get more embedded and fire more repetitively that any others - personality - a great word! A personal reality :)

As usual with any assessment where you are choosing more of one thing and less of another thing, your free personality assessment will shift around (a little) based on your current and immediate context. So a good time to do it is at the beginning of a day, before anything begins to sway your free thinking and feeling.

Required:
Internet access
Quiet space
15-40 minutes

Step 1:
Give this link to the coachee: International Personality Assessment and ask them to do the full assessment in the morning before work really starts....or on the weekend, in the morning, before weekend chores or resting activities take over!

Step 2:
When the assessment is complete, you will have an assessment of the coachee across 5 broad domains and 6 sub-domains in each (again, statistician George EP Box's "all models are wrong, some are useful" applies!). A scoring of Low, Average or High does not mean a guarantee / permanent status of the domain's assessment. I like to think more of trying to evaluate the overall picture and then to evaluate specific incidents within that context.

You will have a free computer generated profile report - and you will need to manually either highlight all the text and paste into a document editor, or print to PDF!

You now have material again to either focus coaching goals and plans on making more use of the personality insights - all up to the coachee and your understanding of the person's needs.

This assessment is really great for all team members to complete and share their results with each other. The quick insights about each other helps the team figure out how better to work to each other's own interests and strengths - in some ways similar to Belbin's team roles and the Work imperatives but this is a lot more indepth personal and less on how to work well with others in the current work context.

My favourite coaching tools: Free work personality assessment

Caveats:
This free strength finders test is really insightful. Everyone I know has gained great benefit from understanding their strengths better! Some folks seek to find the answers of who they are, why they are, and what work are they supposed to be doing. They're seeking confirmation of their talents. Some believe we should be using our talents to achieve our destiny. Others believe we should be developing new skills until they become talents that we were not born with - and that these new talents are the path to our destiny.

If you feel good about what you are doing and you feel good about how you are doing it, then you feel good! When the Who, What and How are all aligned and in the right balance, you have a greater chance of getting into flow.

Success encourages success. Flow is particularly important for changing your life as these new higher level experiences actually change the brain.

As usual with any assessment where you are choosing more of one thing and less of another thing, your free work personality will shift around (a little) based on your current and immediate context. So a good time to do it is at the beginning of a day, before anything begins to sway your free thinking and feeling.

Required:
Internet access
Quiet space
10-15 minutes
An email account you don't mind using for the assessment

Step 1:
Give this link to the coachee: Imperative - bring meaning and fulfillment to work and ask them to do the assessment in the morning before work really starts.

Step 2:
When the assessment is complete, you will have the Who, How and Why the coachee works in the organisation, as well as some insights connected to the archetype/persona that has been matched (again, statistician George EP Box's "all models are wrong, some are useful" applies!). And a couple of hints about all the other imperative archetypes/personas that could have resulted if you had answered a couple of questions a little differently - because you will have an indicator of how many other respondents have been similarly labelled!

And you will have a free online profile you can share with others - friends, family and colleagues! It's very well presented and highly interactive!

You now have found your strengths and have the data to either focus coaching goals and plans on making more use of the work personality insights - all up to the coachee and your understanding of the person's needs. Their strengths and a clue about their weaknesses. Plenty to work with!

This assessment is really great for all team members to complete and share their results with each other. The quick insights about each other helps the team figure out how better to work to each other's own interests and strengths - in some ways also similar to Belbin's team roles.

Thankyou for reading. Let me know how it goes!

My favourite coaching tools: Labels and Believing Is Seeing!

Caveats:
This is a group exercise and great for team building. At certain times during the session some people's emotions might rise due to frustration at being misunderstood.

As coach you MUST manage the level of frustration (a little is good, too much is bad) in order to allow the group to fully experience and gain from the steps below. Most participants however are quick to see the simulation for what it is and self-control themselves accordingly. If you feel unsure, practice with a smaller group of friends, for instance, who can safely give you feedback throughout to ensure you are able to facilitate it correctly to the intended benefits.

Always remain on the safe side - for your sake and for your participants' also!

Required:
- Enough labels to get people into groups of 6 - preferably the labels are on little hats so that the people who are labelled do not know their own label (sometimes I use post-its stuck to foreheads but this does not work in warm sweaty conditions, sometimes paper tape/medical tape but have the same problem with sweaty foreheads, sometimes name badges tied on short strings under people's chins).

- Labels should be written (or use symbols) big enough so that other people can read them from 2-3 feet away.

- Labels suggested in Quick Team-Building Activities for Busy Managers: 50 Exercises That Get Results in Just 15 Minutes by Brian Cole Miller include "laugh at me", "disagree with me", "leader", "brown noser", and many more - *BUY THE BOOK*. I've also used Belbin's team roles for labels, as well as Belbin team role opposites (see Coaching with Belbin for details). Sometimes I just make them up based on the group and behaviours I have observed.
- Printouts for half the group of Stephen R Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (*BUY THE BOOK AND READ FOR FULL DETAILS*) Young Lady:

- Printouts for half the group of Stephen R Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (*BUY THE BOOK*) Old Lady:

- A digital projector and computer in order to show the group Stephen R Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (*BUY THE BOOK*) Both Ladies picture:

- 15 minutes for the first "Label Game" session

- 15 minutes for the second "Believing is Seeing" session

- 15-30 minutes for open group discussion to ensure lesson properly understood and people back to normal

Step 1:

Explain the basics of the "Label Game" to the participants:

- Everyone will receive a "secret" (from them) label that they should not see before the end of the exercise

- No one should tell someone else what their label is

- The groups will be given 7 minutes to plan something (department party, a new fun game, who to choose to evacuate a doomed earth, survive for 24 hours in a desert/artic, etc)

- As the group discusses, the participants must proact/react to the label of the person

- By the end of 7 minutes, people will be asked what they think their label is, before being allowed to look

Step 2:

Break the group into sub-groups of 6, distribute and place the labels on each member so that they are unable to see their own label.

Step 3:

Start the timer! Remind the participants about good timebox strategies to ensure they succeed with their discussion. Help with time keeping.

Step 4:

Time up! Let the groups discuss amongst themselves and get an indication of how many people realised within 7 minutes of simple discussion, what label they were wearing! Usually >75% correctly guess or infer their label based on how others were interacting with them.

Step 5:

Open the discussion up to the whole group. Good questions like "How did it feel to be treating people according to their label?", "How did it feel to be treated according to a label that was not visible to you?", "What about the labels we're treating each other with continuously in the day to day work?", "What are the dangers of labels?", "What are the pros of having labels?", "How do our labels affect us?", "Labels versus Job Title?" and see what thoughts and feelings are provoked by the group.

Be strict with your own time management as there is still the second session to run!

Step 6:

Get people to become 1 group again, this time split them down the middle.

Step 7:

Without making it obvious that there are 2 different pictures being given out, distribute the "Young Lady" above facedown to half the group, and distribute the "Old Lady" above facedown to the other half of the group.

Ask the participants to turn over the picture and stare at it for 30 seconds, and then to put it away. Help them with timekeeping and ensuring they're focussing on their own picture only.

Step 8:

With the pictures away, turn on the projector and show the group the "Both Ladies" picture.

Step 9:

Ask the participants to stick their hands up if they recognise the picture. Now ask 1 "random" person from the "Old Lady" group what they see. Then ask 1 "random" person from the "Young Lady" group what they see.

Step 10:

Now ask the whole group to raise their hands those who see an Old Lady? And then ask those to raise their hands who sees a Young Lady? Act confused and ask how is it possible - surely they're looking at exactly the same, unmoving picture on the screen - how could it be that people are seeing different things? And then ask who sees both an Old Lady and a Young Lady?

The groups are usually quite fun and energised by this time so allow them to discuss and try to resolve the different perceptions they have. People will come up to the screen and start tracing out the different curves, arguing, getting frustrated, getting amused and slowly all or most of the group will eventually see both pictures. (as an aside, what does it mean if someone is unable, even after a lot of help, to see both ladies?)

Step 11:

Now explain it the way Stephen R Covey does: "It's not logical, it is psychological!"..."the way we see the problem IS the problem!" 

Step 12:

And now ask similar questions of the Label Game session. Ask how this kind of knowledge, this insight might have changed how they approached problems in the past, and how they will approach problems in the future? Are the problems restricted to work problems, or are "people problems" also now more approachable? And so on.

Before running this session, I strongly recommend buying both books linked above and reading them properly for more many more details than I've summarised here. 

I find the 2 exercises even more beneficial for individuals I am coaching who attend, especially if they have already covered Belbin's Team Role Inventory Theory, Myers Briggs Type Indicator and Preferred Auditory, Visual or Kinaesthetic Communication Styles. For additional benefit, these sessions, run before coachees attempt their first feedback gathering from peers, also help to give people more self confidence in the collection, in the giving, and in the understanding of the content+emotion they receive from other people. We are all human, even if often it appears we are, or they, are not! ;-)

My favourite coaching tools: Motivational direction discovery and visualisation to achieve

Caveats:
Some people reject/debunk NLP (Neural Linguistic Programming) in its entirety. I find some of it useful to know and to teach to others. I do this by skipping the whole NLP thing and just honing in on the particular tools where relevant - for example below.

Required:
A bit of time to chat through various situations

Step 1:
According to NLP: the New Technology of Achievement humans are motivated in 2 ways:
- TOWARD what we want
- AWAY from what we don't want

For instance:
- Going to pat the friendly happy dog
- Keeping distance/getting away from the angry aggressive dog growling and barking madly

Another way to think about these motivational directions:
- Toward oriented people are goal-directed (outcome focussed)
- Away oriented people are more interested in identifying and solving problems (journey focussed)

Step 2:
Of course, as is clear in the example, humans use both motivation directions depending on a variety of factors - eg environmental, experience, etc.

However, we also, due to the wiring of our brains according to the NLP model, tend to specialise in 1 direction of motivation more than the other, and hence use it in situations where really the other motivation direction is better. And this is where I find many people in coaching situations trying to make changes happen for themselves or for their teams, but just not succeeding.

Step 3:
Armed with the knowledge of motivation direction, we take a look at the goals and rethink what motivation direction is more in play. We do the usual things of listing the pros and cons of making the change...but it is still not enough.

Step 4:
Making use of another tool from NLP, I ask the coachee to describe the image of achieving each of the goals.

Goals that are not so important to the coachee, or are "away from" motivationally oriented are usually described in 2 dimensions, little or no movement, little or no colour, with some distance between the goal description and the coachee describing it - the coachee is an observer.

Goals that are important to the coachee, or are "towards" motivationally oriented are usually described in great deal more richly: 3 dimensions, sound, colour, movement, passion, excitement - it is clear the coachee is engaged in achieving the change. The coachee is part of the scenario.

Step 5:
Now that the list of goals, and the motivational orientation of each has been analysed, there is 1 more tool that NLP provides that helps people perform a change they do not really want to: The New Behaviour Generator.

New Behaviour Step 1: Preparation
Ask the coachee to focus on themselves, to settle in, find quietness and relax. Ask them to imagine another "them" who they are observing.

New Behaviour Step 2: Choose the goal / task required to fulfil the goal
Ask the coachee to select the task which is currently blocking the fulfilment of the goal.

New Behaviour Step 3: Imagine the benefits
Ask the coachee to imagine their imaginary clone reaping the rewards of performing the task.

New Behaviour Step 4: Imagine the clone performing the task, completing the task, and achieving the benefits

Ask the coachee to imagine their imaginary clone performing the task - going through the troubles, the problems, the challenges, and overcoming each one, all the while becoming more confident and beginning to enjoy the benefits of fulfilling the task / goal. And finally when the goal is achieved, observing how the imaginary clone is enjoying all the benefits and sense of satisfaction that is evident.


New Behaviour Step 5: Integration
Ask the coachee to imagine that the imaginary clone now merges with themself in the observer position. Some people hug to initiate the merging. Some people feel a surge of energy or tingling when this integration occurs.

New Behaviour Step 6: Planning
Now ask the coachee when they will perform the task for real, and followup!

Step 6:
Repeat for each of "away from" goals. I prefer to do this exercise only once per session as the amount of energy required from the coachee can in some instances be great.

These NLP tools do sometimes take a bit of practice to master. The key is "baby steps" and checkpoints full of feedback along the way. The key metric is the quantity and the richness of the description of the description the coachee provides. As coach you can suggest adding music to the scenario if it is missing, to enhance the colours or the movement etc etc to really help manifest the future desirable state. Some of my coachees have also benefited themselves by reading Rhonda Byrne's The Secret .

My favourite coaching tools: Retrospective timeline cartoon

Caveats:

None. Getting a group to draw together, to make and convey meaning in story format by using the retrospective timeline cartoon pictures is an incredibly powerful team building activity. The retrospective timeline often raises team awareness, very gently, with humour, of something some of the team members are experiencing - eg providing feedback about a particular behaviour of one of the team members.

Required:

Large paper and markers.

20-30 minutes to draw

10 minutes to present and explain

Optional:

For distributed team members, the easiest is a way to scan/photograph cartoon contributions and email/upload to a shared space.

Step 1:

Simply give the materials and the instruction to the group. Part of this experience is to allow the group to figure it out for themselves - ie, less is more. A typical instruction is simply:

"Spend the next 20 minutes drawing a cartoon of a couple of frames that capture the key things that occurred during this past sprint/iteration/month/week/year/day"

As facilitator, you can suggest strategies for dealing with the 20/25/30 minute timebox (breadth first, depth second, breaking the timebox into smaller timeboxes, breaking the team into sub-teams after consensus is reached in the initial timebox, good-enough-is-good-enough, etc) 

Step 2:

Sometimes someone will attempt to dominate the effort - as facilitator try to ensure everyone is equally being heard and equally participating in the effort to decide what things to include, and how to depict them. Monitor the work effort and help the group meet the final outcome: a cartoon strip that tells a consistent story!

Step 3:

Something like the below will emerge when all goes well:

Retrospective Timeline Cartoon Drawing Exercise

As agile coach I've seen and heard about many funny cartoons, and seen or heard of fantastic individual or team insights conveyed by using them!

One of my  favourites that I heard about had a character showing up in 2-3 of the frames and asking "What's going on?".

When the Scrum team was asked who this character was, it turned out it was the technical team leader who was also committed to 3 other projects and not really available to the team, and thus was actually detrimental to progress as the team had to keep bringing this "leader" up to speed and could not become truly empowered and self-organising.

Not really Scrum then! And this is a great awakening to help teams go through - many think they are agile or Scrum, but when they understand those 2 terms, and when they understand deeply the evidence in support of or opposition to, this can be quite shocking for some team members, whilst being the "I told you so!" moment for some other team members. You  have to be ready to coach for this situation and help each individual and hence the whole team successfully negotiate this awakening phase.

I suggest helping everyone with calm and focus in the current moment, and hope for the future to envision a future they all want to become the new current reality!

Thankyou for reading! I hope I convinced you to try with your team! It's really good stuff!

My favourite coaching tools: Visual Individual - Squiggle Completion

Caveats:
None. You can do this for group work as well, and I have used it quite successfully for Agile Retrospectives.

Required:
5 minutes to draw
5-10 minutes to explain (per coachee/group member)
Paper
Pens/pencils/colours or not
Quiet space

Step 1:

Take the paper and draw a quick random squiggle on it. In a group everyone can draw a squiggle on a piece of paper.

Eg:

Step 2:
Pass the paper to the coachee, or in a group ask the members to pass to the left/right. Ask the recipient to look silently at the squiggle. Depending on the context, you can choose to ask a question for instance "How has this past week/month/year been for you?" or "How would you like the future to look?" or "What does success look like?"

Step 3:
Ask the coachee or group members to now complete the squiggle they have received as appropriately as possible to reflect their context or their answer to the question raised. Timebox this to 5 minutes - the results are more useful if cognitive thinking has been reduced and instead subconscious knowledge is accessed.

Eg

Step 4:
Now ask the coachee to explain their picture to you and/or the group. The insights from this exercise are extremely varied. Remember to make no judgements, nor allow any in the group to make judgements. Visualising knowledge is extremely subjective and it's up to the drawer to interpret along with guided questions eg: "What does that represent for you?", "That seems far away from this?", "Did you choose red on purpose?", "Who is that big figure?", "The waves seem to grow?" etc

The data gained from this coaching tool is useful for individual coaching plans - sometimes there is the discovery of a motivational factor or an anti-motivational factor. And the insights for a group who use this have a team building effect - especially when people take their masterpieces back to their office spaces with them and leave them on display. Especially if, over time, you use the tool a few more times for different or the same question.

Thankyou for reading! Let me know how your practice goes!

My favourite coaching tools: Free online wheel of Self

Caveats:
Like all self-assessments, especially with scales, assessing your Wheel of Self reveals different results depending on when it is completed and how you're feeling and what you've been recently reflecting on.

Requirements:
Internet access
Quiet space
15 minutes to complete initial assessment
5 minutes to transfer to the second wheel
15-30 minutes to discuss

Step 1:
Give this link to the coachee: http://www.new-oceans.co.uk/new/wheel2.htm. Encourage the coachee to be as honest as possible, and not to think too much - go with their first instinct. The more honest they are, the more they will get out of this tool. Again I think the best time to complete this assessment is in the morning, before work really starts.

Step 2:
When the assessment is complete, you will have a "radar chart" / "spider graph" of various aspects of life that most people find important (Health & Well Being, Personal Growth, Achievements, Work-Career, Friendship, Security, Energy, Self-Esteem, Fun & Recreation, Home - Family, Relationship, Finance).

Discuss what the results mean to the coachee. Do they think or feel they should strive for more balance or are they comfortable? What do they think the outcome would be if they were willing to reallocate some of the time they spending on an outlier activity to lesser area? What prevents them from rebalancing? Would rebalancing take a long time? What are the rewards? And so on.

Step 3:
Another way to represent a 12-segmented Wheel is actually the Zodiac Wheel. Whether or not you believe in astrology, or your coachee does or does not, the Zodiac Wheel actually clearly shows opposite pairings (Career vs Home, Mental Explorations vs Communications, Death and Regeneration vs Possessions, Marriage and Partnership vs Self, Service and Health vs Self-Undoing, Creativity vs Hopes/Wishes and Friends). Thus usually it is clear if you overscore on say "Career" according to the Wheel on http://www.readingsbylafaye.com/12-Houses-of-the-Zodiac-Wheel.html you will underscore on "Home" and thus it is quick to create a prioritised plan to shift towards more balance ASAP.

Using both these wheels together (by transferring the scores from the 1st to the 2nd) make for a very interesting view for your coachee to look at themselves and understand themselves better. A lot of the people I work with for instance spend more time on Career activities or Home activities - a tiny minority actually feel they have balance between these two. And the same with Creativity or Friends - very few people commit to quiet times for themselves to engage in creative processes and thus recharge a different aspect of themselves for a more fulfilling life.

You now have more material, and perhaps a simple prioritisation mechanism, to help the coachee with setting up a coaching plan.

My favourite coaching tools: Csikszentmihalyi's Flow (psychology)

Caveats:
None for using, but please be sensible whenever thinking and applying a model of thought. It's all abstract and in that experiential space - nothing is perfect for everyone in every context.

Required:
This is a "chat through" session with a coachee or a group
30 minutes and more, dependent on the group's size and engagement
Read the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) and be sure to click on all the segments in the picture which are links to a bit more detail which you will need to know and understand.

Step 1: I either draw something similar or show the coachee or the group the following image (available in the public domain from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.svg)

Step 2: Most important - do not cast, nor allow any group member to cast, any verbal or non-verbal judgements! This is self-perception stuff, so with a group, as facilitator of constructive listening and volunteering of important "self" information, the session must be managed sensitively and sensibly.

Step 3: And as the picture is quite self-explanatory, especially having read the background reading available on wikipedia and other sources, the conversation is quite easy to have. I ask for examples of what tasks the coachee or the group members perform that are Low in Challenge Level, and Low in Skill Level.

I then ask for examples on each flanking side, 1 sector at a time (ie, Medium Challenge Level with Low Skill Level, Medium Skill Level with Low Challenge Level) until finally reaching Flow.

Typically the sectors before Flow are quite quick and easy to find good examples for, though it is always interesting for me to see how house/admin chores such as sweeping, filing, dusting move around between Apathy-Boredom-Relaxation. And the same for what kind of tasks such as public speaking, waiting for feedback from a client proposal, writing a proposal, move between Apathy, Worry and Anxiety.

Often teaching, managing and mentoring type activities appear in the Control sector.

And sporting, extreme sporting, and "breaking the ice" with someone that is liked appears in Arousal sector.

And then, the tough one is discovered, and the real soul and past experience searching begins: Flow.

Step 4: Helping identify tasks that represent true Flow state requires covering the information found on wikipedia, summarised here:

1.The person must be engaged with something that has clear goals in order to provide direction and structure (aka Vision)

2.The person must believe that they have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task and their own perceived skills - they must be confident.
3.The clearer and more immediate feedback the person receives whilst engaged, helps the person get into this "super state" and then stay there for longer
 
Flow psychology provides a great tool for explaining the enjoyment people report when they embrace modern/agile software engineering practices like Test Driven Development, Pairing, Collaborative Design and more.

I have not read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience yet, but I find the graph he drew above incredibly useful when talking to people about their experiences of work - what they have really loved in the past, and helping them understand what they are experiencing currently. This tool helps provide some motivational energy to help people make a decision to try something new.

And for team building, this tool provides great insights into the kinds of work individuals really want to do, to feel alive, to contribute as much as possible whilst at work, to be themselves, and to be with others, contributing to team success based on capability and capacity rather than role.

I like bringing this tool into discussion with the results from Belbin (see Coaching with Belbin), the Free Strength Finder (see Coaching with Free Strengths Finder), the preferred learning styles VAK (see Coaching with Free VAK (Learning Styles Visual Auditory Kinaesthetic)), and the positivity ratio (see Coaching With Free Positivity Ratio Tool). Together they provide a couple of very useful views on people that allow for the creation of great coaching plans, team plans, and ultimately greatly enhanced self-awareness.

Thankyou for supporting! Let me know what you think!