A Coaching Power Tool By John Montgomery, Executive & Leadership Coach, AUSTRALIA
The Rules vs. Re-imagine Power Tool
Arthur Conan Doyle the creator of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes and amongst others the Boscombe Valley Mystery is attributed to have said
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
This reminded me of being in a meeting with Paul Polman the retired Unilever Global CEO and former Global CFO at Nestle SA. It was shortly after he had started with Nestle and he was visiting Australia a colleague asked him what observations he had about our business.
He remarked, “We seem content to dig for coal in a gold mine.”
In reflecting on this observation, it was clear the reasons for our contentment. It was built on a legacy of decades of investment to successfully extract value from a particular commodity. There was general agreement that we operated with strong brand equity yielding superior returns vs. competitors.
So why change a winning formula?
It would challenge the status quo of our established perspectives, disturb our well-functioning culture, and potentially put at risk our winning position in the market.
It would challenge the stories we told ourselves and the rules of engagement.
The small yet alarming ‘canary in the coal mine’ was that consumer tastes were moving, the way this commodity would be consumed was evolving, and with it a change in the rules of the game.
Do we have the capacity to see our context differently… to discover gold?
Would some other party see and extract gold leaving us to extract the inferior commodity?
Hidden in Plain Sight
Robin Warrena pathologist& Barry Marshall a gastroenterologist at Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the bacterium H. pylori and its link to gastritis and peptic ulcers. Prior to his discovery, researchers seemed to have settled the science that bacteria could not grow in the acidic environment of the stomach which was thought to be sterile. That said, in his Nobel Lecture in 2005, Warren concludes by saying that “H. pylori had been seen and largely ignored for over 100 years”.[1]
The book ‘This is Water’recounts the only commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace.
He starts the speech with what he describes as a parable-ish story.
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Wallace goes on to say, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”[2]
Power Tool Rules vs. Re-Imagine
This approach is designed to support business executives who may be operating in a large organization setting with incumbent positions, characterized by established narratives, entrenched viewpoints, and prescribed actions. Alternatively, the individual may be in a challenger enterprise that is seeking to disrupt the status quo, through innovation to change the focus of attention.
In both scenarios, the power tool is designed to invite reflection and to shift perspective by re-framing towards possibility.
Rules
The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus defines RULES as…[3]
- Regulations | a statement spelling out the proper procedure or conduct for an activity.
- Traditions | inherited or established way of thinking, feeling, or doing.
- Governs |exercise authority or power over.
- Controls | to keep from exceeding a desirable degree or level.
Every industry is built on long-standing, often implicit assumptions about what shapes consumer actions, and how stakeholders develop a network or ecosystem to create and deliver sustainable value. This value could be defined on monetary dimensions such as return on invested capital [ROIC]and /or on non-monetary dimensions such as the positive impact on a person, group, or community.
The Rules frame provides space to explore and understand what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified as diverse kinds of heuristics and cognitive biases that end up becoming mental shortcuts to allow us to make quick judgment calls based on “rules of thumb.”[4]
The development and utility of these“rules of thumb” is to support efficiency when seeking to navigate problems or decisions. Whilst these can be advantageous, they can also mean reliance on incomplete, out-of-date, and partial data, insights, and experiences that lead to ineffective decision–making. For example, Kahneman & Tversky outlined several types; the availability bias is used to make frequency &probability judgments and is influenced by the tendency to remember certain information and events better than others.[5]
Second, the anchoring adjustment bias that occurs when we get stuck on an initial value placed on something. In an experiment cited in the book ‘CEO Excellence’ “one grocery store puts Campbell Soup on sale at 79 cents with a sign above the display that says, “Limit 12 per customer.” In another grocery store, the same sale is happening at an identical price, but with no purchase limit. On average, how many cans do you think are purchased per customer in the first store? The answer is seven. And in the other store? Just over three.”In this example, in one store the shopper’s brain anchored on the purchase limit of twelve and adjusted downward, whereas in the other store, the shopper anchored upwards from zero[6][7]
Third, is the representative heuristic where events are classified into categories. When new events arise the person classifies them based on their relatedness to what they are already familiar. A person can make a subjective judgment based on another person fitting their constructed prototype even without hard evidence to support the assumption. This can be illustrated by the illusion of validity. For example, this leads to our judgment of others based on past experiences. It also influences our tendency to predict future outcomes. This can be further influenced by the illusion of correlation that under or overestimates the frequency of events and can attribute a connection between two factors which in fact have little or no connection.
In the coaching setting all these biases influence a person’s current perspective which in turn influences their agility and autonomy to act based on their clarity, confidence, and motivation.
Useful Coaching Questions for This Exploration
- What factors influence and shape this situation today?
- What needs are being met / unmet?
- Who is on the playing field?
- Where are you on this playing field?
- What rules are beneficial?
- What considerations are most important to you at this moment?
- What might be different from your expectations?
- What is preventing you from acting?
- What leads you to believe that this perspective is true.?
Re-Imagine
The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus defines REIMAGINE as… [8]
- To think about again especially in order to change or improve.
- To imagine again
- To re-interpret [an event, a work, process, way of being].
- Imaginatively to rethink
The night before he became “the most reluctant convert in all of Christendom,” C.S. Lewis[Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at Cambridge and subsequently the author of the Narnia Chronicles] spent some long hours walking with J.R. Tolkien, the famous novelist (Lord of the Rings). Tolkien, a committed Christian, was trying to convince him of the credibility of Christ and the church. Lewis was full of objections. At a point, Tolkien countered Lewis’s objections with the simple statement: “Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part!”According to Ronald Rolheiser, “A healthy imagination is the opposite of resignation, abdication, naive optimism, or despair. It is the foundation of hope.” [9]
The re-frame from Rules to RE-IMAGINE is designed to support the person to re-orientate towards open curiosity, possibility, and discovery. It is a journey that includes challenging the mind’s established rules and assumptions with the aim of replacing rigidity with agility.
It is helping the individual to shift consciousness from a mindset of “to me” characterized by seeing oneself “as the effect of” conditions outside me and my control which can lead to occupying the role of a victim to a mindset of “consciously creating with” and occupying the role of creator.[10]
In Harvard Business Review, Tim Brown identifies 5 characteristics of a design thinker:[11]
Empathy | Imagining the world from multiple perspectives withholding judgment. Great designers observe the world in minute detail, they notice things others do not and use their insights to unlock fresh solutions.
Integrative Thinking | Holding in tension the salient and often contradictory aspects of a confounding problem AND still see potential opportunities.
Optimism | Despite the challenges and constraints at least one new solution will be better than the existing alternatives.
Experimentalism | Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in creative ways.
Collaboration | An open-mindedness to work in partnership and access complimentary skillsets – the sum of the parts is greater than the parts.
In the coaching setting keeping these five approaches in view will help the person to shift to a re-imagined outcome. According to Hal Gregerson “Brainstorming for questions rather than answers makes it possible to push past biases and venture into uncharted territory.”[12]
Useful Coaching Questions for This Exploration
- What are the better questions to ask?
- What makes these important?
- Where might you discover ways to answer these questions?
- Who can help you?
- What excites you about solving these questions?
- How could constraints work to your advantage?
- What does success look like?
- Where do you see yourself in this success?
- What will you need to do differently?
- What will you need to learn to do?
- How will you secure this new way of working?
- In moving towards your goal where would you place yourself on a scale of 0-10?
Zero being not started / 10 being solved.
Where do you think you need the score to be currently?
- What would be an action that could move you from x score to y?
- How confident are you in achieving this step?
Where would you place yourself on a scale of 0-10?
Zero is not at all / 10 being confident?
- What could support a stronger achievement?
- How might you conduct some mini-experiments?
- What would be a measure of success for these experiments?
- Is there anything else that would make a difference?
- What could prevent you from acting?
- What leads you to believe that this perspective is true?
- What would support addressing the barrier?
The Rules vs. Re-Imagine Power Tool
According to the translation, Leo Tolstoy said in ‘Three Methods of Reform – in Pamphlets [13]
Everyone thinks of changing humanity, but no one thinks of changing himself.
The Rules to Re-imagine Power tool is constructed to support a person to cultivate the changes they need in themselves as part of securing the change they seek in their team, organization, marketplace, or wider community.
Pictures for Rules
Pictures for Re-Imagine
References
- Warren, J Robin, 2005 ‘Helicobacter: The Ease and Difficulty of a New Discovery” Nobel lecture, https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/warren-lecture.pdf. Accessed 14.09.23.
- Foster, Wallace David, 2009 ‘This is Water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life’ Little Brown Co.
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/rules Accessed 14.09.23.
- Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science. 185(4157), 1124-1131.
- Kahneman, D (2011) “Thinking, fast and slow,”, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.
- https://thedecisionlab.com/biases accessed 20.09.23.
- Dewar, C, Kellar, S, Malhotra, V [2022] ‘CEO Excellence – the Six Mindsets that Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest’ Scribner, New York.
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/reimagine accessed 20.9.23.
- Rolheiser, R (1991) ’Paschal Imaginationhttps://ronrolheiser.com/paschal-imagination/ accessed 20.09.23.
- Dethmer, J Chapman, D & Warner Klemp, K [2014]’15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership’Kindle edition accessed 20.09.23.
- Brown, T [2008] ‘Design Thinking” Harvard Business Review, hbr.org accessed 17.09.23.
- Hal Gregersen [2018] ‘Better Brainstorming’ Harvard Business Review hbr.org accessed 17.09.23.
- Leo Tolstoy [1900] ‘Three Methods of Reform’ in pamphlets.
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