Lightening Talk topic at POD2014

The Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education is holding its annual conference in Dallas, TX in early November, and POD recently announced they would be holding a couple of UnConference sessions.

I am toying with proposing a lightening talk and have to brainstorm a proposed title and one-sentence summary by next week.

Here a five titles I brainstormed yesterday. Would you vote for any of them? Why?

1. Service Design, Team Coaching, and Work-based Social Performance Support, or How might we disrupt the dominant logics of educational development?

2. Everything I learned about educational development, I learned from Australia, Hong Kong, and Sweden, Or, Why North American educational developers should attend to ideas from elsewhere.

3. Against educational development relativism, or Why teaching and learning centres should resist anything goes.

4. “It’s the relationships, stupid!”: Non-directive educational development

5. What’s your unit of analysis? Individuals, teams, units, institutions or systems

What do you think? Seen a great lightning talk in the past? Help me out and. Share a link to the talk or description in the comments.

Next step in my coaching training journey

As I’ve written before, I am pursuing an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) professional coaching credential from the International Coach Federation.

As part of my journey so far, I’ve completed 60 hours of coaching training with Essential Impact and I have been coaching some amazing, creative people in my spare time.

Thanks to my long commute, I’ve been devouring some tremendous books on leadership team coaching and coaching practice from the UK and Australia. I’m compiling highlights and will post soon. Watch my Pinterest board for highlights.

Here is what I know so far:
1. Coaching is one aspect of the service I offer clients in my day job. The area that I specialize in is leadership team coaching in educational and creative organizations.

2. Leadership team coaching complements the other two foci of my professional practice: service and learning design. I’ve come to recognize that many organizations not only need design service but also need to design learning and development interventions to implement new services.

Curious about coaching and my approach? Get in touch… david at davidrubeli.ca

Service design and organizational change

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I’m drawn to creative people and to organizations seeking to design systems and solutions, to implement them, and to effect change.

Through my work, I’ve become aware of the gaps between developing coherent strategy, a kernel, as Richard Rumelt suggests and the endless complexity of implementation. Without strong shared commitments, teams dissolve into coalitions, people reenact learned habits, and conversations turn prematurely to the IKEA-instruction sets of implementation.

Service Design: Insights from Nine Case Studies offers an interesting collection of service design project descriptions, methods and interviews surrounding a public transit service design initiative in Utrecht, Netherlands. A recurring theme in the collection is the challenge of achieving consensus and buy-in from stakeholder organizations, particularly in the early stages. Co-creation and visioning workshops were among the most successful ways of bringing people together and moving forward. Reading the project reports persuades me that leadership team coaching offers a powerful set of tools for facilitating collaboration amongst design firms, client organizations, people and users, and other stakeholders.

Planning demands that teams step out of time and context and park egos and agendas, at least momentarily, to envision shared futures.

As another example, Kronquist et. al describe the challenges of aligning all the factors to “go all the way” and implement service design innovation. To create an innovative pharmacy required significant commitments amongst the pharmacy brand, the individual pharmacy owner, and the employees and customers.

What are your insights about initiating successful service design collaborations?

Learning to maintain buildings

"building" by Narumi
“building” by Narumi

When things go wrong and I don’t know what to do next, my instinctive reaction is to scan the scholarly literature to see if I can find solutions or new angles to whatever challenge I am confronting. Two weeks ago, the owners of our strata corporation didn’t support a motion to take an incremental step towards a major maintenance project.

The anthropologist in me wants to consider the implications diversity on collective building maintenance projects. It turns out that this owners in multi-owner housing (e.g. condominiums, co-ops, strata corporations) in different parts of the world have different attitudes towards the need to do maintenance on common property. For example. Yau studies homeowners attitudes in Hong Kong.  Yau (2011) mentions two barriers  that Hong Kong owners cite as barrier for them participating in building care that resonate with my building’s situation:

difficulties in raising fund or collecting money was the most frequently mentioned barrier (71.4 per cent). This obstacle is followed by the lack of confidence of the homeowners in the building professionals and contractors engaging in the building management and maintenance exercise (64.2 per cent)

Many of my neighbours, regardless of where they are from, distrust the professionals that the strata corporation employs to offer professional service and expertise, and the most cited issue they raise is about proceeding with the project is how lower- or fixed-income owners will be able to obtain financing to cover the cost of the common maintenance. It will be hard work to address both these barriers, but it might lead to interesting conversations on different perspectives on trusting expertise.

In another 2011 study, Yau sets out conditions that are most likely to precipitate collective action and participation by owners in collective maintenance:

In general, collective action is likely to occur when members of the group are geographically close, have low turnover of membership, share a common interest and believe that they can succeed (Elster, 1978; Bicchieri, 1990; Chwe, 1999). By the same logic, if homeowners in MOH deem that their participation offers genuine opportunities to influence collective outcomes and make gains, they are more willing to participate in housing management affairs. As a result, collective action is more likely to occur. (p.5)

This passage inspires me to reframe the wicked problem my strata corporation is currently facing from the immediate challenge of how to advance a specific project to the broader issue of how my neighbours and I might co-create a shared vision for  our property  and working together to make that vision a reality in the future.

 

Kanban (or how to manage email in 2014)

I’ve been exploring Kanban over the winter as part of my efforts to take control of my workload.

Kanban originates with the Toyota Manufacturing Systems. It is based on two simple principles:

  1. Visualize the work.
  2. Limit the work in progress.

What I find most valuable about Kanban is that it demands that you clarify what your work is, how it flows (or doesn’t), who informs your efforts, and who your efforts serve.  It might be going too far to suggest that Kanban enables co-creation, but at least it escapes the dominant logic of individual psychology in its propositions for enabling work.

Check out the books and tools I’ve been playing with on on my Pinterest board:
Follow David’s board Kanban on Pinterest.

My own experiments with Kanban has been somewhat tentative to date, partially because I operate independently in my day job, and my tasks are not as standardized as those in software development or manufacturing, where Kanban is widely used.

10 Things I’ve Learned About Coaching in 10 Hours of Practice

I am currently pursuing an ICF ACC coaching credential. I have completed 60 hours of training with essential impact, and I am now in the process of accumulating my 100 practice hours. Get in touch with me if you would are interested in a conversation.

1. Notice when you are in a conversational cul-de-sac and bring it to the coachee’s attention.

2. Offer the coachee choices and let her decide which topics to address.

3. What are the limits of non-directive coaching? How can processes and exercises be woven into the coachee’s experience? My hunch is that the coachee must design the experiment himself.

4. Some coaches are obsessed with contracting and re-contracting. My approach is more organic. The contract is a touchstone to return to to assess progress rather that an absolute determiner of success or failure.

5. Flaherty is right when he talks about three levels of conversation:

Level 1: Single conversation to build or sharpen competence
Level 2: A more complex conversation over several sessions
Level 3. A profound and longer conversation intended to bring about fundamental change
(Flahrety, 2010, p. 116)

With most coachees so far, the conversations have been about practical day-to-day challenges rather than transformative challenges.

6. I’ve aligned myself with Essential Impact’s non-directive coaching approach, and I see clear resonances with Jenny Rogers’s perspectives on developmental coaching. I’m struggling to position myself within particular coaching theories, particularly those that align with psychology and neuroscience.

7. Coachees have consistently demonstrated creativity, determination, vulnerability, and resourcefulness.

8. Committing to a coachee demands that I set aside any squeamishness I have about emotions or about the conversation venturing in different aspects of the coachee’s lifeworld. We were taught to “coach the whole person” and, more often than not, the tensions or obstacles people are grappling with run like veins throughout one’s
experience.

9. People come to understand coaching by experiencing it first-hand. Most people leave expressing positive statements. It easier to demonstrate than it is to explain.

10. People want value from the coaching experience, and some struggle with setting a course for themselves. They may look to me for structure.

Coaching for pragmatism with emotions?

My coaching collaborators are helping me recognize that my bias as the coach is towards the pragmatic. My coachee may want to sit with his affective truth for a while and unearth cognitive roots: “I feel…because…” Usually I resist going into that pasture because I aim to keep the focus foward-looking.

Clearly there is a core tension around affect for me in coaching practice. I am not against emotions and affect — they interest me intellectually and coaching is helping me be more aware of them in myself. But I cringe when coaches lead with questions about feelings.

Thinking about this brings me back to Silvan Tomkins, who I read at UBC, and some remarkable passages in Shame and Her Sisters :

For me, talking with emotion and affect is one kind of interpersonal interaction in which I vary from many people.

If one ideal in coaching is mutual freedom of expression (Flahrety) than not only do I have an obligation to let the coachee explore affects and emotion if that is where a person wants to go, but I must invite coachees to intervene when I push too hard to the practical.

Escaping disciplinary tunnel vision

Don Norman and Scott Klemmer’s commentary State of Design: How Design Education Must Change challenges the design field to embrace theory and integrative educational approaches. It compliments the Carnegie Foundation’s recent report on the future of business education, which calls on business schools to integrate elements of liberal education into undergraduate business curricula.

These thinkers challenge their fields and disciplines to escape disciplinary tunnel vision and embrace marginalized  or new practices.

If integrative learning is the future of adult and higher education, not only must fields change, but also institutions, and higher education systems.

My hunch is that we need to find ways to move beyond binary thinking. Theory—Practice, Quantitative—Qualitative, Skills—Knowledge, Art—Science — Such spectra limit our ability to progress. So do linear metaphors like tunnels.

Can public sector services be ambidextrous like Apple?

Ian McCarthy posted a link to Ben Thompson’s interesting analysis What if Steve Ballmer Ran Apple?

As McCarthy points out strategic ambidexterity is a choice between short-term exploitation to maximize profit or longer-term exploration to create the future.

Strategy lessons in the technology sector can inform public-sector services. Organizations that aim to maximize and co-create value with clients and other stakeholders will have strong long-term prospects. The field of educational development, for example, wrestles with ambidexterity on a daily basis. Should one offer learning events that cut across an institution or should one dive deep into the situated mess of daily practices and look for ways to create value with communities in ways that matter most to people themselves over a longer time frame? These are wicked problems without easy answers, but, ultimately, I believe learning and development has better prospects if we situate ourselves with the clients we serve for the long haul.

12 books that can help you teach or plan better at a university or college

As the fall semester approaches here in North America, I wanted to share some of my favourite books on teaching and learning in higher education and course and program planning for anyone who is returning to campus in a few weeks.

Here are 12 or my favourite titles that I think could help you with your teaching or planning.

What is your favourite book on teaching and learning in higher education, or in business or management education?