Do you know the possibly apocryphal story about the artillery field gun?

For over 100 years, and through many technological upgrades and Army reorganisations, a crew of four gunners always served this type of gun.

Until one day when someone asked two questions. “What do these four gunners actually do? Why do we need four of them?”

Ummm, good questions. The answer is now three, operation is slicker and manpower costs are less.

As I say, possibly apocryphal. But it does highlight the issue of responsible ownership of organisational capabilities.

So, think here about teams. Who owns them? Who commissions them? How are they resourced? Who gives them their purpose? How are they developed?

When were these questions last considered? What has changed since then? What are the answers now? When is a good time to ask them again?

Sometimes teams are like dogs. Their best service is given to responsible organisational owners.

So, before you even think about individuals, relationships, processes, team building etc.. have a think about how responsible an owner you are, and how clear and relevant your commissioning has been.

Dave Stewart
The Fresh Air Learning Company

How much thinking goes into the selection and use of team development approaches and tools where you work? Who does this thinking, choosing, using, and evaluating?

In various leadership roles over a couple of decades I have been a buyer of external consulting and development support. I now run a company with an expertise around team development. And so I have been on both sides of the thinking, choosing, using, evaluation engagement.

The phrase “both sides” is telling, isn’t it?

As a buyer, how many times have you specified with great confidence that you want a bit of MBTI, some Belbin, and an away day that focuses on subject X? You are the leader-buyer, and you know what the organisation or team needs. Right?

Can you remember how you grew into a different kind of leader-buyer? One that became more comfortable about not knowing the solution? One that became more comfortable with sensing and shaping rather than specifying? One whose role was to create the conditions for success rather than deliver the detail?

Can you remember letting go of being a bricklayer and becoming an architect? Can you remember when the thinking, choosing, using and evaluating engagement became a dialogue with trusted professional partners?

In our work we get to see the many versions of the buyers we used to be.

What kind of leader-buyer are you becoming?

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

Trawling through LinkedIn the other day I was struck by how many former military officers claim to be experts in team-work, team building, team development and the like.

Maybe they are. I don’t know. I wonder if they really know.

It got me thinking about the claims we all make about professional expertise. A question arose, “What is the source of our knowing?”

Experience is one such source, but how do we make future-worthy sense of this? What models, benchmarks, filters and biases are in play? How widely is the story of our expertise shared by others, or is it one we created solely by ourselves?

Did the story actually unfold as we tell it now? How much is freshly constructed, changed in scope, with players and events modified or missing, and divorced from the richness of the original context?

What wisdom from our stories do we apply successfully to new challenges? How does the story continue to evolve?

I am a huge fan of experiential learning. I run a business that draws on this approach. Experience without reflective learning is not, in my view, enough to make professional claims of expertise.

So, maybe there are some other important questions. “Am I aware of how I learn? Where do I place my attention? What am I unaware of? How would it be if I could develop a critical awareness of how I make sense of the world and the things that happen? How might I explore and integrate new ways of learning? How much richer would my knowing, and claims to expertise be?

So, lets check in honestly with ourselves and consider our capacity for critique, the fitness of our critical faculties. We can get some way on our own for sure. Real transformation, insight and expertise – in my experience – however come from dialogue with fearless friends and colleagues, and the challenge and support of coaches and mentors.

“I did something in a former career, and it worked really well” may be good enough for a keynote address on a limited run. It isn’t enough to make a claim to professional expertise.

Harsh? Fair? Somewhere in between? What do you think?

Dave Stewart
The Fresh Air Learning Company

Remember the joke about the apprentice lumberjack?

He could only clock up nine trees a day compared to a performance target of ten. And so his foreman decided to give him some coaching on technique. He grabbed the power-saw and fired it up.

A startled apprentice jumped back and exclaimed, “I wondered what that button was for!”

Do you notice a similar situation in the teams where you work?

How much toil, sweat and underperformance in going on? How much untapped potential is sitting there waiting for someone to fire these teams up?

What does the firing-up process look, sound and feel like? What do leaders believe about the power of teams where you work?

How do they approach the commissioning and missioning process; how do they optimise trust, challenge, commitment, and accountability; how do they nurture engagement and dialogue with stakeholders; how do they encourage effective learning and reflection? What tools do they use?

And how do they decide when the team’s purpose has been fulfilled? How do they decide when to power-down and switch it off?

How many well-meaning apprentices are struggling with teams in your neck of the woods? What are you going to do about this?

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

Climbing the highest mountain in each of the seven continents – the “Seven Summits” – has become something of a bucket-list adventure for those with the inclination, time and money.

Gavin Bate, a highly accomplished expedition leader and mountain guide, gave a talk on the subject at the Adventure Travel Show in Olympia, London, 26 Jan 14.

Gavin has done a whole load more than “just” the Seven Summits. He has climbed Everest six times, for example. And he runs Adventure Alternative – a company that is seen as an ethical leader in the adventure industry.

The closing slide of his talk was of the view from the summit of Mount Vinson, the highest mountain in Antarctica. The sky was blue and the cold white-scape stretched out to a distant horizon.

“Every time I rest a moment and notice how my body is connected to all that surrounds me; and every time I look out over vistas such as this, I fall in love again.”

For him there is nothing cynical or indulgent about the Seven Summits. The physical and mental effort, the weeks and months spent engaging with the wild outdoors and with their fellow man, and the huge personal learning journeys involved make an endeavour such as this a deeply human one.

One that super-charges the connection between head, heart, body and soul; and opens up the relationships between people and Nature.

Short of investing in a Seven Summits attempt, how do your bring your full self to the people and projects in your life?

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

The coaching industry worldwide is a big one, with big budgets. And most of these are spent on individuals.

There seems to be an assumption that developing leaders using an individually focussed approach contributes to great leadership. It’s a small hop from there to assume this investment will create great teams and leading organisations.

Is this a logic train you recognise where you work?

Sure, individual coaching is a powerful tool and should continue to attract investment.  And yet, leadership is evidently a relational activity that involves other people and some form of endeavour.

In an ever connected and complex world why is it that so few organisations invest in the stuff that happens ‘between the noses’?

Could it be because some coaching spend comes out of executives’ personal budgets? “I need to spend on me to survive around here.”

Could it be that effective teams are high maintenance and messy places? Does it take too much courage to spend money here? Is it ignorance? How many executives know what an effective team is? Is it a numbed acceptance? That this is as good as it gets?

As Peter Hawkins (2011) puts it, “The major leadership challenges lie not in the parts but in the interconnections.”

Will you spend more between the noses?

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

Are leaders more important than managers? Nature or nurture? Right or wrong? This one or that one? Good or bad?

Organisational conversations and LinkedIn discussion group topics seem to be increasingly littered with this binary nonsense.

It gives me a splitting headache.

Take the leaders versus managers question.

How about they are both important? How about they are blended roles not different individuals? That individuals are both leaders shaping and energising towards future possibility, and managers implementing stuff right now?

Binary questions may have their place in limited, urgent, over-whelming operational scenarios. “Right here, right now, in this pressing moment, do I choose A or B?”

Psychodynamics people will tell you that “splitting” is innate and allows the underdeveloped personality to simplify complexity by labelling some things “good” and others “bad”.

With development comes a world-view and capacity to create and handle paradox, possibility, off-the-wall ideas, inclusion and connectedness. Maturity. Wisdom. As individuals, teams, organisations.

So, what do you notice about the kinds of questions you ask? In what circumstances? And what kinds of answers can you handle? What of the people in your world?

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

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Ever had that feeling when talking to someone that you are somehow missing one another?

The language and culture are the same. The words are recognisable. Yet nothing makes sense.  You listen ever more closely.

“Just where is this other person coming from?” you think to yourself.

This was brought home to me when working on the design of an evaluation for a programme. To cut a long story short I felt that the context we were working in was a complex one, where “good” could best be described in words rather than numbers; words in the form of stories the sponsor would like to hear participants, the wider organisation, customers etc. tell. Mood music stuff. Pretty subjective.

The person I was discussing this thought I was being a bit fluffy. He was clear about how simple it was. The intervention would take place and this would map pretty directly to a measurable effect. A number. Good could be described by a number.

“I don’t see vaat de problem is. Simplzz!” he said, mimicking the TV meerkats.

So there we were: me drawing on complexity theory to make my sense of the context, and using aural and kinaesthetic language – “hearing”, “feeling”, “mood music”; and he expressing a world-view of predictable cause and effect, and using visual language – “clear”, “map”, “direct”.

Different world-views. Different languages. Potentially different action.

Now that we have recognised this we are having a richer more learning’ful engagement. Making sense together. Dialogue.

Have you spoken to anyone from another world recently? How did it go? How is your engagement unfolding now?

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

Last week I wrote about how two actors brought life to a mock board exercise that was part of a non-executive recruiting process. They went out of themselves to inhabit fictitious board characters. Their role-play was awesome.

This week I supported an experiential learning exercise for a group of executives. We were using the Barry Oshry (1995) power framework of Tops, Middles, Bottoms and Customers – roles we all inhabit every day – to help the executives examine a real work issue from multiple, connected perspectives.

The executives were divided up. The Tops had a plush boardroom, the Middles had a busy open plan meeting space, and the Bottoms had a room that was soul-less, lacked enough chairs, and was freezing cold.  The Customers had a warm, well-appointed, magazine- and coffee-full waiting room.

Everyone was invited to adopt the relevant power perspective, and to rotate around the different environments on a timetable. A number of scripted events connected some of the groups during the exercise.

Almost everyone went into role-play. They adopted different levels of over-the-top-ness in their mannerisms, tones of voice, energy etc. It was as if they went “out” of themselves to inhabit fictitious external characters. Just like actors.

Yes, there was some value to this. However the invitation, and the real power of the exercise was to inhabit their real selves; to go “in” and be the people they are when they are – every day – Tops, Middles, Bottoms and Customers; to draw on the knowing they already possess; the knowing they somehow lose sight of and don’t use in the bustle of business life.

The seemingly natural reaction to go “external”, to talk about the “its” and “them” is part of a narrative we commonly hear in organisational life. It is as if many of us forget to bring ourselves fully to work.

We seem to be at our most comfortable holding stuff at a distance; and we seem to be at our least comfortable and competent when we explore – together – personal issues such as trust, compassion and challenge.

The Oshry exercise was part of a journey to develop and integrate self-awareness, relational maturity, and contextual sense making; to create the conditions for collective connected thinking, dialogue and impactful action.

It is tough going for those involved but the self-discovery and business outcomes are stellar.

Dave Stewart

The Fresh Air Learning Company

I was recently part of a non-executive directors selection process. One element involved my chairing of a mock board. My board colleagues were two professional actors and seven candidate non-executives.

Of course, everyone was acting to some extent, and there were competitive pressures underlying an otherwise collegiate exercise.

Let me focus on the two professionals.

They had no real grasp of “content” beyond the short written brief they had been given and a short conversation with the real directors – now sitting in critical audience of the mock board.

But gosh they were awesome!

They modelled a presence that was respectful and listening-ful, and they used questions in a way that invited exploration and reflection and created the conditions for fresh insight.

They helped the board to think together.

They played as a team, not just between each other tag-style, but also with their “colleagues”. They handed off to one another, building on each other’s contributions, yet never colluding with a position that seemed soap-boxy and untested. They weaved artfully between advocacy and inquiry – sometimes leading, sometimes opposing, sometimes building, sometime inviting pause for reflection.

Never broadcasting, never withdrawing. Always fully and powerfully engaged.

Bravo, encore!

Dave Stewart
The Fresh Air Learning Company