Feed on
Posts
Comments

Spoze you’ve been experimenting with Test Driven Development (TDD), and spoze your experiments were a wild success.  Strange as it may seem, using TDD is making you go faster!

You sit up excitedly at the weekly staff meeting and you wax positively eloquent in making the case. TDD is brilliant, and it’s where everyone’s going, and you’ve been studying it and using it and so you’re a little ahead of the team but only a little and anyway the amazing thing is that it made me faster and it’s going to make us faster, too, and I’ll help and my mom will help us make the costumes  so let’s do it, okay? You pause for a breath, and you look around the room.

Tom Waits as Renfield

They’re Looking At You Funny

Your problem is that no one in that room wants your help.

Getting them to accept your help is the thin end of the wedge.

Straight up? Getting the thin end may be the easiest thing you’ll ever do or it may be the hardest. Every thin end I’ve seen has been somewhat different from all the others. By the way, getting the thin end is a problem for all coaches, not just for those that are coming from somewhere inside the team. Even outside coaching pros like me face the challenge with every new team.

You’re Gonna Need A Tale

Here’s the first mention ever of the single most important tool in the coaching toolbelt: what you need is a felicitous tale.

A felicitous tale is just what it sounds like, a story that fits the gap between where we are now and where you want us to go. (Yes, story might be a more natural word, but there are already 82 things in the coaching world called stories.)

We don’t have room for the whole enchilada on felicity or tales, so let me anticipate a lot of future exploration of the idea, and focus in on the specific tale that the thin end of the wedge requires.

Beginning, Middle, End

Like an ordinary tale, the thin-end tale has to have the basics, like a beginning, a middle and an end.

The beginning of the tale is how you connect it to the team’s current situation. Pro-tip: Do not base your story on a problem the team doesn’t cheerfully acknowledge.  If you add the challenge of persuading the team their status quo is a problem to the challenge of getting permission to help, you generally set back both efforts with one ill-chosen stone. Notice: starting with a problem is fine, but only if everyone at the table agrees it’s a problem.

The middle of the tale usually has three parts. The first is how you came to actually use the technique as a noob.  Be as creative and funny as you can be. Self-deprecate, as that signals that you’re more interested in the team’s adoption than you are in being crowned king of the cubies.  The second part of the middle is the how it worked. Careful: All coaching noobs over-emphasize the second part, on the rather youthful theory that people are rational about their choices, and will climb aboard as soon as they know that it works.  The third part of the middle is about how the experience made you feel. This part never varies: you felt happy and somewhat foolish.

The end is all about what we’re going to do.  You want to show a real path forward, and you want to tailor it well to the team’s current mindset and environment. This is the part noobs think is the real coaching. The key for your ending is to make the next step as small and soothing as it can be while still showing a team they will have a net gain in pleasure. Important: you are not your team, so make sure they get the pleasure, not you or anyone else. Failure to consider the specific pleasure of the specific team in front of you is far and away the most common mistake.

Other Stuff About Tales…

…is gonna have to wait.  Here are some pending topics we need to cover:

  • Manipulation:  Is this that?
  • Samples: Show us some of these, yo?
  • Timing: What’s the right time to get the thin end in?
  • Felicity: You totally sidestepped that term.  What does it mean?
  • Groups: Can you do this only in groups, or do you do it solo, too?

Read the article to know why the online driving is so popular and you will get an idea on the same and order tadalafil then move on to the next food. Finally it enlarges the viagra without prescription online veins in the penis and make it hard and erect for proper penetration. You can buy levitra learningworksca.org group its types generally or according to duration. With these little blue pills, men can reduce the effect of the medicine commander cialis on the body.
And there’s probably even more things we have to talk about.

Please comment on this one.

Agree, disagree, or query.  I need your input to know where to go next.



10 Responses to “Coaching: The Thin End Of The Wedge”

  1. Wow! I feel such a noob!!

    Thanks for sharing this! You just gave me a VIP back stage pass to a magician show. So tales are the trick? I noticed how coaches use tales or metaphors to explain concepts but until now I did not put 2 and 2 together.

    I am really curious about what you have to say about manipulation but I am even more curious about how I can start practicing this art? Could you come up with a couple of situations where we have to tell you a tale? Would you be willing to give us advice and suggestion to get better at it?

    • GeePawHill says:

      William Calvin, the neurologist, once said we shouldn’t be called homo sapiens ‘cuz we’re not wise. We should be called homo seriatim because of our sequentiality. There’s a lot of evidence, and even some theory, out there that says, no matter what sensory modality new knowledge comes in, folks do better with tales.

      I like the talespinning challenges idea. I shall mull.

  2. John Stoneham says:

    Dude. This is becoming the coaching blog I always wanted to read. Rule. I’m quite enjoying recognizing myself in all the mistakes you point out.

    The bit about expecting people to be rational about their choices is kind of the kicker for me. Because of course, in addition to expecting people to be rational about their choices, I’m expecting them to make rational choices according to MY assumptions, MY experiences, and the things I’VE learned to prefer or avoid. Startlingly enough, they aren’t starting from the same place I am.

    Do you subscribe to the theory of the opportune moment, as put forth by Captain Jack Sparrow? (Really, I’ve got ‘teachable moment’s in mind.)

    • GeePawHill says:

      Hah! the opportune moment is key — though I often worry most about finding the *inopportune* moment, for which I apparently have a natural gift of some magnitude. As for recognizing yourself, dig it. We’re all in there.
      I genuinely believe the biggest problem most noobie coaches make is their over-reliance on rationality.

  3. fqqdk says:

    ooooh, fun!
    this may come in handy in situations where i’m not a coach, but people are just plain ignorant around me, and should be “coached” as in “subtly taught new things because their old habits are plain stupid”.

    • Anonymous says:

      Oddly enough, I’m not nearly so successful outside the field of geekery. I still spin tales, but I think when I’m coaching part of me has already been ‘accepted’ as a potential helper.

  4. All these coaching secrets in one post. Thanks for sharing!

    This happened to me the other day when I was giving a short presentation/talk where I tried to inspire to take action in ones own life. If you are not in balance in your life (at least at work) how can we expect the project to be in balance. At this point people where wondering why I did not talk about testing and why they should do it… So considering this I walked in to my own trap you could say. I tend talk too much about my own ideas and push them on people based on my experiences.

    Your blog post inspires to go even deeper to find the tale that the team is interested in and not just my own interests.. I still think they enjoyed the talk, but it was different 🙂

    • Anonymous says:

      Part of my tales is usually joy. Early and often, I make it clear that this is gonna be fun, in the sense of reconnecting the team to their original geek joy. That’s not the world’s easiest promise to keep, but I try. Sometimes I get a group that’s ready to talk ‘balance’, but not often.

      Focusing your attention on what *they’re* unhappy about does a lot towards getting permission to help.

  5. xpmatteo says:

    Please keep blogging on this topic! If I may express a preference, I’d like to read some of your samples. 🙂