More detail on each of the lessons

Dialogue and generativity

This lesson explores the nature of dialogic interaction - the process through which joint meaning emerges, collaboration is at its best, and adaptation is most vibrant.

We will look at how patterns unfold between us and others - leading to more or less accountability, more or less adult-adult (or parent-child) dynamics, leading to safe, resilient cultures (or conversely, cultures dominated by wilful blindness and failure to speak up.

With practical processes to enable you to develop your skills and exercises to extend your self awareness and confidence.

The gift of skilful listening

We live in a constantly changing web of interactions and connections with others, and with both human and non-human factors and experiences that force us into adaptations, innovations and work-arounds.  Some of these are welcome and exciting, others challenging.

When troubled - especially when we feel highly anxious or "under attack" - the choice to "lean" TOWARDS the source of irritation is a tough one - and yet, at the heart of sustainable and safe leadership, is the skill of listening with deep attention to what IS, rather than what we would "like" it to be.

This comprehensive lesson takes you on a journey from the most taken-for-granted levels of listening, through to the sophisticated capacity to adapt based on our engagement with others and the wider world, and with the joys and stressors of our lives.  With exercises you can carry out yourself, or invite others to join you with, it will help you develop your craft of deep listening.

The art of the question

​This lesson explores the range and nature of great questions - which promote learning with accountability, and support productive team or individual adaptation.

It will help you understand the different types of questions, their purposes and impacts.

It offers you a compendium of useful coaching, leadership and facilitation questions to help you develop your "art".

Mastering a broad range of interventions

When we are coaching - in any context - we are using a broad range of "moves" within a conversation.

At our worst, we are simply suiting ourselves and our comfortable practices - at our BEST we are constantly adjusting and noticing what is needed to support the progression of the other, the learner.

This lesson explores how we come to make those judgements, and offers a model of a broad range of different "push" and "pull" interventions a coach, leader, facilitator can use, to assist in the development process.  It also enables you to self-assess against this model, and request feedback from others.

Challenge and support and 'drama triangle'

One of the ways that groups demonstrate trust to each other, is the degree to which they enable and allow each other to offer and receive support and challenge.

• Support lifts us up - our confidence and capabilities are built and acknowledged and our contribution is enhanced.
• Challenge exposes our development opportunities - it catches us BEFORE we fall, by others spotting and generously sharing gaps in our thinking, it holds the mirror up to how we are blocking our own progress, or feeding our own pains.

But without trust, it can become distorted and dysfunctional - and this is where the 'drama triangle' of rescuing (instead of supporting) and persecuting (instead of challenging) takes over, reducing others (and ourselves) into a victim-like state which is turned either on ourselves ("I am hopeless and can't do anything about this") or on others ("this is nothing to do with me, it is his/her fault and they must change").  No learning or change comes from this dysfunction, whatever the intention behind it.

Rooting-around, trying to find the FAULT and CAUSE of this dynamic is pointless and helps no-one, no matter how tempting it might be.  This is because the very act of trying to allocate blame lifts us out of a deeper inquiry into how we are contributing to MAINTAINING the dynamic, even at a cost to ourselves.  It is only through asking ourselves about our own contribution that we can step into adult responsibility for making new and different 'gestures' into the dynamic.

This lesson explores the best and worst practices of these dynamics, giving you a language to understand what might be happening.  ALL groups fall into this dysfunction some of the time (families, clubs, communities, teams and organisations) - but you don't have to stay there.  If there is sufficient will and courage to experiment, new habits can be formed.

Difficult conversations and feedback

Most of us are conflict-averse.  When we face the prospect of offering a challenging point of view, holding the mirror up to problematic behaviour, or confronting people with the consequences of their choices, we risk all sorts of fractures to our ongoing relationships, peace of mind, and own comfort zone.

In their book Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project, tell us "Delivering a difficult message is like throwing a hand grenade.  Coated with sugar, thrown hard or soft, a hand grenade is still going to do damage.  Try as you may, there’s no way to throw a hand grenade with tact or to outrun the consequences.  And keeping it to yourself is no better.  Choosing not to deliver a difficult message is like hanging on to a hand grenade once you’ve pulled the pin."

This lesson offers an overview about confrontation, challenge and difficult conversations, with a model to improve the quality and sensitivity (and ultimately, positive potential) of your feedback processes.  It also offers a downloadable preparation tool, to guide you through your own thinking.

Coaching conversations using the 'iceberg' model

When we are working with someone to help them explore their choices, behaviours and ways of working (both with positive and negative consequences for themselves and others) we need to understand that ALL behaviours are, at some level, useful strategies responding to a need for that person.

By approaching these conversations with compassion, respect and curiosity, we can help the person to let go of defensiveness and take up a 'growth mindset' relationship with their choices.  This involves a deeper inquiry than merely attempting to impose new behaviours.  

This lesson utilises the idea of the psychological 'iceberg' as a model to underpin a coaching conversational 'journey' that you can enable with others (or use to underpin workshop design with a group, or to self-coach), that enables people to think again about the assumptions and theories-in-use that might be holding them back.

Working positively with resistance, ambivalence, grief and anxiety

When confronted with a changing world - either because change is introduced deliberately, or because we are facing other external, potentially existential threats, dangers and losses forcing unwelcome adaptation, we have at best a legitimately ambivalent response, and will often be distressed, hostile or anxious. 

Empathetic, compassionate and deeply humane cultures have been shown again and again, to be more adaptive and resilient than those founded on self-interest or imposition of rational solutions without the human touch.

This lesson explores a number of different ways we can experience these things, often labelled "resistance" – including:

• Resistance and denial, grief, shock, anger and loss.
• Resistance and ambivalence set up by competing drivers and commitments – in effect two opposing "right" assumptions which block movement and change.
• Resistance as wisdom – generative and legitimate information which, if engaged with, improves what we are trying to do.

Whether you are a leader, a coach or a facilitator/consultant - this invaluable understanding helps you to develop approaches that are rich with empathy, yet challenging in all the right ways - bringing the wisdom within the resistance to light, and resulting in mutual learning, growth and adaptation.