In our MAPP class today we were fortunate enough to have Mark Templeton, O2s Director of Organisation Development, present to us on the positive psychology approach to leadership development that he has implemented with great success over the past year.

One thing that really intrigued me was the mention of David Whyte, a.k.a the “Corporate Poet”. I’m a huge fan of using creative approaches in the workplace, ever since I took the fantastic Open University Business School B822 course in Creative Management (now called Creativity, Innovation and Change).

So I followed this up, to see what David Whyte had to say about using poetry in a corporate setting:

“Every worthwhile organization is asking for qualities of adaptability, vitality and creativity. And none of these qualities can be legislated, none of them can be coerced out of people. You cannot invite anyone into your office and say I want a 9 percent increase in your creativity quotient this week. The request is absurd because there is no lever inside that person that they can pull to turn on their creativity. If there was one, they surely would have pulled it years ago.

The only thing you can do is to create a conversation in the workplace that will be invitational to those great qualities of creativity that have long been associated with the soul, with a person’s sense of belonging. The main task of leadership is no longer strategic management, though this will always have importance, but of creating imaginative and participative conversations that bring out the best in themselves and others“.

I couldn’t agree more – what Whyte says here fits exactly with positive psychology approaches to developing leadership and positive organisations.

Photo Credit: Cygnoir, San Francisco

100 ways to use visualisation and creative thinking to identify, explore and resolve business issues, presented in a brilliant Periodic Table format. This is a must for anyone looking for new ways to communicate visually – whether its data, concepts, strategy or metaphors that you want to illustrate.

This is a fantastic tool – if you hover your mouse over the Table, examples of each type of illustration pop up to show you how to use it in context.

You can use and/or adapt a fair number of these in Coaching too e.g the Story Template. I loved the Iceberg (so many businesses attend only to the bits they can see and hear, and ignore the more important bits which they can’t…), the Feedback Diagram (simple but effective) and Zwicky’s Morphological Box (brownie points for the jargon). The Failure Tree is the only one I could see that focuses exclusively on the downsides – not something we advocate if you want to win people over, although it’s a useful technique for analysing complex system problems.

And what about the Hype Cycle? I was considering its application to Coaching and Positive Psychology.WRT Coaching, I think we’ve survived the Trough of Disillusionment, and are travelling gently onwards and upwards through the Scope of Enlightenment to our destination which is the Plateau of
Productivity.

As for Positive Psychology, well in the UK at least, we’re still programming the Tom-Tom to get us to the Start of Media Infatuation. Put your seat-belts on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…

With thanks to Sarah ‘Intellagirl’ Robbins, on whose blog I discovered the Periodic Table, and of course to the guys who invented it, Ralph Lengler and Dr. Martin J. Eppler from visual-literacy.org.

Last night I went to an Open University Business School South Coast Alumni Network event – a presentation by Curly Martin , one of the UK’s leading life coaches. She was energetic, passionate and persuasive about the benefits of life coaching both for the client / coachee and for those in the audience who might be considering life coaching as a profession.

Prior to the session starting I got chatting to some of the other delegates about coaching in general, about the difference between directive and non-directive practice and about coaching principles, one of which is that the client / coachee already has all the resources they need themselves. Martyn Stainer, co-incidentally a Resource Group Manager at BAE Systems and I were considering what you do as a coach when you ask your client/coachee a question and they respond with ‘I don’t know’. How do you help them without giving them an answer on a plate?

Curly neatly addressed this issue during a concise and effective demonstration of life coaching with a volunteer from the audience. One of the questions Curly asked was, ‘And what action are you going to take?’ The answer came back, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, but I don’t know.Curly wasn’t fazed by this at all, she didn’t make a suggestion or give advice. What she then asked was, ‘Well, if you did know, what would it be?’  This is a very useful little NLP question, which works by getting the client/coachee out of an I-don’t-know-the-answer rut for a few seconds, which is often long enough for a creative solution to emerge.

Other ways of tackling the I-don’t-know-the-answer response are:

1. Ask your client / coachee to think of someone they know whose skills, abilities or qualities they admire. Once they have someone in mind, ask them what this person would do in their situation.

2. Disney Creativity Strategy (Robert Dilts)
This is another NLP technique which allows the client / coachee to look at an issue from different angles. It involves anchoring four spaces on the floor, one for ‘Realist’ one for the ‘Dreamer’, one for the ‘Critic’ and a Meta position. Have your client / coachee step between the Meta position and the first three, considering their issue from that point of view. This technique enables people to identify other courses of action (as well as other potential downsides!).

3. Cartesian Logic questions -  these are particularly useful when your client / coachee is stuck for an answer or is unsure about something. They help to test the boundaries of normal thinking, and loosen up limiting beliefs. You ask:

Q What would happen if you did XYZ?
Q What would happen if you didn’t?
Q What wouldn’tt happen if you did?
Q What wouldntt happen if you didntt?

The questions allow your client / coachee to consider something from all possible angles, and might enable them to see both possibilities and limitations that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

4. Even as a non-directive coach it is OK to make a suggestion as long as you ask the client / coachee’s permission to do so first. Even better if you create an anecdote (‘I know someone in a similar position and they found XYZ helpful’), thus leaving the client / coachee free to decide whether they take it on board or not.

Finally, it really is worth persevering with your questioning in order to help the client / coachee come to their own decision about what action they’ll take, because they are far more likely to be committed to it. Having said that, if you test the level of their commitment (using a simple scale of 1-10) and they’re not on 10, remember to ask, ‘And what would it take to get you up to 10?’.

After all, people are far more likely to take action that they have thought of, and that they are fully committed to.

I had a phone call Friday morning from Bill Saravinovski, the Mayor of Rockdale, New South Wales (situated on Botany Bay, 12km from Sydney, Australia). I first came across Bill following an interview of him on the BBC website about playing Barry Manilow songs in public to deter groups of youths from congregating and potentially causing trouble in the car-parks of Brighton-Le-Sands, a suburb of Sydney.

I’m not a great fan of Barry Manilow myself, so I can understand the attraction of this particular creative solution – I certainly would run a mile to avoid hearing a single rendition of the ‘Copacobana’ , let alone Manilow being blasted out at high volume non-stop for several hours.

When I came across a similar idea (using a high pitched whistle called a Mosquito, which only young people can hear) I tracked down Bill’s email address using the Rockdale City Council website and sent him the details.

Late last year I came across another idea, this time using pink lighting as a deterrent, so I sent that information to Bill too. Well, I thought, the young people who were gathering in the car parks of Brighton-Le-Sands might have been secret Manilow fans; playing his songs hour after hour might actually have made the night-time meetings even more popular than before… Bill replied that he’d put the idea of pink lighting to his colleagues at the council, and if they got approval, they’d try it out.

He rang me early Friday, saying that they were piloting the idea in Brighton-le-Sands – not only that, but he’d been inundated with media requests for interviews (see ‘Sydney creates a pink light district’,  ‘Pink light to beat crime‘ in the NSW Daily Telegraph) because of it…I was delighted he called and I’m delighted that the internet and email have allowed us to make this connection, and that in some small way I have been able to make a difference to someone on the other side of the world.

So if the spotlight wasn’t on Rockdale (or more specifically the car-parks of Brighton-le-Sands) before, it will be now. I can’t comment on the efficacy of Barry Manilow, Mosquito sonic devices or pink lighting over and above what I’ve read in the press, but I hope Bill solves the problem. I think it’s great that he’s prepared to be creative and try something on the off-chance it might work.

And the moral of the story is? When you’re looking for solutions, you might have to try a few things out before you find something that really works. Do a bit of research of course, assess the risks and prepare yourself for the flak you might get from other people (after all, you can never please all the people all the time). Whatever you do, don’t let this stand in your way. Persevere. And be bold!