Transcript
Edited for readability. Recorded in 2020; figures are as spoken at the time.
Introduction
The talk I will be giving is fundamentally about asking whether coaching can become an integral part of society — and asking ourselves whether we can bring about deep change at scale.
You will find both of these questions answered through examples from the work presented here. It also throws up ideas for how coaching might look different in the newly defined VUCA world.
The imperative for deep change at scale in this age
Let me start with my first proposition for the day: VUCA, and all the disruption we are talking about, means there is an incredible opportunity to help people across many different areas. Here are some examples — very concrete, very defined examples.
Bankers. In India there are hundreds of banks. They are going through automation; they have ATMs, they have mobile apps. Bankers’ traditional roles are being completely disrupted, and as they are disrupted, they are being asked to take on completely new roles. They are being told: you are not supposed to be delivering banking processes anymore; you have to go out there, counsel your customers, and help them solve financial problems. They don’t know how to do it. And in numbers, we are talking about more than a million bankers.
School children. They are entering a world completely different from what their textbooks teach them. Their teachers come from an older world, locked into an older mode of thinking. These young people come out and are expected to adapt through traditional ways of learning and thinking. They don’t attend conferences like the one we are attending. They need radically new ways of thinking about themselves and the world around them. How are we going to help them? There is both an opportunity and a need.
Graduates. In India, something like 5.5 to 6 million graduates come out every year. Six million people. They are not trained to deal with the world. They are not trained to deal with disruption, or with the kind of adaptiveness you read about in the Deloitte and World Economic Forum reports. But they are going to walk into that world, and they are expected to perform and to build their lives. They need completely new notions of career, and new notions of how they will navigate their lives. They need help — and the help is sitting in this room.
Gig workers. Let’s go down the pyramid. You have all these fancy apps now — in India, food delivery apps of various kinds. People call it the “servant economy”; they are called gig workers — whatever nice name you give them. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people literally going out there delivering pizzas and food to homes. They are looking at dead-end jobs, yet they want their lives to be as meaningful as each one of us does. They need help.
So how are we going to help them? That is really the context of this conversation.
Limits of current methods & delivery models
It is not easy to bring about change through coaching at scale, because there are many barriers facing us. Let me very quickly walk you through three or four of them.
First, institutions don’t recognise the need. They don’t recognise that their people need this kind of support, and they don’t have an answer in their minds about how to help them. They think training is the answer — but training is only part of the answer; it can’t be the whole answer. With so many large clients we work with, the go-to response is: “We’ll set up a training programme and run it.” But that is not going to help people cope with completely new roles and completely new ways of working.
Second, scale versus context. People say you have to understand the customer, understand the client very deeply. But you are going to do it with thousands of people. How do you combine scale with the fact that, as you scale, context may be lost at the individual level? You need to reconcile the context you build with a client with the need to scale. That is a challenge.
Third, professional orientation. Even if you are building capability inside organisations — take teachers. Teachers teach; they don’t coach. Most of them. The few teachers who coach are remembered by their students all their lives. Most teachers convey information. They convey rules and discipline; they convey expectations and expect performance against those rules and expectations. They deliver skills, concepts, information, knowledge. They don’t help people grow — not many of them. So professional orientation itself is a problem. How do you get them to start thinking differently?
Fourth, sustained support. People need sustained support in order to change — all of us know it. How do you provide that on a scalable basis?
These are some of the challenges we face when we say we want to scale coaching across large numbers. So is there an answer?
Introducing Knowledge Interventions
Here is an answer we’ve built, and I’m sharing it with you along with some of the learnings — there may be many more new ideas that come out of it.
What we are saying is that it is possible to do something we call knowledge interventions. This is a way of building that new kind of thinking for a VUCA world. And these, by the way, are not just examples; they are actual situations we have worked on:
- building new kinds of thinking in large corporations — public sector, financial services, software, retail;
- helping nurses and police cope with stress;
- building cognitive resistance in youth, who face peer pressure of every kind;
- building self-esteem in petrol pump attendants and others who are, in a way, the underbelly of society.
How do you help all of them go through conscious, self-directed change? How can you trigger it on a scalable basis? That is really the challenge of knowledge interventions. If you can trigger conscious, self-directed change in people, get them moving on a journey of change, and support them along it, then you have a way of engaging with this incredible need and this incredible opportunity.
That is what I’ll talk about, with three examples from three different contexts, and a few learnings around them.
Case examples
1. Schools: teachers as coaches
Let’s take the first context — an intervention we are doing in schools. Let me first give you the big numbers, to show the scale at which this can operate.
It is a three-year learning-coaching programme: 16 sessions a year, three years in a row, in Standards 7, 8 and 9. It is given free of cost — done pro bono — and implemented with implementation partners. Every year, 600,000 students go through it. Every Kendriya Vidyalaya — every central school in India — gets it; it is now part of the CBSE syllabus. And there are 17,000 teachers struggling to become coaches with it. We are trying to build an ecosystem that supports them in becoming coaches, giving them a whole programme to do it.
How do you do it? That is where there are some very interesting learnings.
First, while the school teacher has to be the coach, we have to integrate training and coaching. Coaching does not work alone. We need to give students new discovery models of learning that allow them to deepen their vision of self over time — over three years, they systematically learn to deepen their vision of self. On the other side, we need them to grow in their responses: you give them hundreds of situations and examples, and teach them how to work together to solve all kinds of life problems, so they build that confidence — a theme we call “I can” — which emerges in them, and you keep building it.
What is interesting is that when you pilot it, test it and build it, you can scale it — at these levels. And when you do it at this level, you get responses we have not seen before.
This is one example of what can be done when you are trying to deliver coaching at scale. These school teachers are being supported in coaching — but they need a lot more support to coach even better.
2. Petrol pump attendants: building self-esteem in the less visible
Here is another, very interesting, example. I’ve used the phrase “building self-esteem in the less visible.” Why that phrase?
We did an ethnographic study of people working at petrol pumps — gas stations — in India. We asked them to draw a picture of the petrol pump. 85 to 90% of them, without fail, drew beautiful infrastructure of the pump. But they did not draw themselves.
In short, they believed they were irrelevant. They believed they didn’t matter at all — that they were simply resource units who could be replaced one after another. What do you think is happening to a human being who goes out every day believing that he or she counts for nothing?
The company — a Fortune 500 company — was running customer service programmes for these people and asking them to smile. You are expecting a petrol pump attendant, standing in petrol fumes, with no sense of self, to go out there and serve customers — with a smile. What are we talking about? And these people have no future beyond that.
So if you want to help them, you need to do many things.
First, you need to convince the business leaders: stop thinking in terms of productivity. Start thinking in terms of being. Start thinking in terms of empowerment — and not empowerment from outside, not someone giving you power. Most people mistake empowerment for power being given to you. Empowerment actually means being empowered from within. If they have a new sense of empowerment, you are going to pull it off.
Then you give them a structured coaching engagement. Notice that there are three components.
Deep learning. By deep learning we don’t mean the deep learning associated with AI; we mean the deep learning associated with human beings. What kind of deep learning? The petrol pump attendant, for example, has an identity built around class — around his or her status in the social hierarchy. They believe that in that pyramid called the social hierarchy, they are at the bottom. What if we transform their identity and help them look at themselves slightly differently? Can we help them discover new ways of framing themselves — of framing their whole idea of who they are? Can you build identities around strength? Identities built around your ability to contribute? Identities that are enriching to yourself? If you can create those identities, get them to discover them, and show them that they are already making progress —
Converting the “big person” into a coach. — and then if you can convert the big person in their little social system. That big person is the sales officer who comes from the company. Across the network, 25 or 50 petrol pumps report to one sales officer, so the sales officer is the big guy from the company who visits. Can that person be your coach and actually empower you — pay attention to you, work together with you? That is what we did. We converted these sales officers into coaches. We said: you are the people who are going to coach them when you visit. You are not going to sit only with the rich dealer at the petrol pump, talking about how much sales you made. You are going to spend a few hours, or a day, working with the people there, helping them think about themselves differently. If you can do that, you’re onto something else.
Career pathways. Then you add a third element. Why should people have to live in dead-end jobs in a growing economy? Why can’t they look at career pathways? In a country like India there are as many — even five times as many — people standing outside as there are inside, so you will always get new people; help the existing ones move on. That is what we convinced the company to do. The idea is now institutionalised there, because they realised they have highly motivated people for the three, four or five years they are there — people who believe there is a growth path for them, who don’t see themselves in dead-end jobs, and who see that they are being empowered.
You can then add incentive structures and so on, as the topping on the cake. But that is not what drives it. What drives it is a completely different vision of the person.
This kind of thinking is what coaching really has to offer organisations. It can challenge their traditional notion that structures, incentives and punishments are the only framework within which they operate, and let them look at each stakeholder group in the organisation in a totally different way.
3. State Bank of India: from bankers to citizens
Let me give you one more example, to illustrate this in a slightly different way: our work with India’s largest bank, State Bank of India, which had 200,000 people at the time we worked with it.
Over 18 months we ran four interventions with them. What did we coach them on? What did they learn, or discover, about themselves? They discovered that they are not just bankers but citizens — first and foremost citizens.
That means coaching is also about discovering deeper identities. It is about discovering that your identity need not be limited to role identities — “I’m a banker,” “I’m a manager,” “I’m the chief executive of a company.” I am a citizen of a country. I am a contributor to the nation. I am someone who can make a difference to people. Coaching has the ability to help people dive deeper into themselves and widen the vision of their identity.
But imagine doing that at scale. You have to find ways of helping people discover, and you have to build tools — which we did. We had 1,000 State Bank officers working as coaches. Even after our work ended, 30 to 40% of them stay in touch with us, because they say it was one of the most fulfilling periods of their working careers. Many have taken up careers as coaches and done certification programmes after retiring from the bank, simply because they found working with people far more exciting than working with money.
And when you do this kind of thing, this is the kind of response the chairman of the bank talks about. He says: “I can see a new kind of energy in people, a new kind of willingness.” Where does it come from? It comes from helping people widen their notions of identity — which you can’t do unless you build structures and enabling models that support their discovery of these new ways, and do it in a collective context, working together. When you do that, all the other business changes follow.
So I also have a proposition: deep coaching — real coaching — can create the conditions for order-of-magnitude improvements in performance in organisations. It can help organisations do things they never imagined they could do — provided we see coaching not as an individual process alone, but as a process of collective change: a process of helping a large group of people rethink their notions of self and identity, who they are, and how they work together. When you start challenging those, you start making big differences. This is really the kind of world we can enter.
The shared possibility: going forward
And this is the possibility I believe we are really starting to see.
When we see coaching as an individual process, we get one kind of result. When we see coaching as a team process, we get the next kind of result. But when we see coaching as a collective process of change — when we see it as an enabler, and not as coaching versus learning, or coaching versus any other form of human change, but as one more powerful tool for human change — then something else becomes possible.
Really speaking, all of us are in the human evolution business. We are not in the coaching business. We are in the business of helping human beings evolve and become more than who they are.
And if that is our core business, every tool in the toolbox is open to us. We can use and assemble every tool and create new answers. That means, as coaches, we are not only coaching — we are also architects. We can architect completely new learning for people, and new journeys for people.
That is the possibility for coaching — and that is the real possibility for coaching at scale.