Creating a Coachable Moment for Change

To change our minds, humans need a fleeting moment when solid ground gives way.  The Sufi poet, Rumi, wrote about birds learning to fly, “How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.”  

Florence Nightingale invented the pie chart for just this purpose. That innovation was created as a way to shock a resistant bureaucracy into making changes that eventually saved millions of lives. Nightingale’s method is just one method leaders can use to create a ‘coachable moment’ to kick-start change.

It was early winter of 1854. Florence Nightingale and 38 nurses arrived at a British Crimean War field-hospital near modern-day Istanbul. The horrific conditions - diseased soldiers lying in filth, lack of decent food, and an exhausted staff - had deteriorated to a point where 42.7% of patients died. Nightingale ordered changes that reduced the hospital’s death rate to only 2%. But Nightingale knew that this hospital’s situation was not unique. 

A leader’s job is to perceive better possibilities and then to coach people to perform at a higher level.  Leaders want to spur team improvements. Marketing want to lead buyers to the possibilities new products can realize. Nightingale needed British authorities to reform hospital conditions. Complacent authorities accepted huge numbers of inevitable war deaths. However, Nightingale’s experience taught her that soldiers needlessly suffered due to lack of sanitation, not wounds. 

The biggest barrier to coaching is the learner’s attitude. Most of the time, we aren’t open to new perspectives. We may be satisfied with the way things are. We may assume we know what to do.  We may just be too busy to try something new.  Military officials rejected Nightingale’s ridiculous ideas about the causes of war deaths. She was only a nurse. Her preposterous proposals attacked their professionalism.

Coaching is an act that essentially causes a person or a group to “fail with support”.  To stretch our brains and open our eyes to that which we cannot yet see, we need a kick that gets us out beyond our comfort zone. 

A ‘coachable moment’ occurs when we suddenly realize that current reality isn’t working.  In the midst of a ‘coachable moment’ we realize we need serious help from someone willing to coach. Some ‘coachable moments’ happen naturally. Other times, as in Nightingale’s situation, we need to stimulate them.

Here are five techniques to stimulate ‘coachable’ moments:

1) Data   Truth can be a highly effective mind-opener.  Nightingale rigorously recorded battlefield deaths at her hospital to reveal that only 2.6% of soldiers died from wounds.  Her painstaking analysis and innovative statistical presentation, the “polar-area” chart, (i.e., the pie chart) portrayed this data.  She was later inducted as first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. Nightingale fueled a ‘coachable moment’ among authorities who subsequently enacted significant reform that changed sanitation practices, thus saving millions of lives.

2) Benchmarks and Best Practices It’s difficult to be smug about the status quo when facing a clear picture of how others are better than you.  Providing Benchmarks and Best Practice examples also models what great performance looks like, and contribute to confidence and capability.

3) Pose a Challenge Leaders can create ‘coachable moments’ by challenging learners with new, unknown, assignments or stretch goals. 

4) Provocation To provoke is to deliberately bait an emotional response. You can create ‘coachable moments’ by directly challenging beliefs that stand in the way of better performance. For example, when someone offers an excuse for the way things are, you could provoke with:

• Doubt: “I want to believe you, but something is missing.”

• Tactfulness: “A person with less experience than you might believe that.”

• Invoking a mentor: “What would <mentor> say about that?”

• Reality check: “Really? How do you know?”

5) Cause Failure While studying design in college, I learned to cause a self-imposed crisis in order to spur innovation. Our brains are full of the common. Because of our shared culture, our first ideas are the same as hundreds, or even millions, of others. To reach a point of innovation you must first spew out the common. You must force a failure of ideas. 

The method I learned is to spew out all the ideas that you can possibly think of. Don’t stop. Don’t fall in love. When you think you have all your ideas out, force out a few more. At some point, you will have imposed mental failure – blankness! Every ounce of you will desperately want to go back to one of your boring, common, seductive ideas. But if you live with that horribly uncomfortable empty mind for a while (take a walk, look at pictures, play music), something things inevitably pops up.

Like the Crimean War authorities, we humans need that moment when the ground falls away in order to fly.  Like Florence Nightingale, sometimes it’s our job as leaders to push people out of the nest.