The Amplio Value Flow Coach

Coaching, Consulting, and Training Are Interrelated

Knowing something without being able to convey it to others has little value. People need to learn how to convey new ideas while they learn them. This also accelerates their learning.

The intention of coaching is not to convince someone of what is right. It is to guide them in convincing themselves of what is more effective for them. When you see a better path for them than they see, the action to take is not to build a path to the target in how you would like to get there, but in creating breadcrumbs that enable them to create their own path in getting to their better way. Doing this requires seeing the path. This is why knowledge in the domain that you’re trying to improve for your mentee is critical.

The Amplio Learning Kata enables coaches to help remove limiting beliefs, convey new concepts, and help people improve how they work.

Knowing how to coach is more than just asking questions. It requires understanding the principles underneath the work so coaches can guide people to discover what works themselves. It also requires understanding people’s automatic interpersonal reflexes caused by automatic interpretive reframing. People make decisions more on emotion than on logic. A great coach is not only aware of this, but knows how to work within these confines.

Coaching, consulting, and training require some expertise in each of the others.

Amplio integrates all three of these capabilities into its curricula.

How Kata Coaching Works

When you coach, you should have an objective of what your coachee should be getting at. This could be:

1. Removing a limiting belief
2. Learn a new concept
3. Improving a practice
4. A combination of the above

Clearly a coach needs to know something about improving creating value to guide their coachees in getting better. This is where knowing the theories of Flow, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints comes in. Without this, you can’t really guide them to a target.

You also need a path to guide them. Just jumping to the end and tell them to try it to understand doesn’t work well. Expecting people to trust you is more than most people will accept. So knowing small steps, each providing enough insight to uncover something they already almost understand is essential. This approach requires an understanding of What’s the difference between experts & those with less competence? and the order in which to teach them.

You must also know how people listen, learn, and react. Without this knowledge, you are likely to either evoke resistance or limit learning.

You need to be able to ask them questions so that they can discover these new insights as well. The proper questions will get them to understand what they already almost know.

Of course, you need good interpersonal skills – empathy, listening, being respectful, etc., as well.

If any of these are missing, expect your coaching to fall short of what is possible.

Let’s look at this in action.

A great way to coach improving is with Mike Rother’s coaching kata shown in the following picture.

In it the coach guides the coachee (mentor / mentee in Mike’s vernacular) in their improvement kata with the coaching kata.

The five aspects of Amplio Kata coaching is shown in the following picture.

Notice how each of these is critical for the coaching kata to be effective.

The essence of what we’re doing is creating a bridge from where the coachee is to where they would be more effective. It is important to understand the need for theory for people to learn. See Why theory is so important. There is a huge amount of evidence that without theory, people learn much more slowly and even resist adopting what are good practices. Telling people to follow until they understand is both demeaning, disrespectful and a poor way to lead. You can learn the distinctions to present by understanding the difference between experts and those with less competence.

And we can determine the order in which to present these differences with The Pick-up Sticks Model of Teaching Concepts.

Creating a path from where they are to where they need to be is shown in the following picture. This process enables people to take advantage of what they already know.

Complexity can also be explored during the Amplio Kata

We can uncover and create clarity on what is obscured to us by complexity by using our intelligence and tools to move forward. When our tools are insufficient, we will look to create new tools to help us.

We take the attitude that we can continue this process going deeper as we do and getting better at the process to solve our problems.  However, during the process, we recognize that we are not aware of all of the complex (and potentially non-linear) behavior of the system, so we must attend to this risk by getting and responding to quick feedback.

Useful tools include value stream analysis, “5 whys”, fishbone diagrams, affinity mapping, and more.

Let’s summarize these five aspects and highlight why it’s needed and what happens when you don’t have any one of them:

1. Knowing the theories of Flow, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints is needed to be able to see the target condition of coaching you are giving. Without this the path to improvement will take considerably longer and likely be frustrating to the coachee. Without this understanding coachee’s will likely fall back into old habits. Eli Goldratt says that “A comfort zone has less to do with control and more to do with understanding.” Understanding is key. Without an understandable theory people, won’t accept new practices.
2. Present the distinctions needed to get to the target condition in the order in which the coachee can best grasp them. Without this they will likely get overwhelmed. This can cause resistance, slow learning, and disengagement.
3. Know how people listen, earn, and react to avoid resistance. People are often uncomfortable learning new things. To interact with them in a way that makes them feel safe, you need to understand how people automatically respond to new insights.
4. Good interpersonal skills are needed. Patience, empathy, and respect are invaluable. And without them your coachee’s will respond negatively to your coaching.
5. How to ask questions is a useful skill to enable your coachee to discover what’s useful in their own mind. This grounds it better and makes them feel better about the process.

It is important to recognize that the coachee discovers everything by answering questions asked of them. They are not told the answers. But by guiding them with questions the coach shortcuts the time it would take for fully self-discovery.

But since they got the insights in their own head, they learn them just as deeply as if they self-discovered them. The process is just faster.