Enterprise Coaching – One Day Workshop

Just been putting together a one day Introduction to Enterprise Coaching programme. Unfortunately because delegates are coming from far and wide we have a late start and early finish.

Here is the outline:

10.30 Arrive, register, welcome etc

11.00am Introductions and Objectives Exercise

11.30 – What are we Trying to Achieve with Enterprise and Entrepreneurship?

12.00 – Self Directed Learning – a framework for managing and leading our own development

12.30 – When I was a Kid – An Insight into (part of) our target market

13.00 – Lunch

13.45 – Situational Enterprise – understanding technical and psychological demands of the service

14.15 – The Enterprise Coaching Cycle and 4 Interventions styles

15.00 – An exercise in acceptant interventions

15.30 – Self image and enterprise

15.45 – So what might change?

16.00 – Close

How does it look?  Interesting?  Challenging?  Relevant?

Just been putting together a one day Introduction to Enterprise Coaching programme. Because delegates are coming from far and wide we have a late start and early finish.

Here is the outline:

10.30 – Arrive, register, welcome etc

11.00am – Introductions and Objectives Exercise

11.30 – What are We Trying to Achieve with Enterprise and Entrepreneurship?

12.00 – Self Directed Learning – a framework for managing and leading our own development

12.30 – When I was a Kid – An Insight into (part of) our target market

13.00 – Lunch

13.45 – Situational Enterprise – understanding technical and psychological demands of the service

14.15 – The Enterprise Coaching Cycle and 4 Interventions styles

15.00 – An Exercise in Acceptant Intervention

15.30 – Self Image and Enterprise

15.45 – So what might change?

16.00 – Close

How does it look?  Interesting?  Challenging?  Relevant?

What else would you want to see covered?

There is so much material and so little time!

Ripples Out – Reflections

First of all congratulations to everyone involved (Lippy Films, Yorkshire Forward, Together for Peace and local residents) in creating a powerful, provocative  film.

I sincerely hope that it helps disturb the comfortable equilibrium in Leeds (and beyond) that exists between the controllers of the public purse and the developers.  There maybe a brief window for reflection while development is ‘put on pause’ by recession – but I am sure that we will soon see business resumed as usual – if only temporarily.  At the moment, conveniently, there is no other game in town.

The likelihood of this will be increased if we focus our time and energies in trying to ‘influence’ the processes of planners and developers.  This will be playing their game – on their terms.  And I have a sneaking hunch about who might win – no matter how articulate and informed those that advocate the voice of the community are.  We also run the risk of further contributing to the dilution of our personal power as now, instead of relying on planners, we learn to rely on ‘our representatives’ to create a better future for us.  Developers and communities can become bedfellows – trading favours, but they are unlikely to become allies – they are seeking different and mutually exclusive goals.

The ‘Planners Analysis’ that says ‘give us time to finish‘, ‘forgive us a few mistakes‘ and ‘we just need to complete our investments‘ essentially says that ‘Planning’ works.  Visions, blueprints, plans and ‘investments’ will lead us to a better world.  ’You ‘the people’ will be well looked after once we have engineered things fully – but we need more than 10 years – much more‘.

Can I be the only one that doubts this promise?

Am I the only one that thinks they, the planners, don’t really believe this themselves?

But it keeps the Porsches and the Mercedes on the road.  This is an unsustainable and unjust paradigm for progress that we engage with at our peril.  Our best endeavours are perhaps focussed on the search for a new paradigm for progress.

Perhaps the root of the problem is a perception that it is the decisions and actions of ‘others’ that largely determine the course and quality of our lives.  That the quality of our lives depend on decisions about where money is spent and what infrastructure is built.  If ‘others’ make the wrong decision or do their jobs badly our communities will be broken.  This is a dangerous and pernicious myth made even more dangerous and pernicious by an obvious ‘face validity’.  But we have learned that it takes more than PVC windows and doors to ‘renew’ communities.  Physical infrastructure creates profits (on a good day).  It rarely creates sustainable progress.

If we believe that others have ‘the power’ then we are relinquishing ours.

Finance and infrastructure accrue as a by-product of community.  As by-products of people (diverse tribes including inventors, creatives, workers, financiers, developers, mothers, carers, young and old, healthy and sick, bureaucrats and anarchists – you get the picture?) collaborating to make ‘good’ lives and ‘good’ work.  They are seldom the preconditions for it.

And now, more than ever before, what we need to produce is not profit or GDP – but ‘wealth’; that stuff which remains when the money has run out – wellbeing.

Learning to collaborate to do ‘good work’, understanding what ‘good work’ is – learning to use our talents to create (private and common) wealth (not just profits) for our communities offers us a more robust framework for progress.  These are the challenges that require our time and our attention.  Thankfully they are much less expensive than buildings and ‘walkways in the sky’.

If this analysis offers hope we need to allow a new cast to take to the stage.  Architects, planners and bureaucrats must become the servants of community rather than its masters.  Community development workers (not outreach workers paid for by the state to deliver outcomes), and educators (not teachers paid to deliver ‘employer’ requirements) perhaps hold the keys to this kingdom.

Perhaps this is a crude analysis.  I do not believe that planners, architects and developers are bad people.  Nor that there is any planned assault on community.  This is cock-up – not conspiracy.  Nor do I believe that vibrant communities can develop without an effective dialogue with planners.

It is just that this is not the place to start.

Social Participation and Enterprise

One of the key themes explored at the recent Future Gov Work Better Together event was the promise that ’social participation gives people the power to self-actualise’.

I am sure it does.

However ’social participation’ has also been the technology of choice for us human beings to make progress at all stages of Maslow’s Hierarchy – not just at the ’self-actualising’ peak. Competence in social participation (or what de Tocqueville called ‘association’) and the ability to negotiate self interest through effective collaboration is one of the critical enablers in community and personal development.

Whether it is learning to share a cave (or a housing estate) to meet needs for shelter and warmth, putting together a team to start a new business venture, or pursuing self actualisation, effective ’social participation’ is the key.

The challenge facing us here is promoting social participation, collaboration, association. Not technology. In very few of the communities where I work is the REAL barrier to progress access to a networking site or high speed internet access (although these are cited usually after lack of money and skills).

It is often a lack of understanding about how collective self interests can best be met through negotiation and association.  About the need to see what can be contributed rather than taken.  About the need to build real trust rather than uncomfortable bureaucratic ‘compacts’.

The other barrier to social participation in the real world is an almost complete loss of belief that progress IS possible – manifesting itself in apathy and resignation. A belief that perhaps this is as good as it gets – and, if it is going to get any better, those bloody politicians had better get their fingers out, because I AM POWERLESS.

So IF we are serious about trying to shift the enterprise culture of a community we need to be in the game of building social capital, self belief and personal responsibility for making things happen.

Ripples Out Screening Invite

RIPPLES OUT SCREENING INVITE

I hope to get tickets for the October 7th screening!

Mentoring for Enterprise

Thinking of setting up a mentoring scheme?

Here are some top tips to improve the chances of success:

1. Educate mentees in how to choose and use a mentor – this will provide a better return on investment than training people in how to be good mentors
2. Offer a mentor matching service – but always encourage people to look for their own mentors first – this ensures relevance
3. Always encourage people to check out a few potential mentors rather than allocating them one
4. Train people who have already been approached to become mentors – avoid training a whole bunch of people who want to mentor, but for whom there is no demand

Please do add more….

Tackling Enterprise Head On Is Wrong-Headed

Most projects designed to promote enterprise tackle the problem head on.

When we say that a community ‘lacks’ enterprise we are saying that we believe fewer businesses are starting per head of population than is ‘normal’.  Typically in a community that ‘lacks’ enterprise you might get 4 new starts per hundred adults per year.  In an ‘enterprising’ community this is closer to 6 per hundred.  This might not sound much of a difference – but this 2% increase could in theory be worth millions in a local economy.  We are usually also saying that fewer businesses are registering for VAT than we would like.  We want more business start-ups and we want more VAT registrations and all of our attempts to promote enterprise are geared pretty directly to these ends.

‘Never mind how you percieve your self interest.  Just start a business.  We will even make it easy for you’.

The assumption is that if we encourage more people to ‘be enterprising’, if we give them access to knowledge, skills and money then surely we will get more enterprise as a result.

In my view this is wrong headed.

I would argue that all human beings are innately enterprising.  All of the time.  It is a part of the human condition.  We create and pursue a set of habits and behaviours that we believe will work in what we believe to be our self interest.  Behaviours that will maintain our self image and help us to get where think we want to be.  This IS enterprise.  These behaviours and habits are a reflection of what we perceive to be in our ’self interest’, and what we perceive to be our ‘power’.  There are a massive range of ‘enterprising behaviours’ from claiming benefits and watching day time television through to planning a multi-million pound bio technology start up or a space tourism operator.

If our self interest is ‘to maintain the status quo’ then we will get the power we need and our enterprising behaviours will serve this goal.

Ditto if our self interest is ‘to be a millionaire by the time I am 30′.

A thorough development and negotiation of  self interest is central to the kind, and extent, of enterprise that emerges.  If we want ‘more’, ‘better’ enterprise then we should focus our efforts on helping  more people to clarify their self interest and build their power to pursue it.

Chasing More Enterprise

Often what we call ‘enterprise’ (or more accurately ‘count’ as enterprise) is a set of behaviours generated in order to comply with a system of stick and carrots that we have carefully constructed to pursue our policy goals.  This is not enterprise.  It is compliance.  Manipulation.

Helping individuals to clarify self interest – to work out what they want to spend their time and energies doing – is not a trivial task.  It takes a strong relationship (confidential, compassionate, challenging, person centred rather than policy driven) and sometimes many months of introspection and exploration of options.  Helping people to recognise the difference between self interest and selfishness and to recognise and adopt the principles of ’sustainable’ enterprise cannot be rushed.

But when we get it right we can bet that much more enterprise will emerge.  Not only will the economy benefit but our community will become much more vibrant too.

Enterprise at its best—decoupled from self-interest?

Julia Middleton has written an interesting piece for the Institute of Directors.  She argues that we need to decouple ‘enterprise’ from ’self interest’.

Julia contrasts the motivations of the bankers  – ‘primarily financial‘ with the interests of Narayana Murthy, Chair of Indian IT giants Infosys – primarily about a ‘wider social gain‘.

Julia suggests that ‘Bankers’ are primarily motivated by self interest, while Murthy was motivated by a wider social need that ‘transcended’ personal gain.

“Many people wondered why I wanted to take such a risk, to create, at that time in India, a company that would set a new standard of ethics in business. I had a good job, I was married, I had a small child, and I was brought up middle class. It was no easy decision. But all of us are driven by factors that transcend the hygiene factors: money and position. We all want to do something noble and make a difference to the context.”

Julia argues that this is view of enterprise is “glorious and grand and is delivered the world over by people motivated not only by personal gain but also by the needs of their communities and countries. It is enterprise at its best—enterprise decoupled from self-interest.”

But Murthy was acting EXACTLY in his own self interest.  He was driven by factors that ‘transcended the hygiene factors’.  He was driven to do something ‘noble’.  He believes that everyone else it as well.  Presumably even bankers?

In my book, both enterprise and entrepreneurship are all about ’self interest’ and ‘power’.  About taking decisions and actions that work for a self interest that has been properly understood and negotiated.  Not simply in terms of profit, but in terms of sustainability, and wider societal impact.  Some bankers seem to have managed this ‘proper negotiation  of self interest’ more effectively than others.  As indeed have some IT companies.

Perhaps Julia is arguing that good enterprise is ’selfless’ rather than ’selfish’?

I would argue that both of these are equally dangerous foundations on which to build an enterprise.  The middle ground of self interest, where my hopes and aspirations (to get rich, to save the whale, to reverse climate change, to do something noble) are properly and sustainably negotiated with the interests of others provides the only strong foundation for a sustainable, progressive and effective relationship.

I cannot be always giving (selfless) nor can I be always taking (selfish).

The point is not that we should decouple enterprise from self interest – but that we should work with people to ensure that their self interest is both rightly understood and properly negotiated with both the present and the future.  That personal perceptions of self interest remain dynamic and relevant (witness Bill Gates journey from techy to philanthropist – all the time pursuing his self interest).

Instead of urging people to put self interest to one side we should be urging them to put it ‘up front and centre stage’.  We should then help them to explore how their self interest ‘works’ with the self interests of others.  To understand how self interest is served by helping others.  How association, co-operation and mutuality work in pursuit of individual and collective self interests.

Because it is the mutual negotiation of self interests, and access to the power to pursue interests effectively, that provide the basic building blocks of civic society.

Enterprise Coaching is Being Broken

Broken

I get so frustrated when I see a 4 day enterprise coaching course being commissioned that pays little or no attention to what makes the role of the enterprise coach different from the business adviser.

I witnessed one recently, delivered by an Enterprise Agency (so they MUST know what they are talking about) that started with a half day on ‘Building  empathy and rapport’ (this should have been subtitled ‘Using psychological flannel to manipulate your client’) before going on for a full three days about ‘business planning’, ‘marketing’ and ‘finance’.  It even included a ‘very useful’ glossary of financial terms that every enterprise coach should know (things like profit, loss, break-even and cash flow).  Essentially it was a four day course of basic business advice re-branded ‘Enterprise Coaching’.  SFEDI accredited which is handy, except as far as I know SFEDI have yet to do develop any standards for Enterprise Coaches (which makes me wonder how they they can accredit the course)!

The challenge facing the enterprise coach is NOT to provide business advice to people living in areas of deprivation.

It is NOT to help people who want to start a business to develop viable business plans.

It is not to sell them places on workshops or training programmes – even if this is what mis-guided funders incentivise them to do.

It IS to:

• make connections in communities
• become trusted
• have structured conversations that help people to uncover their aspiration and to get back in touch with their potential,
• help people assess their options and choices and make decisions that are most likely to help them make progress with their lives.
• to engage with pre-contemplators and to help them contemplate.  It is to help contemplators to prepare for change and to ensure that they can access relevant, high quality and personalised specialist services.

Enterprise coaches develop people.

They unstick people.

They help people to grasp the possibility and practicalities of progress.

They help people to get in touch which their enteprising soul.

They build social capital, they put people in touch with fellow travellers and with sources of specialist support.

They work on shaping social contexts to make them more supportive of enteprise.

Some of the people they work with will go on to develop businesses.  Others will go back into education and skills, some will remain as before.

After a relationship with a skilled and powerful enterprise coach each one of them will have been challenged to think about what they want to get from life and how they are going to get it.

They may not have had ‘Break-even’ explained.

The concept of enterprise coaching is being broken.

It is being broken by bureaucrats who believe that the best way to increase start up rates is to put watered down business advisers into deprived communities to push self employment and entrepreneurship.

It is being broken because the enterprise industry is exploiting an opportunity to re-package ‘bog standard’ business advice under another name and sell it to unsuspecting and ill-informed regeneration commissioners.

It is being broken because Reality TV and the media at large insist on promoting the ‘Entrepreneurship Fairytale’ in which all that is needed is a good idea and few hours with a business adviser.

It is being broken because we lack a brave, positive and long term approach to developing more enterprising communities.

It is being broken because we are not seriously trying to engage the disengaged in making a better life.

Anyone ready for a change?

The Emotional Content of ‘Enterprise Support’

I am no fan of entrepreneurship based reality TV – however I do make an exception for Gerry Robinson’s Big Decision.  The basic premise of the programme is as nauseating as most – Sir Gerry Robinson, one of Britain’s most respected businessmen, comes to the rescue of several companies across the UK, armed with his personal cheque book. The ‘white knight’ rides in carrying all before him with his expertise and cash.

But the reality of the programme is somewhat different.  On occasion Gerry refuses to open his cheque book because he recognises that an injection of cash will actually prevent the management team from doing what has to be done.  And he seldom ‘diagnoses and prescribes’, preferring instead to use good questions to get the various members of the management team to face up to what they know has to be done – but have previously repressed.

It is also clear that any help that Gerry is able to offer is based on a real human connection.  There are tears, anger, fear and real affection and caring  as well.  And in my experience these emotions are always present whenever help is ‘non-trivial’.  Yet most business advisers tend to professionalise their relationships with clients.  They objectify both the company and the management team – viewing it as a black box to be fixed – rather than a very human system of passions and self interest in which they too need to participate.

Carl Rogers in On Becoming a Person had this to say:

It has gradually been driven home to me that I cannot be of help …by any means of any intellectual or training procedure.  No approach which relies upon knowledge, upon training, upon the acceptance of something that is taught, is of any use.  These approaches are so tempting and direct that I have, in the past, tried a great many of them.  It is possible to explain a person to himself, to prescribe steps that should lead him forward, to train him in knowledge about a more satisfying mode of life.  But such methods are, in my experience, futile and inconsequential.  The most they can accomplish is some temporary change, which soon disappears, leaving the individual more than ever convinced of their inadequacy.

The failure of any such approach through the intellect has forced me to recognise that change appears to come about through experience in a relationship.

…

If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.

Carl Rogers – On Becoming a Person

Although Rogers background was in psychotherapy his practical interests were in all kinds of helping relationship.  I don’t know if Gerry has ever read any Carl Rogers, or is a student of person centred helping relationships, but I am certain that he understands that it is his relationship with the people behind the company that matters most to his ability to help – not his expertise and cheque book.

It is his ability to build the relationship through openness, empathy, rapport and congruence that makes Gerry perhaps Britain’s most powerful company helper.

• To what extent does your practice rely ‘upon knowledge, upon training, upon the acceptance of something that is taught’?
• How could you make your practice more ‘relationship based’?
• What risks might such progress entail?
• What benefits might accrue?

Knowing ‘Bugger All’

I spent a very pleasant afternoon recently in the offices of New Start Magazine researching what makes for an inspirational or transformational relationship and I came across this wonderful quote:

In my ethnographic work, with a head full of American methodologies and theory, I thought I knew a bit about local government, urban and social policy and the theory of community and activism.  However, I knew as Betty was to tell me, “Bugger all!”.  All I knew was learned, abstract and distinct from reality.  Betty knew it from 60 years of lived experience.

Neil McInroy Chief Executive, CLES

This is why we need to have a process for community development that is not controlled by local government but by the lived experience of local people.