If you coach poorly, people have an almost allergic reaction to it. It probably feels like suddenly being with a life-coach/shrink without having signed up for it. If you do it well though, it doesn’t look like “coaching”, and you just make change happen. So how do you think carefully about delivering a message that makes change, without seeming like you’re totally off your rocker for trying to play games with someone?...
This is a short riff on spotting potential. Sometimes you need someone with epic skills ready to plug in, but that’s not what this is about. This is about what potential looks like. When someone took the time to prepare for their interview, that might be potential. When someone has a beautiful CV that’s not a stock template, smells like potential. When someone presents a portfolio of things they’ve made, the potentiometer starts jittering....
Agency. The spice that makes everything anew. Agency is the cure for “stuck”. It’s the glue that makes organisations work. It’s like adding nitro to an otherwise “OK” engine. But it’s hard to screen for. High agency individuals don’t wear “Agent” badges. Agency doesn’t often show up in a job interview, and even when it seems to, it might not persist when the rubber hits road. Agency. The difference between giving up when the recipe didn’t work, and making a new, 10x better recipe....
I play a lot of Halo 5: Guardians at the moment, on Xbox. Most of the time in anonymous multiplayer, there’s a good amount of radio silence. Most people don’t have headsets, so there’s not a lot of team comms going on unless you manage to pre-organise a team. I’ve also been watching some streams on Twitch. The communication is epic. There’s a whole host of callouts the skilled players make to their team....
It’s easy for me to fall for the idea that once I find a perfect system, I’ll be done. I’ll have a recipe for life that just works. It’d be amazing to have a set of habits and routines that I practice until they’re baked in, and they’ll be all I need to be doing my absolute best for as long as I live. The problem is the territory is shifting....