Changeability - your key to Transformation of  Performance

© Copyright ChangeWORLD 2008

Competitive Strength  from Excellence delivers strong growth, increased turnover, higher margins, more profits, increased customer satisfaction, market leadership, industry domination  and outstanding success.

FINDING OUT

What we call Discovery Skills is Pure Coaching .

This starts with no agenda. The challenge of Discovery is that it starts with the premise that the Discoverer knows absolutely nothing, has no need other than the other person’s input, has no purpose other than Finding Out and no agenda other than the resolution of whatever needs to be resolved. This sounds simple and it is, but is not an easy point of view to acquire let alone sustain. Even so these skills have been acquired successfully by many strongly driven, over-achieving, over-competitive, “difficult” people – and it has transformed their lives and the working experience of those around them.

It may be helpful to describe what happens with Discovery Skills  The Discoverer asks questions and listens to the answers, the next questions are driven by the last answers, the only purpose is to seek clarity and comprehension by the speaker, the only structure is whatever is needed to assist the speaker’s understanding. There is never a Discoverer’s point of view or opinion; there is no advice, no information transfer, no over-emotional engagement, no external referencing. The Discoverer may often speak for a total time that is as little as 10% of the whole Discovery conversation – 12 minutes in two hours - 3 out of 30 minutes.

Our system of education has a great deal to answer for.

We are taught to identify what we do not know, then to work out what we need to know - the difference is our “Knowledge Gap”.  We are told that we can fill the gap by reference to and comparison with other items of knowledge.

These lessons tell us that the Key to Ignorance is Knowledge.

And, in so many cases, all this is delivered in an environment where the admission of a lack of knowledge is punished either by sanctions or humiliation.

“Everything can be learned by sustained application - Ignorance is Laziness.”

What a WRONG, sad and desperately limiting approach this has proved to be!

One of the characteristics of organisations that exhibit massive Competitive Strength compared to others is that they do not think like this.

We have heard the leaders of such organisations respond to questions about their future risks or hazards with the words

“We don’t know, but we know we will be able to find out when we need to”.

This is not over-confidence, or arrogance, even.  It is an attitude based on a (sometimes unconscious) Skill Set.  We call  these Finding Out Skills.

This set of skills is founded on a different way of thinking.  It asks without previous knowledge or assumption.  It questions every answer it gets to make sure that it understands exactly what it is being told and may be learning.  It works hard to suppress what it thinks it might know so that its questions are open to new information.  It is rigorously disciplined in the application of logic.  This is PROCESS based DISCOVERY.

This all sounds simple and it is - it is not easy to do.

That is why we have developed Discovery Skills to help you lo learn to do it.

Why?  Because it fails at the first step.  Because it teaches people to be ashamed if they don’t know and to look only for what they think they need to know.  Because the only basis they have for defining that need is based in what they think they already know.  

This is AGENDA based enquiry- and when the agenda is  wrong, the probability is that any answer will be very wrong.

Our

Finding Out Circle

© 1995-2008