The gimmick had served its purpose. They got up and resumed the show, building on what worked to keep moving forward, but I'd already learned the lesson - given the right constraints, anyone can distill an idea, and distill it again. This kind of thinking is quite pervasive, and mostly for good reason - we are wasteful. There are always extra words, extra sounds, extra movements, but with a little prodding we can trim the excess until we are left with the message - stop, drop, and roll; spring forward, fall back; slow and steady wins the race.
I've been working on teaching this technique recently to one of our younger team members. I've found that his process is thorough to the point of distraction, which runs the risk of a peculiar form of paralysis - he routinely leaves a meeting with an impressive list of notes but is unable to use those to inform his next action. I've started asking him to state a summary of his work, then asking him to summarize his summary, then doing so again - three pages become a paragraph, a paragraph becomes a couple of sentences, the sentences become bulleted phrases. Over the past few months I feel like there has been some progress, and I expect this team member to build on his success over the rest of the year.
Like most business bros, I had a hunch my coaching would work, but for most of the journey I was flying blind. This is the essence of what we do - we try a few things and build on success. Like the way applause helps an improv team understand what works, it always helps us business bros to have outside reinforcement of our speculative efforts. A month ago during our division's monthly meeting, I thought I had my greatest reinforcement to date - our chief executive interrupted a short presentation by asking for a one-sentence summary of the preceding few slides. What a vindication of my methods! I smirked as the presenter struggled with the request, finally managing to squeeze his many ideas into a pair of complex, clumsy sentences.
I caught up with my team member a few hours later.
You see, I pointed out, we are not just working on this skill for its own sake. It's a high-level technique, relied on by the very person in charge of our division!
Ah, about that, came the reply. My dog was acting up, so I had to step away from the computer for a minute. I wanted to ask you if I'd missed anything...
Well. So it goes with coaching, I suppose - you draw up the right play, then the quarterback trips and falls. Still, the show goes on, so I nodded slowly to buy myself time. Yes, it was a good question - what had my team member missed while away from the computer? It seemed that I was the appropriate person to ask, having sat silently through the presentation except for that moment when I had chuckled my way through the two-sentence one-sentence summary. But for some reason, my mind had gone blank - I knew the gist but couldn't explain the details. I said I would get back to him.
I felt like someone who had realized Aesop's morals aren't a sufficient substitute for Aesop's Fables. Why is anything longer than it needs to be? I suppose that's the question we all need to answer. Yes, most things can be distilled into its message, but that means something must be lost in the process. I suspect the most likely candidate is the intangible factor, let's call it the essence, which often takes a backseat to the details. We know the hare lost, and from that fact we can learn something about racing, but what we really need to understand is why he took a nap, or why the tortoise kept going.
I think there was something missing in my well-intended coaching, which I perhaps overlooked from the arrogance of being ahead, and having a certain faith in my experience. I'd forgotten that since I already knew the stories, it sufficed to speak in morals. I was rudely reminded of my oversight when my moralizing exposed shortcomings in terms of retaining the new information from the unfamiliar presentation. I think I learned that there are some races which can only be lost, and that you cannot arrive anytime the journey has no destination. There are times where we learn more from reading than from the reading, just as sometimes we can see more on the trail than from the summit.
If the story has a moral, then why write the story? If the presentation can be summarized in one sentence, then why prepare a presentation? If only a few words from the meeting mattered, then why have a meeting? I think everything about coaching starts and ends when we fall down, realizing that what used to work isn't going to work again, that the gimmick has served its purpose. Yes, the spirit is always good, but ideas always reach their logical conclusion. I think I'm ready to stand up again and start afresh with new questions, better questions - having distilled it to the basic message, what was the point of first having more than necessary? I'm back to it, back to winging it, back on my feet again to make it up as I go along, the lesson having finally sunk in after all these years.
