When Timothy Gallwey realized in the 1970’s that his ‘Inner Game’ approach to
coaching tennis was applicable beyond the tennis court, I’m sure he couldn’t
have imagined that 50 years later a whole industry would have sprung up around
coaching for business people.

John Whitmore and Gallwey were running tennis programmes when a player, who
was also an IBM executive, invited them to teach leaders at IBM how to manage
using coaching techniques .

They were the earliest pioneers of executive or business coaching and there is
a straight line between their approach to coaching and what I learned from
David Lane and Mike van Oudtshoorn on the Middlesex MA coaching programme in
2002.

My thesis on using scenario planning for coaching was supported by Clem Sunter
and opened up a field of work for me that blended executive coaching
conversations with strategy work.

As powerful as those conversations were, over the years, I realised there was
a missing third leg which related to the complex decision-making that
executives need to make.

Core to the success of any business are the people, starting at the top of the
organization. If everyone from the executives down knows exactly how growth
will happen, and what their role, is then there is not much to talk about.

If, however, there are questions and decisions to be made about growth,
competitors, focus, silos to break down, or people being more specifically
aligned, then having a coach to provide perspective and work with, together,
to figure out these complex decisions, is as relevant as having a coach to
work on your tennis serve and volley.

As Eric Schmidt says, “all the best people have coaches.”

A large part of my conversations with executives is about the complex
decisions they have to make as leaders. I hope this isn’t hard to hear, but
all of us humans are not very good at complex decisions.

We can compare the decisions that executives need to make with the decisions
professional investors make about buying or selling a stock. Both require
weighing up numerous inputs and both can only be measured financially sometime
after the decision.

The data on the professionals who make stock investments is widely available
and shows that, for the 10 years to 2020, the professional managers performed
worse than their
index .

This means that by actively making buy and sell decisions, these managers, who
have spent years honing their skills, did worse than simply buying the index –
or the average of all the stocks they were deciding on.

Many books have been written on why this is, but nobody has documented it
quite as well as the king of human
error Daniel
Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow .

Anybody reading the book comes away feeling significantly more fallible in
their decision-making ability. His hundreds of examples of how we over-
estimate and under-estimate, or just get it completely wrong, are truly
disarming.

One of Kahneman’s references is Philip Tetlock’s work on expert decision
makers in
which he shows that experts, people who are paid for their opinion, are
generally no better at predicting than you and I.

So, our executives are up against some pretty formidable forces when it comes
to decision-making.

Nobel prize winner Kahneman’s field of decision making has touched many parts
of behavioural economics and it is the area of fellow Nobel laureate Richard
Thaler, whose work on nudges, offers useful approaches for how we can overcome
our tendency to be biased and make poor decisions in complex situations.

‘Nudge Theory’ presents choices in a particular way which guides people
towards an ideally beneficial outcome, without limiting their choices or
specifically offering an incentive. As Thaler says, putting fruit at eye level
counts as a nudge, banning junk food does not.

You may have heard of the
studies
about organ donors. These show that there are more donors in countries where
it is the default to be an organ donor. Anyone can opt out, but the default,
or nudge, pushes us towards the beneficial decision. Countries in which you
have to actively work against the default and sign up as a donor on your own
volition, have much lower rates of organ donors.

Nudges happen within a choice
architecture which is a
fancy way of describing the context of a decision or a choice.

Moving back to our executives and their teams making strategy decisions, what
interested me was how we can set up the context for strategic decisions (the
choice architecture) that can move a whole organisation in a beneficial
direction.

Strategy starts with a decision on how we will compete and win in the market
place. This needs to be broken down into the pieces that can be executed
across the executive team and then deep within company operations.

By framing all of these decisions in a way which is beneficial to company
growth, we have the potential to literally nudge the organisation towards that
growth, one decision at a time.

And this is the third, big influence on my strategy coaching.

Working with a CEO or executive team, using the same coaching techniques going
all the way back to Gallwey and Whitmore, we can identify the strategy
decisions to be made, structure them in a choice architecture and then provide
an environment where every person in the organisation is making decisions in
support of the desired company growth.

Along the way, there is lots of opportunity for the executive being coached to
learn about themselves, their decision-making ability and benefit from ‘live’
feedback on how they lead.