Day 271 of Self Quarantine      Covid 19 Deaths in U.S.:  284,000   GA Vote!!

I am sometimes asked if I would coach or mentor an executive.  I usually agree.  I look forward to these engagements for the reciprocal learning.

One of my latest coaching experiences is for an executive looking to learn more about strategy.  After a couple of sessions, I realized my coaching style has evolved by combining the design of an experience framework that Vijay Kumar published in 101 Design Methods with John Boyd’s OODA process.

We meet once per week for an hour over Zoom.

Vijay’s design of an experience framework is:

What I love about this framework is that it is in three parts – attract, engage, and extend.  My shorthand is pre, during, and post.  Each part of an experience should be designed.

Prior to our coaching session I keep pages of thoughts, images, diagrams and text quotes in a GoodNotes 5 notebook on my iPad.  My iPad and Apple Pencil are always with me and any activity can trigger a concept I might want to talk about.

Prior to the meeting, I look over my notes and Otter.ai transcripts from previous sessions which includes any homework assignments to develop an outline of topics we might want to talk about in our weekly session.  These notes and a little organizing are my Pre-experience preparation.

At the appointed hour, I fire up my Zoomeroo system and enable the Grain real time transcript and note taking app. 

With the advent of video meetings and the quickly improving speech to text tools like Otter.ai, I am able to fully focus on my reciprocal learning partner.  In the past, in order to have a chance at remembering anything I took extensive notes in an ever present Moleskine notebook.  I mostly needed to see what I heard so that I could remember the conversation.  However, the notetaking distracted whoever I engaged with.  Now I can fully focus on the other person and absorb the non-verbal communication modalities that Mehrabian describes – the words that people say, the facial expressions while they are saying it, and the body posture and movements while expressing their thoughts.

I still type a few notes in real time (the panel on the right above) as an index into the conversation for later use.

It is during the engage portion of the experience that I tacitly use John Boyd’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop.  As I observe my learning partner, I am orienting to her needs, to her organization’s needs, and to the health care ecosystem that her organization resides in.

As the engaging conversation progresses, I decide to share one of the diagrams I’ve prepared in advance or I go to Google and search for a diagram or a web page about what I am trying to describe.  As our hour finishes, I act by suggesting a “home work” assignment for the next week.  The homework usually consists of observing something in her work environment that we discussed or to read a few articles.

After we sign off, I take an hour to review the “To Dos” from the meeting transcript which are usually creating a set of pointers to information on the web.  In today’s session we talked about the following topics: