Doctor's Note - Issue 32 - Coaching Reflections
In this issue: 100 Coachees / Coaching Reflections / Power of Ten / Guff of the Month / Book Corner / The Linkhole
Welcome to the latest Doctor's Note. If you've been forwarded this you can subscribe below.
100 Coachees
Although I have been mentoring designers of all levels for years as part of my work, I am formally in the fifth year of my design leadership coaching practice. A few weeks ago, I noticed I was coming up to my 100th coachee, prompting me to reflect upon the years so far:
Coachee profiles
I coached slightly more women than men as well as people identifying as non-binary.
Coachees are from all around the world and a diverse range of backgrounds and ethnicities.
The ages of my coachees ranged from 24 to 59 with most in their 30s and 40s.
Around 75% of my coachees pay out of their own pocket versus employer paid.
Common themes
Creating time and space in calendars and the mind.
Stakeholder management and partnership.
Dealing with feelings of overwhelm and imposter syndrome.
The shift in identity from maker to manager and leader, what I call The Leadership Dip.
Struggling with the unquestioned need for speed within organisations.
How to link the needs of design to the needs of business stakeholders.
Loneliness in the leadership role.
Lack of confidence in speaking spontaneously in meetings and calls.
Building up a palette of story components and structures.
Finding the shape of you and your personal manifesto when hitting a mid-career/mid-life crisis of purpose.
Understanding leadership as enablement through slow-motion facilitation.
The importance of your inner work. You can't lead others if you can't lead yourself.
Thank you to all my coachees who have trusted me in their process thus far. It really is a privilege to be invited into someone's inner life in this way.
I'm now beyond my 100th coachee — If you would like to be one of them, you can find out more about my coaching practice here.
Coaching Reflections Videos
The above reflections and working on the book I'm slowly (not) writing encouraged me to start putting out short videos of weekly reflections.
I know paying for coaching is out of reach for many people, so I wanted to give people free access to some of the thoughts and experiments even if they can't do one-to-one sessions. You'll find the whole series on my Design Leadership YouTube playlist and I'll be adding to them more or less weekly. Here’s the latest one and a list of the others below:
Getting Started by Starting at the End & Run Workshops, Not Meetings
Simple tricks for defensive calendaring to take back control of your time
A question for you
Here's a question for you, dear reader. I normally write an opinion piece as the opening section of this newsletter, but I realised I have put most of those thoughts in the videos above. Would you still like the text version of one of them to read, an expanded version, simply the video links or something completely different?
Let me know by hitting reply to this mail.
Conferences
It's been a while since I've presented at conferences in person, so I'm very happy to announce I'll be keynoting at the 2024 Service Design Network Global Conference in Helsinki, 2-4 October 2024.
I'll also be speaking at the Design Leaders+ event that is part of Product Design Week London 11–15 November 2024.
If you're going to be at either of them, do come and say hello. Conferences are strange things. Full of people, yet they can be weirdly lonely at the same time, particularly if you've been one of the people on the stage.
Power of Ten
I you haven’t checked out my Power of Ten podcast, you’ll find all the episodes and transcripts here. My YouTube channel has both the videos and audio versions. The audio versions are available in all the usual places you get your podcasts, or click on the feed here.
Here are the most recent. Two wonderful guests provided excellent insights:
Hansi Singh – AI-accelerated environmental forecasts
Jaimes Nel – Do design frameworks lead to boring products and services?
Oliver Reichenstein - Keeping it real when writing with AI
Indi Young — Mental Models and Thinking Styles
Guff of the Month
For years I've been collecting vacuous statements from people in business and consulting when they really don't know what they're talking about but want to sound like they do. It's called The Big Book of Guff. This one is from a management consultancy MD:
"That's one rock in the creek we need to solve for."
🤷♂️ How do you solve for a rock?
Books
I've been reading a lot online recently, so the book corner is rather sparse*:
I haven't yet read this, but Mandy Brown's review of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World sounds like it should be mandatory reading for many service designers. It's on my list.
More D&D DMing nerdery. The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying: Guidelines and Strategies for Running Pc-Driven Narratives in 5e Adventures by Tristan Fishel and Jonah Fishel.
Big Ideas, Little Pictures: Explaining the world one sketch at a time by Jono Hey. Jono is the author of Sketchplanations and this is the excellent book collection.
The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions by Esther Sternberg. I've heard good things, but my copy was inexplicably held up in customs, so I haven't yet read it.
I'll be interviewing Erin Weigel about her new book Design for Impact and Harry Max on his new book Managing Priorities soon.
*Some of the above are affiliate links that contribute to my lavish lifestyle of the rich and famous.
The Linkhole
Marzia Aricò wrote an excellent issue of Design Mavericks outlining a Competency Model for Service Designers. She outlines the skills and attributes of service designers at different stages of their careers. I just had a lovely conversation with Marzia for Power of Ten, which will come out in a few months.
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 is a remarkable piece of research and data visualisation by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler.
I've written about Ed Sheeran a couple of times before. Here's a clip that Matt Schnuck posted on LinkedIn with Sheeran talking about being okay with being terrible at first (via Oliver Reichenstein).
Of all places, the FTC wrote a post about the use of AI in business with the witty headline, Succor Borne Every Minute. It contains very good advice.
Screenwriter Julian Simpson is soon to be on Power of Ten and often writes very thoughtfully about notetaking. In this PKM world, I really enjoyed this long piece in praise of notebooks: Bits of the Mind's String.
The data about return-to-office mandates is conclusively against them. But if you need to send your boss a link, here's a report from Gartner: The Data Is In: Return-to-Office Mandates Aren’t Worth the Talent Risks
Livework's Anna van der Togt wrote an excellent piece about Weaving the planet perspective into the fabric of Service Design. It is only by integrating that perspective into our design methods that we integrate it into our work. Here she explains how to evolve the service blueprint to include a planet lane.
In the video I made about understanding your thinking and communication style I mentioned C.G. Jung's four psychological functions (Thinking, Sensing, Feeling, Intuition). This article on The Physiology of Jung's 4 Psychological Functions was fascinating and explains what goes on in your body with regards to introversion, extroversion and anxiety.
Erika Hall did a brilliant reframing of design and its role in enabling business models and debunked a couple of common myths in her The Business Model is the Grid presentation at Conffab.
Joel Bailey (also soon on Power of Ten) wrote A Horizontal Manifesto, arguing that verticals are holding back business performance in the digital age. I agree, though I don't think this is just a digital age problem. I think it's always been the case. Digital just exposed it.
I've talked before about how time is the fossil fuel of your life: You are never going to get it back and you don't know how much is left. This piece from teacher and artist Isabel Manley poignantly explores this idea.
Most people have heard of the Dunning Kruger effect. Here's David Dunning explaining how not to be stupid.
That’s it for this issue! Thanks for making this far and for reading, listening and watching.
Until next time,
Andy