Taking our own medicine and interviewing ourselves January 25, 2007
Posted by John David Smith in Research.add a comment
Designing in some judicious symmetry is important in coaching and in leading communities of practice. In this project that principle means we’re trying out our interview questions on each other. We’ll also interview some of each other’s coachees, both to “test the questions” and to see what we learn from them and about ourselves and about our coaching practice.
We started this self-interviewing part of the process yesterday. It was Lauren’s turn to be interviewed. One thing that struck me was that Lauren’s responses really spoke to our questions. She really understood them. That may be unremarkable, since we wrote and refined them together, but it got me to thinking about how, despite the power of questions, there are some big differences between the question “as asked,” the question “as heard by the other person,” the question “as answered,” and “the real question.” If the questions are problematic, then the answers must be, too. A fundamental characteristic that a coaching relationship and a community of practice have in common is sustained conversation. The differences between those various versions of a question can get ironed out over time. That gives me confidence that the common meaning that’s developed is really shared.
A one-off interview isn’t the same, so we need safeguards to detect and repair misunderstandings. In the case of this research project, we share written notes with everyone we interview for their inspection and editing. That doesn’t directly go to the question of whether the question is really understood, but it helps looking at the answers together. Toward the end we’ll share our conclusions and discuss them, probably as a group.
Project history and context January 19, 2007
Posted by John David Smith in News.add a comment
Lauren Klein and John Smith joined forces to present a workshop on the subject and on our research about coaching community leaders. We’ve both been in the role of coaches as well as of community leaders, so we were interested in how other people help community leaders get going, get oriented, and get good at leading their communities.
Once our proposal was accepted at the Communities and Technologies conference in June, 2007, we decided to use this blog for several overlapping purposes:
- Report on the progress of interviews, analysis, results formulation and report writing. At this point we have almost enough respondents for our study, but if you know someone who coaches several leaders of different communities of practice, let us know. Although the Technology for Communities of Practice project is not over and still has to claim most of my non-billable time, I couldn’t help but start getting this one going.
- Announce and organize the half-day workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. Everyone who registers for the workshop will be able to post on this blog, so that we can accumulate ideas, references, resources and suggestions beforehand. (This is building on ideas that Beverly Trayner and I describe in E-Learning Magazine and builds on the practice we began to develop in the Prato Dialog.) We’ll aim to report on what we learned together in the workshop.
- Point to other outcomes, including publications, workshops, or resources.
- Most likely we’ll be presenting some of our work within the CPsquare community at some point.
