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People can stretch. We want to! Action Dialogue with Leadership Coach Dana Carman

Dana Carman is an expert in human and organizational transformation. Since 1984 Dana has worked as a senior advisor, consultant and executive coach to leaders of more than 200 visionary organizations on 5 five continents.

Hilary : I believe the educational term for what you do is “scaffolding.” This refers to the coaching and, or education or learning environment required to develop a person. It feels very relevant to any effort we might take on with transforming knowledge creation. But let me start with asking, what is holding your attention these days?

Dana: Let’s find a good on ramp into this big topic of scaffolding. I’ve been working as a leadership coach and consultant since the mid eighties. I came across adult developmental theory in 1996, and it had me question my unexamined assumption about people being either essentially reactive or creative. Adult development opened up a world of subtle transitions between these two ways of relating to the world. It had me understand that creativity is linked to an ability to hold more perspectives and to act more wisely. I have developed greater compassion for my self and those I get to work with,  and a greater range of creative response to our complexity challenges.

Hilary I hear in that a kind of participative orientation which is at the heart of working as an action researcher. Where is this most top of mind, top of heart these days?

Dana Today I’m working with a mission driven healthcare organization with multiple hospitals and my work there is to scaffold development among their people so they can better respond to the complex healthcare environments today.

Hilary How much do you lead with the idea of learning or self development?

Dana:  When I work with human resources we bring the vertical development concept into everything that they do by baking it into the background to design environments for people to grow. We’re building on Kegan & Lahey’s concept of deliberately developmental organizations. I start with what the client perceives the issue is, if they’re working on achieving goals I help them deal with the roadblocks, and inevitably they become interested in the theory. However I find the more that I do work in different parts of the system, the more I am being asked for the developmental approach to coaching. And so I feel like I’m both holding tasks and development together better. This is then stretching my own inner capacity which i think is key to being a good facilitator.

Hilary : What been working? What are you proud of?

Dana: Really it’s about spending the time to understand my clients world. They sharing their language, their dilemmas, their concerns, and I do my best to meet them their world, which builds a lot of trust. So before I give them what I think they “need,” I try to honor their wisdom and do my best to give them what they want. Given the way we see the problem/opportunity space shapes the response I am proud of creating these spaces in deep partnership with clients so that we can tap into the collective intelligence that is present between us and in the system.

Hilary : What happens when people with lots of power and agency are overly stuck on one way of seeing complex issues?

Dana:  We dealt with an uproar recently. Surgeons were turning on the CEO wanting to create a big fight about reimbursements and other privileges they expect. And the CEO brought me in to see how to tackle it. It was obvious to me this was not just a financial problem, it was perhaps more so a cultural problem. Questions under the surface were – Who has the power in a hospital system. Money talks. So we did a rapid benchmarking study across similar hospitals so the surgeons and CEO could see comparisons – that creates a level of clarity to start. Once the CEO saw that the money issues would be respected, I then said “if we only look at the money here, it’s  like putting a band-aid over a gunshot wound.” The timing of my statement allowed him to open up to seeing he had a bigger problem, a cultural problem. And quite simply that there was a problem with his leadership. So I honored him where he was, I gave him what he wanted, which was more clarity about money issues and then I invited him to a much bigger picture. I also helped preserve his dignity. That’s the essence really of beginning to scaffold a more complex response.

Hilary :  That’s great and as I think of the applications to research and learning, I hear echoes of the great Paolo Freire. He said “we can’t get there from there, we get there from here.” You start with what’s “here” for the client and then look for a future sustainable state. Is that always possible?

Dana:  When I’m at my best my clients get that there’s nothing wrong with them, that they don’t need to be fixed. The other pole that I hold, however, is that any organization today is predominantly dealing with complex adaptive challenges. Sustainability is at play in different ways everywhere. Individual sustainability is building your capacity to bring together action and reflection.

Hilary : Beautiful. So there’s nothing to fix here. But a lot to improve in aligning action and reflection. And what seems to be really helpful, as I listen to you, is when people can scaffold a more complex view of reality – like your CEO – which allows for additional ways of collaborative action with others, in this case the surgeons.  This is beyond just someone wins and someone loses. Maybe there is a win-win after all!

Dana: Yeah, people can stretch. They want to. I often share my failures and false starts with clients  to make more safety to stretch. To be stable at more complex stages of seeing and acting in the world, there’s a lot of other skills needed too. Being healthier in yourself makes a world of difference. Letting people know that we also move between many stages – sometimes we see the complexity and sometimes we’re simplistic – during the course of a day. That’s good. We don’t need a lot of complexity of perspectives and alignment between action and reflection  to respond to all issues. But we do for the tough ones such as issues of power and turf, and ego. Those require complexity of mind and agility. So I focus on how do we create the conditions, the context.

Hilary Around AR+ we speak of the relational space to let people feel safe enough to step up their capacity for complexity.  Is that a key element in your work?

Dana:  Yes, and for the most important ability of all, to create a mature conversation about our shadow. Say with regard to how we deal with power issues. Becoming aware of our own envy or our reactivity is hard but it’s key. With regard to say  #MeToo, that means for men to tackle the “Bro Code.” And for women to see how they help perpetuate what is not acceptable. And so reflecting on moments in one’s life when big things have happened is key. I call them the reckoning moments when everything has shifted. It’s important to learn how to embrace and be intimate with our reactive tendencies. And instead of only being angry, we can contain that and go a little deeper with curiosity.

Hilary So I have to ask what you have learned in your reckoning moments with regard to learning and knowledge creation?

Dana: Really knowing something viscerally is the kind of education that works for me. Conventional education less so. I had felt very trapped in a large suburban high school in the east coast starting out. And I literally went from being an A student to someone who was failing school because I couldn’t connect to the material. There was no context for me to personally connect. And I then got myself in so much trouble that I was privileged enough to go to a high school in the mountains. We started off the school year by spending eight days in the backcountry. And it just opened up everything for me.

Hilary It’s a kind of whole systems experiential learning And so it sounds as though it had a tremendous influence on your work.

Dana It just lit me up.

Hilary How does it influence your coaching and leadership development?

Dana: Most people that I meet have had some lifelong relationship with nature as a refuge. And so because that’s been so deeply true for me I tap into that myself. In my executive coaching I take people into the natural world and have them begin to let go of their day to day concerns, turn off their cell phones and slow down to the pace of being in nature. Just walking and talking. And in that place, nature begins to reveal insights to them. We begin to see things in us that we haven’t slowed down enough to take the time to know and understand.

Hilary: When you look at conventional Higher Education, I am guessing, you see it as incredibly narrow slice of what humans can be and could do with regard to knowledge creation.

Dana: Perhaps all we need is to taste this much larger context. I mostly work with executives who are experiencing some kind of turning point in their life and they’ve come to me because there’s some combination of pain and opportunity. Most of us get lost in the details of our life and in the pace of our life. But we always teach what we need to learn. So part of the opportunity for me is to take myself and others out of their day to day life, and to begin to have a reckoning, which is another way of inquiring  “where do I locate myself in the larger arc of my life and my career?” From that place of reckoning, you can find the courage to make choices because you have a perspective on what really matters.

Hilary: I hear your emphasis on empathy and really having learners know they’s OK.

Dana: I work with people to help them find their own practices, to begin to learn how to anticipate what’s going to stop their best efforts. I work with people to help find their own practices that they can integrate into their day to day lives.

Hilary: In your work as an executive coach. It’s about transformation. It’s action oriented, it’s whole systems. It’s all of those things that we care about in the AR+ Transformations Gathering. How might a meeting like that be of interest to you?

Dana: I like to go to conferences with scientists and academics.  I may be there as a minority in being a coach and a consultant, but I’m also a global citizen and educator. I care deeply about the world.  I’m very awake about our climate and about the way we’re responding to it. Learning how to learn how to create what’s next for us, and to develop that knowledge, is compelling to me. It can be a potential nexus of where important knowledge and actionable wisdom connects up. Just knowing things rationally isn’t enough to catalyze action with climate change. I’m interested in being part of developing new methods and approaches. I want to be able to translate what I know more into action and I want to be able to help the people I work with to do more and to expand their notions of what is needed for a more sustainable world.

Hilary:  I am thinking about which communities can fruitfully cross pollinate around this work. Do you see yourself as possibly representing those communities involved in scaffolding development. Are there other people that we might connect with to join us?

Dana: What I can represent is someone who’s been a practitioner and has been involved, with four or five communities and I have deep relationships in those different communities. So we might think about how to invite them. Let’s turn off the recording here as this may be a longer conversation about community building.

Hilary Thank you! So much of our work is community building. Your skills and talents seem especially valuable in all that.