James King

I saw a refreshing take on research recently and I thought I would capture it here. The essential idea is that research is a way to reduce uncertainty, which then leads to 3 insights: When we plan for the future we are usually guessing; Guesses are necessary but they are also just the absence of…

Being a coach is about having good conversations. Sure, there are times when you are reading documents, examining data or making observations, but the reason you are doing those things is to prepare for the conversation that you will be having with the person or team that you are coaching. The conversations that you have…

I was helping someone make some improvements in their team recently, to be more “agile.” I made the point, almost apologetically, that we had changed direction a few times and iterated in what we were doing. I started with a workshop, then some coaching, then we had some team meetings and then we seemed to…

I was talking to someone about a request from a client to “look into something weird.” The client was not sure if something was a problem or not, so they raised it with someone they knew in the team and a couple of hours later the case was solved. It got me thinking. Where do…

I recently completed three courses on Coursera, each achieving the goal I set out with. The first course was a six sigma course that I used to refresh my knowledge on something that I am familiar with. It contained what I wanted to learn but was typical of old fashioned e-learning (and face to face…

I have done many personality profiles over the years. Sometimes they seem to contradict and sometimes there are consistencies. One thing that is consistent though is that I see myself as more co-operative than competitive. However, I was doing a course recently and a point of discussion was when we are all more competitive or…

Early in my coaching career I sometimes felt like Cassandra, from Troy, who would see impending disaster and tell people, only to be ignored and then see the disaster unfold. I would say things like “if you leave testing to the end you will miss your deadline,” or ” If your try to estimate your…

I recently wrote about “coaching tax” and suggested that we should focus on making sure we optimise our “time on task” when coaching, but I got the idea for a coaching tax from the concept of the “Mindset Tax.” In this article I want to look at the difference between a mindset tax (the time…

I find that when I set goals, I often need to test them out and then refine them. No matter how hard I think about things up front, I always find room for improvement as soon as I start pursuing the goal. I recently set a goal of “read someone else’s writing once a fortnight”…

At the start of this year, I wanted to get back into writing. I used to keep a journal and I have maintained this blog for a long time. I was still writing some presentations and workshops at work but I missed writing entire training courses and user guides. The problem was that I did…