Archive - January 2022

The illusion of solutions

Family therapist Barry Mason characterises solutions as ‘only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the dilemma one had’. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in the coaching encounter: no predetermined answers, no pre-set course, but rather flow and emergence, and the noticing of these.  And here’s where certainty and uncertainty arise, mirroring the working environment - and particularly the leader’s environment.   Thinking in terms of certainty may mean that the leader doesn’t see all the tripwires, since not everything is either certain or predictable.  In my experience of coaching leaders, the capacity to allow, and allow for, uncertainty – frustrating as that may be – also allows for versatility, responsiveness to the situation as it is, rather than as one wants it or assumes it to be, and creativity.  Which in turn allows for a more agile response.