"The problem of the steady change of ideas (or the perpetual need to imagine new ideas) also demolishes the notion that the essence of education consists in mastering certain contents or materials. You are not little birdies sitting in the nest with your mouths open to receive half-digested worms of knowledge regurgitated by the faculty. Education is not about content. It is not even about skills. It is a habit or stance of mind. It is not something you have. It is something you are." So says educator Andrew Abbott. To work towards...

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Everyone is coaching or being coached; there are life coaches, career coaches, personal coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, coaches for getting out of bed in the morning and coaches for getting to sleep at night. Why do we need coaches so much and so often?

Could it be that the old, well-worn and predictable pathways - any path to anywhere and every path to everywhere - are dsiappearing, the maps no longer even remotely relating to the territory? Are coaches our conceptual cartographers?

I'm not a great fan of mind mapping, but I find the...

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I'm fascinated by the emerging field of 'experimental philosophy', where it seems that philosophers are stepping away from their armchairs and using research methods from psychology to tackle philosophical questions.

Like intentionality.

This is interesting enough in itself, but just recently I've been pondering some of the ideas I heard expressed and saw practiced in workshops here with my friend and colleague Paul Natorp, from the Kaos Pilots. Paul's gigs were mainly about 'creative leadership', the kind of leadership that is appropriate to innovation and...

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I think a coach does four things:

1. Mentoring - a coach should have the capacity to empathise, and to relate the coaching experience to his or her own mind-set, world view and direct experience of analogous situations and contexts.

2. Facilitation of learning - a coach should have the capacity to transfer knowledge, either tacitly or explicitly, in a way which is beneficial to the client.

3. Problem solving - a coach should be able to deploy a variety of problem-solving processes so that the client can methodically work through the parameters of a problem to evolve...

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I've noticed that I'll often use optical illusions or some kind of perceptual trick in my presentations, to indicate not only how easy it is to trick the eye or the brain, but that the way see the world is the way the world becomes.  It's like everything that's going on around us can be imagined as 360° - a whole world of perception, conception, experience, emotion, input, colour and ... everything. And it's not stretching the idea too far to propose that we're only ever aware of a slice of this.    Let's...

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I can think of four things to say about generosity.

It's a quality of behaviour which requires very little in the way of resources but which has enormous power to influence and change things, beginning with yourself.

Firstly, generosity is an accessible behaviour. A generous act can be as small and simple as giving someone ten dedicated, alert minutes of your individied attention. The generosity of a thought or an act is not scaleable; its source is the intention to give. 

Secondly, in order to think and act with generosity you have to...

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 A working hypothesis: every coach needs a coach. Like every shrink needs a shrink. Something about keeping yourself honest, setting up a sounding board for reflection on the practice, shrugging off the Mantle of the Expert (something I learned from the legendary Dorothy Heathcote a hundred years ago, back in the Drama Days) to look at oneself in the role.

My coach - a dear (critical) friend and colleague, Ron Adie, founder of Responsive Management Australia, a long established expert in professional development...

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Having thought about this idea of phronesis  for a while it didn't come as a surprise to learn that the three 'R's' - usually taken to mean reading, writing and 'rithmatic - were originally conceived as

Reading and writing
Reckoning and figuring
Wrighting and wroughting

... where the third 'R' refers to the knowledge of action, of making and undertaking, of phronetic knowledge.

... and brings to mind, again, the distinction between competence and capability, a foundation of skills and competencies which are not ends in...

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