Essays on art and coaching
A leadership team in front of one picture
The walk is a public practice. Its mechanics also work in a boardroom, with one image and ninety minutes, if the coach is willing to run it as coaching and not as an icebreaker.
Since October I have been asked, more than once, whether something like the walk could work for a leadership team. The answer is yes, with conditions, and the conditions are the interesting part.
The format I use is smaller than a walk. One photograph, printed large, in a room with the chairs already in a circle and no table. Six to ten people. Ninety minutes. One question under the picture, chosen for the team and not for the public. Ten minutes of silent looking, which for a group of executives is the longest ten minutes of their quarter. Then a circle run on exactly the rules of THE WALK: no interpretation, passing is a complete answer, questions anyone in the room could answer.
The first condition is that it is coaching, not a warm-up. I have watched facilitators use an image for five minutes at the start of an offsite and then move to the slides. That trains the room to treat the picture as decoration. If the image is in the room, it is the agenda. The slides can wait until tomorrow.
The second condition is the question. For the public walk the questions are personal and universal. For a team they can be collective and still open. In front of the corridor, a team can sit with "Where, as a group, do we move without noticing?" It is a question about culture, asked in a way that nobody can answer with a slide, and the only reason to run the exercise is that the answers will not be the ones the most senior person in the room expected.
The third condition is the hierarchy in the room. In a public walk the people in the circle are strangers and equal. In a team the most senior person's answer shapes everyone else's, and a skilled coach manages this quietly: the senior person speaks last in the first round, not first, and the coach asks for one sentence from everyone before anyone gets a second. The picture helps here more than any ground rule, because people answer the picture and not the boss.
The fourth condition is what happens afterwards. A team that has spent ninety minutes being honest in front of a photograph will want to turn the honesty into actions, and the coach has to decide whether to let them. My practice is to close the circle as a circle, with the same minute of silence, and to hold the planning for a second session. Rushing from reflection to action list is how organisations convert something true into something manageable, and the value of the first ninety minutes is that nothing in it was manageable.
What this produces, when it works, is not agreement. It is accuracy. People describe the organisation they have always worked in and, for once, describe it in the same terms. That is a modest result and a rare one, and it is worth ninety minutes of a leadership team's time more often than a slide deck is.
If you coach teams and want to try it, start with an image you did not choose for its meaning and a question you could not answer yourself. Ten minutes of silence. Then the simplest question you have: "What do you notice?" Then wait longer than feels polite.