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In Indigenous Australia, traditional pedagogies emphasise the tacit (as distinct from explicit) transfer of knowledge. This plays out naturally in contemporary notions of the value of mentors. If you want to learn to hunt, don’t worry about the the How to Hunt books on the Hunting and Personal Development shelves. Find somebody who knows, attach yourself, serve, model, reflect, actualize. Action learning and action research resonate in this domain, the commitment to experience things first hand and learn, in stages, from this experience. Including experiences of failure.
“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 ‘progressing’ our skills and capacities, as if this was just some kind of iterative and cumulative process - that is, as if we were merely intelligent machines - is a limiting concept.
A lot of Edgies kick-start their business from savings, leveraging a mortgage, or from a credit card, and this is often sufficient to generate the momentum which will eventually enable conventional financing. Bootstrapping (as in pulling yourself up by the bootstraps) has several advantages:
- You retain equity in and control of your business
- You demonstrate the capacity of your business to generate value, starting from scratch
- You demonstrate your own confidence in the business through your willingness to expose yourself financially
- You experience the risk and the burn
Putting together a coaching bureau is an interesting challenge. I’ve been working on this for some months, gathering together half a dozen friends and colleagues with coaching experience in a group I hope will make a very wide range of expertise available to my customers, *Edgies*, entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of their business. It’s a challenge because not only should these people implicitly and explicitly understand and accept Edgeware’s DNA - *Make money, have fun, change the world* - but each shoud demonstrate a skill set which has ’stand-alone’ value and also particular strengths in one area or another, hence the value of a bureau, a menu of talent and experience from which Edgeware’s customers might benefit.
And there are subtler intangibles. Edgeware tends to generate a tribality among its customers, I guess because of the camaraderie inspired through its emphasis on the personal journey and social responsibility, the simultaneous looking inwards and outwards, and this familial orientation in turn seems to inspire a need for elders and *eldering*.
In some Indigenous Australian cultures, pubescent children are raised not by their direct parents but by uncles and aunts. These elders have the same regard for the children as the parents, the same responsibilities, the same drive to protect, guide, nurture and correct, but *they’re not Mum and Dad*.
And so, for Edgeware’s coaches, we seek not only capable and complementary skill sets but also capacity for unclehood and aunthood. I wonder: who would you choose, if you could, as your uncle or aunt?
Starting up, emerging entrepreneurs need mentors, coaches and critical friends. We can think of these as the uncles and aunts to the growing baby. (Edgies so often claim they feel that their business is their baby, with all the frustration and heartache and untrammelled joy that infers.)
Babies can get different parenting. Some parents want their baby to grow up faster, smarter, richer than the other kids, some want them to grow up to be loving, compassionate, generous, maybe even happy, some want all of those things.
We’re interested in the mummies and daddies who want their kids to grow up saying ‘yes’ to three questions: Is what you’re doing sustainable; is what you’re doing meaningful; and is what you’re doing responsible?
