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.
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?
Things are fast and getting faster. Whole industry groups, whole professions, are disappearing from view. Who would have thought 10 years ago that General Motors and Chrysler would go broke? What’s missing, and where’s the opportunity?
It’s not a question that can be answered in quantitative terms, because the answer is a verb, not a noun, and nouns are the things that are disappearing. Verbs - processes, conversations, interactions - are ends as well as means, in the sense that entrepreneurs and business people are developing the capacity (and the confidence) to generate processes in their business, the outcomes of which are unknown, and rather than ‘driving’ outcomes, stepping back to see what emerges.
At Edgeware we have a sneaking suspicion that Twitter is going to turn out to be much more than the kind of life streaming’ we see going on right now. It has to do with the conciseness and simplicity of the medium (text only, 140 characters), its ease of use on mobile platforms, and its capacity to multicast very quickly. A recent case in point: yesterday Yollana Shore, one of my Twitter ‘followers’ (who I hasten to add, I also ‘follow’, as the result of a Twitter intro from a member of each of our Twitter networks), tweeted that she was looking for ideas about dealing with a negative mood. I recalled a teaching from the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who says that negative attitudes like anger and anxiety should be treated like an ‘errant little sister’, a pesky kid who gets on your wick but who you nevertheless love (she’s part of you, right?), so you should consider taking her by the hand, talking calmly to her, soothing her, walking with her, treating her gently until her anger subsides. I replied to Yollana, who liked it and RT’d (re-tweeted) immediately to her network of ‘followers’. One such, Isabel Grant, who I’ve never met, RT’d in turn to her followers, and one of them, Nancy Gray, RT’d it to hers. (I know this because they included my Twitter tag in the messages - goodness knows how much further it went if someone stripped out the tag!) Then, as icing on the cake, Yollana blogged on the experience, and now here we are in this blog, right now. The wisdom of that little monk just focused, multiplied, circled, spiralled and homed in to where it was needed.
A little compassion, it seems, can go a long way.
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