COACHING AS A MINDSET HACK Coaching in immersive game simulations to develop dispositions for learning, leadership and teaming: across geographies, generations, functions and disciplines.
By Phillip Crockford At VTeaming, we have been pushing the boundaries of coaching. We coach leaders to cultivate a growth mindset by developing dispositions: essential soft skills for learning, leadership and teaming. Drawing on the work of thought leaders like Amy Edmondson, Fernando Flores, Robert Dunham, Reg Revans, Sylvan Tomkins, Daniel Kahneman and many others, we coach small teams as they work to accomplish assignments inside the immersive simulation environments offered by MMOs (massively multiplayer online games). As a complement to executive coaching, regular workshop-style and online blended learning, this deeply experiential approach provides the high level of immersive engagement and psychological safety needed for the skilful coach to prompt the coachee to observe emotions and learn in action with others – from both success and failure.
Accelerating Change The context for the future of coaching Coaching is an idea whose time has come, principally because it is such a powerful and adaptable approach for coping effectively with change in any field of endeavour. Change has always been part of the landscape of life, but now human activity is actually accelerating the pace of change. In every area of life, old ways of living and working are going away as new ones emerge with increasing rapidity.
In the space of two or three generations, we humans have become so numerous and so energy-intensive that climate change is attributed to our collective activity and even the ecosystem services that support us are compromised. Other unknowns are in the mix: gene technology, mass extinction, AI and machine learning, social media manipulation.
Entirely new phenomena like these make our future even more ambiguous and uncertain. Communications technologies and digital transformation amplify and accelerate: global economic activity has increased seven-fold in the last fifty years. The hyper connectivity of communication technology is accelerating the swirling currents of social change in ways that many of us have difficulty coping with.
