If you’re already practicing Coaching Kata, you might have noticed that the set of questions on Maggie’s card slightly differs from the original version of Coaching Kata questions. Why’s that? Let’s explore.
The two sides of the Coaching Kata
The word kata has two meanings. A kata is a practice routine, a set of steps, for learning a specific skill. In addition, Kata means a way of doing something. In 2009, Mike Rother published a set of five questions, which he called Coaching Kata. These questions provide a starting point and practice routine for leaders desiring to coach their teams for developing a more scientific way of thinking and collaborating.
Underlying the Coaching Kata questions is a five-phase coaching model. A way of coaching for developing a more scientific mindset. That is what I call the Coaching Kata Model.
What makes the Coaching Kata model so powerful is its dual purpose.
Like other coaching models, the Coaching Kata Model provides a structure for helping individuals or teams to reflect, make decisions, solve a specific problem, and reach challenging goals.
Additionally, the Coaching Kata Model serves a second purpose: Develop a more scientific way of thinking and exploring – through repeated coaching interventions.
The Coaching Kata Model aims at developing a meta-skill that will not only help a person or team succeed with the topic at hand but set them on a path of continuous success, despite uncertainty and complexity.
The purpose of skill development makes coaching conversations based on the Coaching Kata Model slightly different from what we usually perceive as coaching in a business or personal context.
The purpose of the Coaching Kata questions and why to use them deliberately at the beginning:
The questions of the Coaching Kata provide a starting point and structure for learning to coach based on the Coaching Kata five-phase model. Of course, coaching needs more than just using the starter set of questions.
Deliberately using and following these questions at the beginning will help us develop the Coaching Kata five-phase model as a mental model. That model will help us to coach in a wide array of situations. It’s a universal coaching model based and aimed at a scientific way of thinking and working.
Over time, we'll realize that the questions of the Coaching Kata are like steppingstones. They structure the conversation into five phases. Each steppingstone question opens a new phase of the coaching cycle.
As the five-phase Coaching Kata model evolves in our brain, the questions of the Coaching Kata will turn more into these steppingstones. They structure the conversation into five phases. Each steppingstone question opens a new phase of the coaching cycle. Over time, the exact wording of the questions will fade into the background, while the model and the phases of the coaching conversation remain.
Coaching for developing a meta-skill
The Coaching Kata questions are also like an investigation instrument for the coach.
How do we develop a person’s ability? Imagine booking a day with a ski instructor to improve your skiing, given you already have some basic skiing skills.
What will the instructor do first? Ask you to ski some lengths of a slope to give them the opportunity to observe your current condition of skills.
Then they will compare their observations with a reference in their mind and derive the deviations. Based on that, they will define a first learning focus and then start giving specific advice or run you through a specific exercise.
That is a good model to have in mind when coaching. First, understand the current condition of the person’s ability and thinking. Compare it with our reference of a scientific way of thinking and identify deviations. Then react based the analysis.
But how do we understand the current condition of a person's ability and way of thinking? As with a ski coach, it is by giving a task and observing. In a coaching cycle, this happens by asking a question and listening to the answer.
Asking one of the open questions of the Coaching Kata helps us see the approach and the underlying thinking of the other person.
That is, if we listen to the answer carefully without being biased by our opinion. That might be even harder than asking the right questions. An experienced coach would not only listen to the words, but also recognize body language and intonation to grasp how the other person thinks and feels. Just like a ski instructor would.
Using the Coaching Kata questions helps us understand how the other person is thinking.
For that reason, the questions should be as open as possible to influence the answer as little as possible. At the same time, the steppingstone questions should reflect the meta-skill, the way of thinking and acting we desire to practice as precisely as possible.
Design criteria for the Coaching Kata questions:
Provide a starting point and structure for coaches that helps them develop a five-phase universal coaching model. As a result, we should aim for a minimum number of questions that are easy to remember and resemble the five-phase Coaching Kata model.
Develop a more scientific way of thinking with the person we coach. The questions and their order must train the scientific way of thinking we want to develop.
Help the coach understand how the other person is thinking. The questions should be minimum influential while still fulfilling criteria two.
Now let’s look at the differences between Maggie’s set of starter questions and the original Coaching Kata questions you might know:
Criteria 1: Provide a starting point.
As a starting point, the Coaching Kata should contain as few questions as possible. The more questions new coaches must learn, the harder it is. Think like this: What minimum set of questions can we provide for a beginner to still run an effective coaching conversation?
That idea has resulted in the following:
The question “What did you learn from taking the last step” is the only question on the last step on Maggie’s card. That allows for placing it on the front side of the card. Actually, there is just a front side to Maggie’s card to make things as easy as possible.
Beginner coaches often jump to question four (next step) too quickly after the obstacle to address has been chosen. That can easily result in a next step based on assumptions without understanding effect and cause. It might even reinforce an action oriented mindset and a trial and error approach. That’s the reason for adding “and what exactly is the problem” to phase three of the Coaching Kata starter questions. That question provides a safety net for beginner coaches to avoid jumping to assumption-based action. Also, it serves as an opening point for investigating what is causing the obstacle.
Here is an example based on one of Denise’s early coaching cycles.
Denise: “Which Obstacles are preventing you from reaching the target condition?”
Mark: “Damaging the sealing during the assembly, jamming nuts when assembling the motor lid, and problems when plugging in the cable on the controller board.”
Denise: “Which one are you addressing now?”
Mark: “The problems with the controller board cable.”
Denise: “What is therefore your next step”?
Mark: “I think the cable is simply too short. I will talk to Rosalyn from purchasing to find out if we can get a longer cable from the supplier.“
This is the point where Denise realizes, we are jumping to conclusions.
A simple way to help beginner coaches is adding the question “what exactly is the problem” in phase three and before moving to phase four. This often helps people rethink their understanding of the obstacle, prevents jumping to a premature step, and instead dig deeper into effect and cause.
Criteria 2: Develop a more scientific way of thinking.
The question about the obstacles contains neither the word “currently” nor “do you think”. An experienced person will tend to list current obstacles in their answer, or give a reason for listing future or past obstacles as well.
Secondly, we would rather not invite people to “think up” obstacles. We would like to discover actual obstacles through experiments. Creating a path by walking it.
Criteria 3: Understand how the other person is thinking.
A difficult part in truly understanding the way the other person thinks is not to influence the answer by the questions we ask. Of course, there is no human interaction that will have zero effect on the people involved. However, we should try to have the least influence, which is why we ask open questions and why suggestive questions are a no-go.
Especially the first questions, we ask for every of the five phases should leave maximum room for the other person to answer them in their own way. This is what simply asking “what did you learn from taking your last step” does.
One person might answer:
As a last step, I planned to do A…
and expected B to happen.
When I actually conducted the experiment, C happened…
from which I conclude D.
Here we see the parts that make for a good scientific approach in phase two of the coaching cycle.
Reflect on 'last step planned' and 'original expectation / hypothesis'.
Compare it with the 'result' that actually happened.
Based on the comparison, draw a conclusion or finding.
Another person might only answer, “It did not work“ or even explain a different step.
From the answers to the Coaching Kata questions, the coach can learn about the other person's thinking patterns.
Now imagine the Coach asking all the following questions in this order:
What did you plan as your last step?
What did you expect?
What actually happened?
What did you learn?
There is hardly any room to get off track. It feels a bit like steering with a remote control through this part of the coaching cycle. This can easily disguise the actual way of thinking.
That is why Maggie’s card starts the reflection with the open question “what did you learn from taking your last step” first.
If the answer seems disconnected from the last step, an experienced coach might follow up with “what did you plan as your last step” as a deepening question.
If the answer is linked to the last step but not matching the expectation developed in the last coaching cycle, a coach might throw in “what did you expect” as a further deepening question.
Every question influences the answer. Let’s ask a minimum influential question at the beginning of each phase.
Closing remarks:
To be clear: I don’t think you should change the Coaching Kata starter questions card you might be already using in your organization. I am just proposing to invite experienced coaches to step back a bit in phase two and first ask “what did you learn from taking your last step”. Then react situationally with deepening questions depending on the answer.
Also, I would like to invite coaches to increase their awareness of how tiny words can influence the answer. For example, some coaches tend to ask “which biggest obstacle will you address next“, thus adding only one word — ‘biggest’.
That primes people to prioritize for the biggest and hides how they would have prioritized the obstacles without the priming.