It’s interesting to me how one or two words can suddenly unlock a problem or tie disparate ideas and thoughts together.
I currently do some teaching and supervision with post-graduate students. I come from a commercial rather than an academic background so my approach is likely to be different from professional academics and trained educators. But the university system allows people with industry knowledge to pass their experience on to students, which has to be a good thing.
I’ve worked in a number of fields, but the most important things to me were to always have results in mind, and to establish strategies and tactics to enable those things to be achieved.
And building good relationships is an important element in achieving them.
Building relationships and achieving objectives is what I am doing with the students. It’s challenging because I find it hard to build relationships and develop understanding in a room of thirty people.
There are language and cultural obstacles to overcome. The student cohort is international so very few have English as their first language, and unfortunately I have it as my only language. I worked in a Japanese company in Europe for many years so I understand the challenges and have developed approaches to counter them.
And so to my point about how a couple of words can have particular significance.
After a day of supervision my head was buzzing with conversations and thoughts. As usual when I’ve gone to bed in this state, I woke early, and I had a couple the words in my head: guided co-discovery.
Being a practiser of what I preach, I keep a notebook and pen by the bed, so I jotted down ‘guided co-discovery’ and went back to sleep.
This morning I’ve been putting more flesh on the bones of guided co-discovery. Essentially it succinctly sums up what I do as a consultant with my Real Treasure Maps, and what I do with students to help them with their major projects.
It may be what trained teachers do, I don’t know enough to comment.
For me the principle is this. I have a lot of years under my belt. I’ve been curious and tenacious throughout those years. So in addition to doing the stuff of business in real life, I’ve been learning as I went along. Reading, making notes, trying to get better so I could help my employers do better.
Now I can see I’ve trodden a lot of paths, looking for the best routes, sometimes finding them sometimes not, but always reflecting and analysing.
Those paths are my experience. They have been hard fought and I have the bruises and scars we all get throughout life.
As a consultant, trainer, lecturer, supervisor, I believe I have a responsibility to share those life lessons; that curiosity and tenacity.
I do see myself as a guide in the field of co-discovery. I’m simply giving people a start and some directions. The journey is theirs to take.
The value surely comes from the journey – not merely the destination. In making this a joint venture I learn too. I get to share a little piece of a lot of journeys, and that sharing feeds my curiosity.
Guided co-discovery feels like a virtuous circle to me.
