“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which they have been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms them in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils their sense of reality, so that they are all too apt to take their concepts for data, their words for actual things.”
Aldous Huxley

Recently one of my long-term clients (I’ll call him Greg for the current purpose) was introduced to something called the skill-will matrix. He found it really useful as a trigger for shifting the way he was thinking about and acting in relation to the “performance” of a number of members of his team.coaching-skill-will-matrix

As far as I know the original idea for this comes from a simple and very practical book on coaching by Max Landsberg called The Tao of Coaching. Landsberg uses it as a “rule of thumb” way that coaches (or managers) might decide what style of coaching might be most useful and effective in a given circumstance. My client found it useful as a “reminder” of something that was in plain view for him. That not everybody is the same and that, therefore, as a manager with a strong desire to support his team into a happy and productive relationship with their work and each other, he needs to respond differently to different people and in different circumstances.

Greg pointed  to me that it is possible to identify people who, at least for the purpose of thinking about their work and what to do to support them, clearly fit into one of the elements of the matrix. He observed, however, that most people probably occupy a “space” in the middle of the matrix, “bumping around” if you like, among the elements. “Will” is not a mono-dimensional thing.  Neither is “skill”. Each of them is what it is in relation to a uniquely particular time and context.

This leads me to think about the “maps” we have that help us navigate our way around the complexities of leading, managing and organising. We have many of them and most can act as “reminders” of some aspect of our experience and can be useful to direct us back to a particular circumstance. None of them “represent” reality. The world we are part of is much “messier” than any model. Nonetheless many of these “maps” are useful reminders and can draw our attention to aspects of our experience that we might otherwise miss. The risk is only if we begin to take them as “descriptive” of reality, if we act as if the world as we experience it actually consists of matrices and checklists and the like.

That’s why I particularly liked the subtlety of Greg’s variation on the skill-will matrix. It “reminds” me that it is our engagement within our immediate experience of working together with others that is most significant in forming the way forward. The complex experiences that we conveniently “label” as skill and will inevitably wax and wane. Often, as we “bump around” in the metaphorical box at the centre of the matrix, we do so without noticing. Our feeling of being more or less “skilled” or more or less “willed” in relation to particular work or a particular person or group influences the way we respond in real time without our necessarily becoming aware. As so much of how we “go on together” depends on the way we relate and respond to each other, becoming more aware as we “bump around” in the centre of the matrix could be one way in which the pattern of that relating and responding might become different.

If we are to become more “aware” in the moment, though, it will not be by thinking about the matrix or by conscious effort. It will be by being more attune to our “feelings” – the bodily emotional and ethical responses that are, even if only momentarily, prior to conscious thought.