While Kenning coaches do sometimes help our clients learn how to invent and adopt entirely new behavior patterns, we often are asked to help our clients bring behaviors they already exhibit in one context to a different context. As Ishan, a VP I recently worked with, put it, “My boss, the CIO, tells me I need to be more assertive in steering committee meetings with the senior executive team. I feel like I am actually pretty good at being engaged and even quite challenging with my peers and my teams, so I know what she is talking about, but I don’t want to look foolish by saying something I am not 100 percent sure I am right about in groups where I don’t know the people as well or where I feel like the stakes are high.”

When I asked what seemed like a pretty straightforward question, “So why don’t you act the way you do with your peers with the executive team?” Ishan responded with an answer that was at once surprising and the most likely thing in the world: “I don’t know. It would feel risky.” Rationally, my client already knew perfectly well that it was probably much more risky for him to maintain this two working modes split than to bring more of his “working with peers” style to senior team meetings, but he was legitimately unsure why doing so seemed so hard, or at least so unsafe.

Clearly there is a sense-making challenge here that needs to be addressed for my client to achieve lasting, self-generative growth as a leader- what is the thinking that gives rise to his actions, and what are the deep assumptions and assumptions that underwrite that thinking? At the same time, though, while a strictly behaviorist approach may not be sufficient, some reasonably clear behavior changes are necessary: can my client, in identified situations, produce behavior A, which he is already quite capable of elsewhere, instead of behavior B, which he has been told is not serving him?

In cases like this, it may be helpful to think of the behavior challenge as a 4-part task:

• Identifying triggers prospectively
• Noticing habitual behavior
• Having a clearly articulated alternative in your mind
• Reducing the amount of time it takes to go from noticing to producing the alternative

What does each of these tasks entail, and how do they relate to each other in a systematic program of experimentation and reflection?

Identifying triggers prospectively

I am not a big fan of the term “trigger” because it comes with a fair amount of political baggage at the moment, but I use it here because it actually describes what one is looking for more accurately than an alternative phrasing such as “watch out for pitfalls.” The difference, in my mind at least, is that we are looking for not only a clear picture of the specific moments when the client might be likely to slip into a familiar but less than ideal behavior, but also at least a hypothesis about what it is about those situations that calls out the behavior. In other words, what are the situations you have to be on the look for, and what is it about these situations that make them challenging?

Ishan initially described the problematic situations as larger group meetings with very senior executives where topics he does not necessarily know more thoroughly than anyone in the room are being discussed. That’s a useful starting point, but to really develop an effective internal early warning system, Ishan needed at least some notion about what it is in these situations that drives his behavior. We first considered if it might have something to do with his relationship to authority, meaning that he felt a need to be deferential to superiors? Ishan reflected that his boss had told him several times that he is very good and pushing back on her, and that others in positions in authority had said similar things. Was the difference in his behavior driven by being in a fairly large group instead of engaging one-on-one? Ishan thought that might be part of it, but he could think of a variety of group situations where he was more assertive. We continued to consider what the trigger might be: people he knew well vs people he did not no well? Ishan’s level of expertise as compared to the expertise of other in the room? Eventually we decided that the best way to understand why Ishan might become overly passive in these meetings might be best understood as being a function of his perceived risk, and his reflexes for protecting himself in situations which, for a variety of reasons, felt “high stakes” instead of “low states.” While this hypothesis about the trigger is really just an initial doorway into the sense-making work that we needed to do, it was sufficient for us to be able to provide a robust definition of the situations when Ishan might need to be on the look out for passivity.

Noticing habitual behavior

Having establish the conditions when an unhelpful behavior might show up, the next step.