This is The Coaching In, a podcast from 3D Coaching. I'm Su Blanch from 3D Coaching and today I'm with my great colleague, Nikki McGinty. Nikki, I wonder if you could start by introducing yourself. Thanks Sue. Yes, good to be here. So I'm Nikki. I'm a freelance, I don't know what I call myself these days, change enabler, thinker, facilitator, trainer, coach, all sorts of things.
I have been... for the last, something of the order of, I think it's now 13 years, been working around the areas of leadership learning and change in all sorts of ways. And I come out of a corporate background, originally trained as an engineer, and that's been very formative, I think, having practical problem solving with people, which is what I think engineering at its heart is about, formed and shaped me.
And I look back with fondness at the... times of doing that but also realised that it was time for me to move on and so 13 years ago I quit the corporate space having been the head of change for a multinational so that was an area that had particularly formed and shaped me. My career went through from engineering to the more kind of HR, organisational development area into coaching, training, facilitating and change has been the sort of thread that I think has run through it.
So for the last few years I've worked as you say with 3D for I think something about six years now, it's been part of my work, which has been fabulous. I've also been working with some organisations on a regular basis and across all sorts of sectors, predominantly the church and charity sector, but also within some corporates, a bit of health service, a bit of education, and generally trying to join up what's the best of thinking that we can have at the moment.
And particularly for some of those in the faith space, how do we join up? What's good in the business world? What's good in the faith world and pull that together and make sense of it. So I find myself doing a mixture of those types of jobs, really. Some are ongoing, some are one offs. I also do a bit of large group work, which is a strand that I found interesting of how we have big conversations as well as little conversations.
So my work is anywhere from working one to one to one to a thousand. Yes. OK. So, so, so lots is the answer. Yeah, lots indeed. A rich and varied tapestry. And that's part of the reason for doing the mixture of work is that I do like the variety it gives. And that was one of the joys of moving to work as a working more out of the corporate space was it enabled me to do that. to make choices and to make a contribution in different ways. And the variety is great. Yeah, lovely.
Good, good, good, good. OK, so this morning we thought we'd have a bit of a think about change. That's clearly been, as you say, a thread through all of the work that you've been doing. So why, Nikki, why is it of interest to you? Let's start there. I think it became of interest to me when I found myself having to do it. This is back to my engineering days.
I worked in food manufacturing and particularly at that stage dog and cat food manufacturing for a large company and I found myself many years ago this was in my late 20s being asked to run to pull together two different teams into one team.
So there were two factories which were on the same site and traditionally they'd been run separately and they decided to try and mix it up a bit and have one team who worked across both factories so that they had more flexibility as to how they could get more production as and when they needed it from the different sides of the farm. So that was me trying to work it out. I had no clue, no training, nothing to start from.
And I found myself with a team of predominantly older, most, in fact, nearly all male. teams who just didn't want a budge and I found my thinking was so how on earth do we work together?
What could be a way through a change from where we are to where we want to get to and I made some horrific mistakes, got loads of things wrong and I learnt and I tried and we got there some of the time, not all of the time and it was a place for my discovery and it triggered a thought in me which is how could you do this well?
In what ways could you do this such that it makes it not easier because it's not always going to be easy but in what ways could this be a good experience and particularly the how do you take people with you question. How might you move together forwards which feels a good question to be asking at this current time.
So that became the kind of wrestling question that then has followed me and I've worked with and explored and encountered over the many years that have followed is that idea of how might this be possible. Yeah. And I talk a lot about working with change. I deeply dislike the idea of change management. I may have, you know, I've done some studying around this and I've read an awful lot of books with that title, but I think we work with change rather than manage it.
and that would be one of my initial starting reflections is you have to go with where it goes. You can't tidy up change and make it neat. Very rarely does that happen. Occasionally when it's simple you can do that, but nearly all the time we work with it rather than manage it. Yeah, yeah, well that's really interesting. And also, so this, so I'm sticking with... Why is it exciting for you to be thinking about change? And there's a great story at the beginning almost of your thinking.
Why are you still doing it? What's the excitement now? I'm still doing it because I genuinely believe that with a bit more thought we could be so much better at it. There's a healthy dissatisfaction in me that I think, you know, we still haven't got that. Lots of people have limited training in this area or expertise or, and just tend to try and kind of almost shout louder and hope it'll get better. And I have a hunch that there is a possibility we could do this differently and do it better.
And that genuine belief still stays with me. I think of lots of organizations I've worked in who want to do change and have realised that it's not as simple as it looks, but with a just tiny little bit of a something could get a bit better at doing that and could discover more and also could perhaps let go of trying to control it.
And I think that sometimes what scuppers our efforts often is a desire to make it, to hope that we can sort of control it and get it to go in a way we'd like it to, when we probably can't and therefore... working with it is a more appropriate metaphor. The more organic than the mechanical is my experience of change. It's not always about levers to pull and handles to turn. It's about how we enable growth in a way that takes us forward. And that still fires and excites me.
Yeah, good, good, good, good. Yes. And so I wonder then if we think about, you know, you referenced, our current situation. And I wonder if you've got any reflections that you can share with us about the now that we're in and change. Are there things that might be useful right now for us to be considering? Sure. I think the first one to notice is there's quite a big difference between change that we've chosen and change that's imposed.
So if we're thinking about Sometimes as leaders, as managers, we're wanting to be the people who start and enable change. And therefore there is a sense where we can set some direction and we're making a conscious choice to do that. And that has a whole set of things that comes with it. But the situation we're in at the moment isn't one of those. This is one that has come at us. None of us have consciously chosen this. And therefore I think that's...
That's the harder end of change is where it's imposed upon us. And many of us have had that experience well before the current situation of working in organisations where things have landed on us, where we've been asked to be change makers in different ways, where we haven't really bought in. And I think that's a tough one for us. And so first of all, noticing that imposed change is a layer of complexity that we need to explore.
And we have to try and do some thinking for ourselves about working with change that isn't our choice. And how do we cope with that? How do we, how do we feel about that? How do we get some sort of intellectual buy -in from ourselves to the idea of that? Because that's not really where we wanted to be.
So that would be one thought is that imposed, you know, the model we use sometimes, Peter Sencky's model, that when you tell someone to do something, They tend to push back because the engagement is low. And we're in that situation. We're not, you know, we, there's an awful lot of tell going on at the minute and it's hard to be creative and change when we're in a situation where there are, we, you know, this is how it is. There are lots of rules and structures that we have to fit within.
There isn't a huge amount of space to cope, to create at the moment. I think that's there, but we have to work out what all the boundaries are for us. So that's one sort of initial thought I would have. I think the second one is the model that has kept kind of coming back to me as I've been reflecting over the last few weeks and so on has been the William Bridges transition model, which I think many people might know, but here's a quick summary of it.
Bridges, an American, talks about there being a sort of psychological transitions that we go through and change.
He talks about a difference between hard change, which is things like starting a new project, opening a building, whatever it is, tangible things and soft change which is the inner psychological journey and that's the bit that he's interested in and I think for most of us that's the bit to focus on is the inner psychological change that we're going through and he suggests that when you work with change the starting point for most people is to let go of the old, to make endings.
He talks about the area of endings and most people beginning endings. Then he describes an area he talks about as the neutral zone or the wilderness of people wandering and wandering not quite sure where they are before we get to the new.
And his work is helpful because there's a temptation in all of us to sort of rush to the new and particularly those of us who are leading others and working with others and you see that in the current reflections around the way that government's trying to do it as to... we don't know what the new is and people are saying, please tell us the new and that tension about wanting to be heading towards the new that we don't quite know what that is.
So the thing I'm noticing, I guess, if we think about that endings neutral new is we've been pushed past some of the endings and I think we're going to need to go back and do some good endings. The current situation has forced us into a wilderness. into a neutral zone where we are doing some good experimenting, we're trying out things and people have different feelings about being in a wilderness.
For some people that's a good place, that's a creative, experimental, it can be the kind of place where everything's possible so let's give it a whirl or it can be a very unsettling, boundaryless, uncertain and scary place. And I think we're there at the moment not almost through choice.
And a lot of people looking backwards to what has been lost, the sense of trauma, of feeling ourselves that the world as we knew it, we thought we understood how it worked, we thought we knew what was safe and certain, suddenly none of that is. So we're having to renegotiate that space. So there are endings that we're going to have to keep working on. And there may be things we can do in this space that notice at least what the losses are.
But I'm concerned that if we're not careful, we will... sort of forget about that and then it might come and bite us later because we haven't done some of the endings.
Now there are very real endings, people losing people, that's an ending, but there are endings to how things were, how we worked, how we connected, there are all sorts of endings that we are working through and will need to keep working through and I think those of us who work in the area of being useful to others in their thinking is one that we're going to keep needing to return to over the next probably reasonable length of time to explore that and to find ways to do that.
We're in a situation where it's hard to have the endings we want or you know talking to friends who've lost people the whole situation with funerals means that we are going to need to rethink the saying goodbye to all sorts of things and that's going to need some work later. So there's that piece of work I think. There's also the How do we maximize or how do we gain something from the wilderness experience? What might we learn from being in a wilderness at the moment?
What glimpses of the new might we be seeing that we want to hold on and treasure? And what might be false hopes that we're just grabbing hold of? And noticing that for all of us, we have different places of comfort. As I said, some people... wanting to rush into the new world where everything is in a whole different place and others who are still just looking backwards and quietly weeping at what isn't there.
And that tension within all of us of how are we holding that, all of those three are true. We are all in endings, the neutral and the new and we're working out how to do that and in order to get through this we need to pay attention to ourselves. in all of those places and those around us in all of those places. That's such a helpful model, isn't it, to be thinking about those three places that we will all be travelling through and at different times, I guess, and in different ways.
And when we thought we knew things and now those things aren't solid, they've been blown apart, you know, it's... You used the word trauma and that feels really apt, doesn't it? I think there are, I think there's a lot of people traumatised. I think our organisations, our faith spaces, all sorts of places are going to be traumatised. And I think we can learn perhaps from people for whom that's their skill area and how we help people work through trauma in different ways.
That lack of consistency as we've known it. is going to be unsettling in many ways and there's been people beginning to think about that, reflect about that, the whole conversation about people's mental health is often connected into that of working with that sense of trauma of how we find our own ways through that. Yeah, yes it's really interesting and you know at some points we might be able to look back and see some things that we can't see at the moment.
But yes, the description of the neutral zone or the wilderness feels really what we see around us, right? We see. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other area I reflect on from my change thinking is that the early work on change was very linear. As I said, the mechanical, you know, we start off at A, we want to get to B and we do the following things and we get there. that idea of planned change is really that has gone.
We are now in an area, people talk about it as adaptive change or emergent change, complex change. We can only do a bit, try a bit, learn a bit, have another go. We're in a very different place of how we work with that, that the things don't go in straight lines anymore. So we're having to, therefore you're thinking about noticing. paying attention to what's around us, which perhaps this is an opportunity to do, to really be attentive to what's around us, what might be those things.
And that's one of the skills for a leader in change is keep scanning the near and the medium and the long -term horizon. What are we seeing? What might be some of the things that we are noticing are changing? And sitting light with them as well, because sometimes... things are changing but that's just a transient moment rather than a long -term trend.
Yes. So paying attention seems an important piece and the idea of therefore not having to invest in trying some things out, not knowing if they'll take us in the right direction, they might not get us to where we want to get to, we might not even know where we want to get to. Emergent Changes, one of the writers I like talks about walking through fog. And that's what it feels like at the moment is that you don't quite know where we're headed.
But as you, most of us, the experience of walking through dense fog is you have to walk forward a few paces and then you see the next part of the journey. We can't see the whole direction, but we can perhaps walk forward and try and work out where the next few steps lie. And that's another piece of this working with what's emerging in all the complexity around us and seeing if we can spot things that might be worth. paying attention to. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But how frustrating, Nikki, for those of us who like to see where we're heading. I know. And for those of us who like order, structure, planning, all of that. And therefore a little bit of that, you know, we do need to think. And there's been some good things around that, hasn't there, about how to survive lockdown has been what are some of the little structures you might put in? and what are the ones perhaps you can change.
So there is something about what are the nods in the direction of rather than full -blown structures that we might need. What might be some helpful boundaries to build in? What might be some gentle ways to explore? And I think the sense of change, those people I know who work well with change are people who have good self -sufficiency. supporting habits. They have developed practices that support and sustain them, which allows them to be the best they can be in tough and challenging times.
And I think that's another interesting question for us in Change is what are our habits that we want to have or that we've already built or we might want to tweak or what are some of the habits we might need to say, you know what, that was a good habit for then, but I think that one's passed its time. I might need to find that. And that we all know is really tough. The ability to embed new practices in our lives is never straightforward. We need to keep thinking about how we could do that well.
But I'm wondering what those might be for each of us. I've been thinking a lot for me around that, around what are the new habits to cultivate in this time that would strengthen and give me some of the ways to look at the world to move forward. And then that kind of coming back to the Bridges model is what you described as being creative in the neutral zone and being able to notice some stuff and do something about it. That's very helpful.
And to listen to all the different voices, to listening to people for whom this is just a scary, fearful place and for other people for whom this is the best thing ever and hugely exciting. So finding those places. Yeah, really, really, really good. Okay, so thank you. So there's some really helpful things that you've talked about in terms of change, particularly in this strange world that we're living through at the moment.
I'm intrigued, Nikki, to ask about another thing that I know that you're really interested in, and I'd love to know more about, which is about how... change and theology connects and I know that you've done huge amounts of thinking about this. I'm just wondering if I can ask, you know, in a couple of minutes, could you give us some sort of top line things that have been fascinating for you around this?
Sure, because the other part of my life when I did my introduction is the other reason I came out of the corporate space was to pursue my own vocational exploration and I have been a self -supporting priest in the Church of England now.
a decade or so and so this that that area of work has overlapped and I think I mean for me my faith journey has been about change and following a God who does change so those two for me are inextricably linked and I found the poignancy of sort of lockdown meets Easter very interesting and because all I know about change is that change is about letting go in order for new things to come. And that's the Easter story. There's a letting go in order that new might come. And that letting go is hard.
The Bridges model is about letting go in order that new things might come. And I think the whole creativity of holding with the idea of a creator is intrinsic to the work of change and to connecting to a world of wanting and genuine.
The thing I talked about earlier about kind of healthy dissatisfaction is also about, so that's again in my thinking theologically, is about there's a better way to do this, we could connect and I think one of the things we're noticing is what we want to be as community, society, congregations, groups of interest, all those things, what might that be, how do we find that and I think that's again...
How do we work through this together as a sort of at a societal level as well as at an individual level? Because this is impacting very deeply in all of us who are part, you know, as part of our society together. So I think that the themes are very connected and I think change is inevitable. And it's that again, believing that we can find a way through this and how do we walk through that well and gracefully is one of the challenges perhaps for us at this time. Yes, absolutely.
It's a very interesting thing to ponder, isn't it? How do we walk through this gracefully? And we possibly have seen some examples of that not happening. And so, yes, so what can I do to walk through this gracefully? That's something I'll have a good think about, Nikki. Thank you for that.
I think the other one is how might this be, again, if looking through the sort of faith history of most of the faiths, there have been prophetic voices that have suddenly landed and changed things when situations have been tough. And I'm also wondering where... Where are the prophetic voices at the moment that might be calling us into new places? And how do we discern and listen to those when there's all sorts of noise and clutter around us at the moment? Where might that be?
And that's another part of this, I think, is where do we see a way through and find new options, perhaps by being open? And again, change is about openness. Most of us are OK with change. We just don't like being done to. Yes. And this is the problem at the moment, is the feeling of done to. So how do we cultivate an attitude of openness rather than feeling done to? Let's feel free to think. Yes, thank you. Thank you for that. I could go on for so much longer. We may revisit.
We may revisit, Nikki. Absolutely. I think sometimes we've seen the whole area. I've had interesting conversations with people saying it will change as a business concept and I don't think it is. I think it's a life concept. that and rethink it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'd certainly like to do that, that would be great. Good, so I'm going to say a big thank you, Nikki, for the time we've spent this morning. I've really enjoyed it and have learnt loads, so I really appreciate that.
And if people want to get hold of you, Nikki, what's the way to get hold of you? So first of all, thank you. It's been good to talk this through and to do some thinking about this with you. So these ways to track me down is probably an email. I'm on nickynikky at NJMCG. nicki at njmcginty .co .uk that's probably the best way to get hold of me. For all 3D type work then it's nicki at 3dcoaching .com but particularly if it's about change then reach me on that email as the first point of call.
I'm on LinkedIn as well for those of you who use that. I'm there in a more business capacity so I'm there as Nicola McGinty instead of Nikki McGinty but by all means send me a link through that if you'd like to make contact that's another option. Wonderful, thank you. Thanks very much, Nikki, that's absolutely brilliant. And just as I'm saying goodbye, I'm reminding everybody that here I am, Sue Blanch, I've been talking to Nikki McGinty this morning. Thank you very much, Nikki. Thank you.
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