Q: What is “Funnel” Coaching?

A: “Funnel coaching“ is a technique I use to add increasingly more structure to coaching engagements so that people learn to handle ambiguity. It’s the opposite of the typical approach of starting with all kinds of structure and then peeling away layers, and frankly, I think it works better. (1) it creates a live experiment in which the coaching engagement itself is ambiguous, (2) it provides crystal-clear feedback about how much ambiguity the the coachee can and can’t handle (the coachee goes from uncomfortable to comfortable as more structure is applied during the live experiment, making it hard to claim, “Yeah, but I’m normally good in those situations…” No, you weren’t, you needed additional clarity, now let’s help get you to where you want to be!), and (3) the coachee is forced to struggle, which is where real learning takes place. You can’t learn to swim by reading about it, and you can’t learn to handle ambiguity by only studying models. At some point, you need to engage.

Is this model for everyone? No. It’s only for people who aspire to lead. If you don’t want to lead, don’t do this—it can be frustrating, it provides too much unescapable feedback about how you stack up, and it requires too much work. You don’t need the grief if it’s not part of a larger goal; you don’t need the stress if you don’t care to build your confidence through frequent, small, tests.

Funnel coaching is based on a teaching model that I found consistently employed in my best classes at school. By “best,” I mean those classes I really learned something in, that I can still remember today as having made an impact. For instance:

1. Financial Decisions at Kellogg: Each week was a case study that required some sort of valuation or NPV analysis, and there was always a problem of some kind in the analysis for which we were unprepared (like how to indirectly value a piece of a private company). We’d learn how to handle the “trick” of the case in class, after debriefing what we had done and looking silly.

1. Negotiations at Kellogg: Each week was a case study, and the order of the exercises was set up so that if you tried to use what you had learned the week before, you walked straight into a new trap. In this way, we came to see exactly the impact that emotion, multiple parties, ethics, power, culture, financial incentives, agents, etc. have on the negotiations process… and how to recognize them in real time. Of course, this was after we posted our results publicly and defended our process in front of the class, fully aware that we had probably fell for the trap.

1. Highland Park High School: I had two English teachers who would put me on the spot and ask me (and others) to defend or interpret a piece. I distinctly remember being asked to explain Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle” the moment I finished reading it aloud. I took a guess, and the teacher asked why I had interpreted the way I did. I had no place to hide. Then he told me where I was right, what I had missed, and where to look for clues while reading. He wasn’t being Socratic—he was incredibly supportive—and I walked away with a deeper appreciation for a piece of poetry than I had previously thought possible for a 15 year old boy to have. No place to pretend, “I knew that.” I was forced out of my comfort zone, and I learned as a result.

1. 4th Grade at Red Oak: The first time I was exposed to this method was in 4th grade in Paul Grant’s class. I don’t think I’ve ever felt smarter than I did in that class, but I also don’t think I was ever confronted with how much I didn’t know as much as in that classroom, either. Mr. Grant was a master at helping people learn by making brutal honesty fun. “OK,” I’d think, “I guess I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Now how do I learn that so I can get that smart?!” Mere mention of that year makes me smile, as it does the others who were in that class with me. I’m not sure I’ll ever do it quite as well as Mr. Grant, but it’s a goal.

Is the process of making someone uncomfortable and frustrated unfair? No way. Shouldn’t we be building students up, making them feel smart every step of the way? At every step of the way, no. On the whole, yes. When we get comfortable, we get lazy. We begin to overemphasize ourselves. Constantly telling a student she’s bright can actually close down the learning process because it can cause her to ask fewer questions and make more assumptions. The way to build someone up is to create a safe place for them to fail, and then help them iterate through failure until they achieve mastery. Celebrate the successes along the way, celebrate the final win big time, and be supportive during the failures, but don’t ever pretend that failure alone is a good thing. It’s not. It’s just not a bad thing, either… it’s a natural part of the learning process.

Learning happens in the struggle! If you walk around with a model in your head, you’ll use that same model for every problem, including problems for which the model is inappropriate. (As they say, “If all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.”) It’s not enough to have the model; you also need to know when to use it. Struggling through issues helps you asses when and where to use those precious models and creates linkages in your mind between them… and guess what: handling ambiguity is being able to do just that.

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