Last week I attended the ORSC Intelligence course in Singapore, the second in the ORSC™ series. This blog is about my experiences which I found very valuable for Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters working with change in Organisations and Teams.
This was the awesome group of coaches I got to work with lead by our awesome facilitators David Darst and Abi Shilon.
What is ORSC?
ORSC™ stands for Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching.
ORSC™ is a paradigm shift from having a tight focus on the individual and performance within the group to viewing the 3rd entity – view the System (or relationship) as the client and a softer focus on the individuals.
For an Agile Coach / Scrum Master it provides specialised skills and tools to work with organisations and teams. These skills and tools set you up to better coach the organisation/team relationship (as a whole system) and begin to let go of one-on-one individual coaching within teams.
ORSC™ brings Systems Thinking to coaching. It is influenced and builds upon Emotional Intelligence (EQ), Process Work, Change Theory and Taoism.
What’s the focus of ORSC Intelligence?
ORSC™ Intelligence provides a robust toolkit for increasing emotional resilience in the face of change. The 3 day course revolves around Edges and Change Theory represented through this simple yet powerful model:
Our Primary process is where we are now, it’s what we are aware of and identify with. The Secondary process is something new that is trying to happen, something trying to come into our identification and awareness and increasingly demanding our attention.
The edge is the dividing territory between the primary and secondary processes, at the limit of what we know about ourselves. Wherever there is growth we encounter edges. To support that growth coaching at these edges is critical (and sometimes frustrating). It requires the use of MetaSkills like Curiosity and Deep Democracy that increase awareness to support making change conscious for the system (relationship).
The course teaches how to recognise “edge behaviours” that show up when these edges are occuring. As most communication is non-verbal you learn how to detect signals (packets of new unprocessed information) that can show up through different channels (e.g. someone lets out a big sigh, they turn toward or away, they doodle something). You learn skills to unfold these signals that increase awareness for the system that might support crossing an edge.
You also learn the ground rules for successful change, how to get started and what to expect.
Why is this useful?
In the 3 days I picked up new skills and tools that increase my ability to coach organisations and teams, to help raise awareness of what is trying to happen and for them to navigate edges that lead towards successful change.
Agile teams embed continuous improvement into their way of working through Retrospectives. Teams are continually coming up against edges as part of their growth.
The focus for a Scrum Master and Agile Coach includes coaching the organisation, often as we help teams on their journey to high performance we find organisational impediments that hold them back. Raising awareness in the organisation of what is trying to happen and the edges occurring will help the overall system cross these edges in support of systemic improvement.
Who’s involved in Agile Transformations? How many edges occur here? You get the idea!
What’s Next?
The next in the series is ORSC™ Geography that digs into roles and structure, it explores how to recognise and nurture the structures of relationships. It’s coming to Australia in 2019 and I can’t wait 🙂
