Sam Grayston

Tag: coaching

  • Rethinking Boundaries: Lessons from the Ashes 🏏

    Rethinking Boundaries: Lessons from the Ashes 🏏

    With the Ashes about to begin again, this time in Australia, I’ve found myself thinking about boundaries. Not just the rope around the edge of the cricket field, but the kind we’re encouraged to set in our personal and working lives.

    I loved the 2005 Ashes. I was utterly absorbed, listening to Test Match Special, watching as many deliveries as I could as England snatched that unforgettable victory from Australia. I remember one of my friends sharing his love for cricket by saying “It’s such an amazing game: you can play for five days and come out with a draw”.

    But as the Ashes has come around this time, the idea of boundaries has been playing on my mind in an unexpected way.

    Boundaries everywhere…except in cricket

    We’re encouraged, rightly, for the most part, to set clear personal boundaries which are healthy. Gen Z in particular is frequently praised for being better than previous generations at setting and holding them. When we understand what is acceptable to us and what is not, we create the conditions to flourish.

    Most sports reflect the same logic. Boundaries define the limits of play and help maintain control. Step outside the line in rugby, football, netball, basketball, or hockey, and play stops. The boundary represents the edge, or the point at which play halts and the boundary-crosser loses control.

    Cricket inverts this logic. 🏏

    In cricket, breaking the boundary is celebrated. If the ball reaches it along the ground, the batting side earns four runs; if it sails clean over, they earn six.

    The boundary isn’t a barrier…it’s a marker of success!

    Where most sports insist you stay within the lines to keep playing, cricket rewards you for going beyond them.

    A different kind of limit

    That swap feels worth exploring. It suggests that not all boundaries exist to constrain us. Some are meant to be crossed. Some show us what success looks like.

    Think of hierarchical boundaries, policy boundaries, cultural boundaries, or the quiet habitual boundaries we rarely question. Some are essential and protective. Others are flexible. Some are assumptions hiding as rules. And some, perhaps, sit far too close to us, defining a comfort zone we’ve mistaken for a limit.

    Cricket illustrates this beautifully. When a ball is clearly racing away towards the rope, commentators often say the fielders shouldn’t bother chasing. It’s gone too far. The runs are already earned. The boundary, in that moment, is not an obstacle but a signal of achievement.

    The long game

    I’m not advocating a Bazball approach to life – swinging wildly in every direction in the hope of racking up runs. Like Test cricket, life usually needs a blend of patience and ambition. Sometimes we play a defensive shot. Sometimes we take the single. And sometimes we take a lovely cover drive that carries us beyond the rope.

    In a Test match, the game unfolds over long periods of time, with momentum shifting subtly over hours or days. Success isn’t just about bold strikes, it’s about understanding the game’s rhythm.

    So perhaps the question isn’t: Should I have boundaries?

    But rather: What kind of boundary is this – and what is it for?

    Useful boundaries, debatable boundaries, and the ones worth playing with

    I know from experience that clear personal and professional boundaries support my wellbeing. They help me focus, recover, and make thoughtful choices.

    But it’s possibly true that some boundaries deserve scrutiny.

    Some are rigid and non-negotiable, some are assumptions we inherited, some mark the edges of our fears rather than our true limits.

    Some are there to protect us and some might just be pointing us towards what success could look like—if we dared to push further.

    A thought to take into the Series

    As we settle into another Ashes series of five days, five matches, and all the drama, there remains an intriguing paradox: Cricket is played within boundaries…yet it celebrates the moments when those boundaries are crossed.

    Perhaps the same is true in life? Not all lines are drawn to keep us in – sometimes they show us how far we can go.

    P.S. I’ve taken a different approach to writing this blog. I did lots of rambling into a voice note and refined it with an LLM. Then I’ve polished it and put my own ‘spin’ back on it. What do you think?

  • Stop the Arsonists: Better Leadership for Burning Workplaces

    Stop the Arsonists: Better Leadership for Burning Workplaces

    “I’m always firefighting. There’s no time to think.”

    I can’t remember the first time I heard this phrase, but I hear it A LOT – particularly when I’m coaching senior leaders in transformative and project leadership roles.

    And whilst evocative of modern time-management (or lack thereof) has to be a better way, right? Well this got me thinking, and a confluence of three things sparked this blog:

    1. Someone using this phrase in a coaching session…again!
    2. Reading about systems thinking.
    3. Watching the Apple TV+ show, Smoke.

    A bit of context about each, and then the thought…

    The phrase

    It paints a clear picture…or we can all think of the meme with the cartoon dog in the house that’s on fire saying ‘this is fine’…everything’s going a million miles per hour and we have to move from one crisis to the next, urgent to urgent to urgent – never doing the important things we promised ourselves we’d do, like strategic thinking, self-development, 1:1s with others, improving processes, etc.

    Systems Thinking

    This is something that I’ve dabbled with on and off for years. In the first instance, I didn’t really get it. Someone sent me a video of blobs moving around rectangles and said ‘I think you’re going to love it’…

    More recently, I’ve come to understand more about systems and how interconnected everything is – that is, whatever happens may be as of a result of something else far away in the system, or whatever we do may have far reaching and unintended consequences on the wider system. And that, traditionally, when things go wrong people tend to analyse; that is, break the problem down into smaller and smaller constituent parts – e.g. an app fails and analysis tells us a line of code needs rewriting, whereas Systems thinking asks us to synthesise, or to look up at the wider systemic nudges that may cause the problem – e.g. an app fails because of management pressure to ship fast on smaller budgets.

    Smoke

    This is a show on Apple tv+ about a fire scene investigator partnering up with a cop to identify and catch two serial arsonists. No spoilers, but it’s far more compelling than I thought it might be to start with. The fire scene investigator character, played by Taron Egerton, often delivers talks to trainees about the chaos of fire and being prepared.

    The confluence

    This got me thinking, if a fire kept happening in the same place, you wouldn’t want to keep relying on the fire brigade/department to come and put it out…you’d solve the reason why the same thing kept happening…so why don’t we do this at work when people describe their entire jobs as ‘fire fighting’?

    I can’t imagine a fire fighter loving having to revisit a scene time and time again if a fire keeps getting ignited there – they’d want to put some other measures in place – systemic changes – sprinklers, better equipment, arrest the arsonists, create escape plans.

    This approach could apply to the highly flammable systems in the workplace because it’s not ok to perpetually expect colleagues to be fire-fighters – presumably we want them spending their time adding value and putting their hard-won skills and experiences to work rather than rushing around, meeting to meeting, putting out things that have gone wrong.

    Setup Sprinklers

    In the immediate term, a knowledge-work equivalent of the sprinkler system might need setting up. If a fire keeps breaking out, having something to immediately dampen it down might be a reasonable temporary solution. In our imagined knowledge-work based equivalent, maybe that’s a standing meeting, decision forum, Andon Cord, or emergency WhatsApp channel that can be triggered straight away to solve the biggest crises and challenges.

    Improve Equipment and Systems

    The system is broken if fires keep breaking out. The system needs fixing. In the same way that if a restaurant kept catching fire they might need some better quality ovens, in our knowledge-work environment, we need higher quality systems that avoid these fires breaking out. Maybe it’s visualising all the work that’s going on so that people can see a potential fire brewing. Maybe it’s limiting work in progress so that more work can’t be shoved into an already overloaded system. Maybe it’s building in slack, recovery, creativity time into work.

    To continue the fire metaphor, sometimes a fire-break is required in order to break the spread of the chaos and put new systems in place and so it may be with our work systems. It’s not ok that colleagues describe their working days as perpetually being on fire, we have to find better systems.

    Arrest the Arsonists

    If you’re the fire fighter in this scenario, then I’m going to assume it’s not you lighting the fires…you keep putting them out. So who IS lighting them? Stop them. Take their jerry cans of fuel away.

    If it’s people adding stuff to your plate, check out the No Repertoire from Greg McKeown; if it’s people bringing you down, stop spending time with them; if people change their mind every five minutes, perhaps introduce something like the RAPID decision-making framework and force people to take some responsibility.

    Develop Escape Plans

    And, if it can’t be prevented, fire breaks out – then you need an escape plan. Getting away from your desk for a minute to assess the situation, having a friend to call, taking a holiday, going for a walk all may be release valves for dealing with these situations.

    There’s a reason firefighters have to have breaks and spend a lot of time training – it’s not tenable to be doing it all the time. And it isn’t for us either. We need breaks, we need training, we need recovery if we’re going to have to fight fires at work.

    These are some ideas I’ve been kicking around on firefighting. What other techniques could people try to change the system and stop the arsonists?

  • Sam vs. the LLM: A Coaching Scorecard

    Sam vs. the LLM: A Coaching Scorecard

    In the last 24 hours, I’ve discovered both a validating limitation and a powerful liberating use of LLMs. It’s not all good or all bad—sometimes it’s both. I’d like to share these stories with you.

    Coaching: the human advantage

    One of my clients had been using a popular LLM to do a bit of self-coaching to work out what he wanted to do next. He’d become a bit fed up with his current role after a couple of years, and was looking for change. But because he’d become part of the furntiure, he couldn’t really remember what fired him up. So he went looking for answers through an LLM. Interestingly, the LLM explored what he didn’t like about roles in order to build a profile of what he should be looking for. A fine enough approach – and one I might have taken myself as a coach. But what he came out with (and what so often comes out of LLMs) is a very generic sounding list of ‘you sound like you might find project management satisfying’.

    When I was coaching him through this, and listening deeply, I noticed that actually there was an underlying lack of feeling being expressed. He would talk about his out-of-work sporting endeavours with a smile on his face, energy in his body language, and spark in his eyes. He would talk about work as ‘quite enjoyable’, or ‘quite satisfying’ with that very rational list of things we all do to justify why something is ‘fine’ or ‘ok’. The LLM couldn’t experience the energy, so came up with something generic.

    As two humans interacting, we tapped into the energy and started to map out a compelling map for his next decade.

    Sam 1 : 0 LLM

    Refining an OKR: the LLM advantage

    The second example involves using an LLM to refine an OKR for a piece of new work. OKR stands for Objective and Key Result. I often frame these simply as:

    Objective: what do you want to be better or different?

    Key Results: what would be the result of that?

    I had some alright starter thoughts and context which I put into the LLM. Although this time I’d been reminded that, of course, LLMs don’t ‘run out’ of ideas. I’d assumed that I would put a prompt in and it would generate the single ‘best’ answer. But it could write OKRs all day if I wanted it to.

    So I asked it to come up with 10 versions of the OKR that I’d written. And without breaking a sweat – because it doesn’t sweat – but it probably is environmentally damaging – sorry – it came up with ten versions.

    I could then pick the best Objective and Key Results for the work based on my understanding.

    Spoiler – they weren’t all from one version, neither were they from the first version.

    Next time you want to come up with an improvement using an LLM – ask for loads of them and pick the best ones.

    Sam 1 : 1 LLM

    A fair match, played to our strengths.

    PS – I wrote this myself, not with an LLM. Although I did ask the LLM to come up with 20 titles. This is the one I chose.

    PPS – I have permission from the coaching client to share his story.

  • The most stunning leadership statement I heard this year 

    The most stunning leadership statement I heard this year 

    Leadership is hard. In any organisation, at any level, being a leader requires clarity, calm and consideration. It requires people to paint such a compelling picture of a possible future that it seems like it could be a reality today. So much of the role of leaders is based on how they speak – and whether those words match their actions.

    I was wowed when I heard this statement from a leader’s opening remarks earlier this year. Rodrigo leads part of a large multi-national financial services provider. His words and actions impact work that serves millions of customers. He leads quarterly planning events that have thousands of attendees, and during his opening address, he said something that will stay with me forever:

    Your children know my name and I’ll have never met them. Your team members’ children know your name. What do you want them to say about you?”

    This was such an ingeniously human way of describing the impact leaders have, not just in the workplace, but in our lives more broadly. He knew that, whilst he won’t ever meet many of his team members’ children, they have probably heard his name at home. And he wants his people to talk about him positively to their children. By extension, he was making an extraordinary invitation to consider the impact his leaders have on their respective team members.  

    We can all think of leaders and managers we have talked about with disdain at home – to loved ones, friends, family (and children pick up on everything!). Those people close to us will have formed views and opinions of that leader and, potentially, by extension, that organisation. And because these people love us and want what’s best for us, their views will be strong-held based on what they hear. So, this wonderful statement was to ask us to consider how we’d like to be talked about when we’re not there. Do we want to be the leader that people are stressed and upset about and worry about interacting with, keeping people awake on a Sunday night; or do we want to be the leader that enthuses people to speak well about our organisation at home, to look forward to working with them, to bringing their best selves to work with us?

    As my coaching supervisor says to me, ‘how we do anything is how we do everything’and here’s a perfect example of how this can play out: our lives are complex webs of social interactions where each part of the system has an impact on the other.

    What kind of impact do you want to have on others?