Pat’s Point of View

Over the weekend just passed, I joined my wife and baby daughter at a Tresillian Family Care Centre for an intensive programme of ‘parent craft’. The idea is that parents and baby stay in residence for five nights, learning best practice techniques for settling, sleeping and feeding. We wanted to brush up on technique and shed any bad habits we had accumulated whilst trying to survive the first four months of parenthood.

This “live-in” method gives you 24-hour access to experienced childcraft nurses and allows you to concentrate fully on the task of parenting without the distractions of cooking, cleaning or going to work. It’s the perfect opportunity to master the necessary skills, with expert support at hand, should you need it. It’s a very effective method.

They demonstrate techniques in a realistic environment, as opposed to a classroom or conference hall. They observe how you handle situations, and attempt to adjust your behaviour as necessary (after all what we’re talking about is a change in attitude, awareness and behaviour, not a fundamental change of the game).

The nurses’ intervention reduces from near 100% at the start, down to a bare minimum by the end of your stay. This serves two purposes, at the start they give you a break by taking the reigns for a short time, which is crucial in terms of ensuring the sanity of parents and the effectiveness of the learning. Additionally, reducing this intervention is crucial to getting parents to a point where they can go home and successfully continue using the practices they have learned, on their own.

Throughout your stay, of course, the nurses are always on hand should you need them. They give that all important advice, at the crucial moment it’s needed. This is really important, because by allowing any time to pass allows for post-rationalisation and self-denial. Getting help at that point when things get unstuck also increases the likelihood of remembering what to do.

This live-in approach really struck a chord with me, and I started to consider how it could be used in other fields of expertise. I think it would be an absolutely great model for consulting, and more specifically mentoring. At least in my field, which is information architecture, user centred design and information management.

Techniques and guidelines, no matter how simple and refined, can’t give you the wisdom to know how to apply them to all situations that might arise. Raising a child is complex because life is complex, but many work situations people find themselves in are very complex also—such as managing an intranet, redesigning a large website or any number of major IT projects. This is where mentoring has much to offer above and beyond training or the self-taught approach.

I’ve long thought that mentoring is best done in-situ (in my presentation on Mentoring Collaborative UCD I concluded that an in-house mentor works best) where the team being mentored has access to their mentor’s advice as and when it is needed. Additionally, it should be face to face. Having to call or email your mentor, or wait for them to come in for a meeting, really stifles the inherent intimacy that mentoring thrives on. My experience is that even a relatively small physical distance, such as a taxi ride away, reduces the effectiveness of mentoring.

A traditional consulting engagement doesn’t allow for this, but there are some relatively common tactics to improve the situation. Such as clumping together several visits into one whole day, but this lacks the impromptu nature and feels slightly forced and hypothetical. If you tackle problems when they occur, the better the results are.

Another alternative could be the use of a contractor, to supplement the team. While many contractors and freelancers would have the skills and experience in their particular field to be mentors, they typically aren’t hired to do so and of course don’t have any motivation to go beyond their remit. Contractors are usually hired to perform a specific piece of self-contained work, with little “leave behind” for the rest of the team. To approach the live-in model, they would have to actively coach the team in which they are embedded, but also gradually reduce their intervention.

A ‘day stay’, where the mentee comes and works in your office, is another approach. This gives the access to their mentor, and is close to the Tresillian model. However, most often in my work, the mentee is more than one person, so to be truly analagous to the live-in model, the whole team would need to come and live in the mentor’s facility. While you would gain the same benefits, primarily the elimination of distractions, it just wouldn’t be practical to do so (plus who wants to have a sleep over with their work colleagues?!).

This arrangement would also share the potential problems with the Tresillian model, which is the fact that once you leave their facility you may not be able to match your success once you get home. The very nature of taking the problem to a controlled (or semi-controlled) environment could jeopardise its success; practicing any technique is more difficult in your day-to-day environment.

But if we reverse the scenario, it may be viable. That is, the mentor becomes part of the team being mentored, for a length of time, and operates as part of that team. This is a longer interaction than normal consulting would allow, and something akin to secondment, but more flexible. It needs to be long enough to ‘get into the thick of it’ and practice techniques in a realistic environment with realistic situations. And this is definitely such a thing as too early. Like an advanced workshop or master class, you need to have a bit of distance under your belt. In the case of parenting you need to know your child and what works and what doesn’t, and as with most things, you need to give it a genuine go yourself, before seeking help.

This may be a common approach to consulting or mentoring in certain fields, but it’s not as widespread as it could be, in my experience. Especially considering how powerful it is as a form of up-skilling. I’ve not come across this in web design, IA or UCD fields, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone has used such an intensive, live-in approach to mentoring, as either the mentor or mentee.

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