Digital Coaching?

I was blown away by Seth Godin writing about digital coaches, as he puts into words what one of my favorite aspects of “tech support” has been.

It also seems to be the most underappreciated by, or off the radar of, people who would be paying for it, in my experience.  Perhaps I have been in the wrong market.  If you are someone who loathes paying for training, or allowing employees to participate in any, because it’s an avoidable expense and waste of time, digital coaching is going to go right past you.

It’s the same mentality that will spend $200,000 upgrading computer systems and software… then nickel and dime, eventually limping along with duct tape and baling wire and unknowingly on the brink of disaster after a while, for the next ten years because you just spent all that money already.  Duh, you should be able to coast and milk every bit of life out of that insult to your checkbook, and can you give me exact numbers on percentage productivity increase or forget it, please?

The joy, though.  There is nothing like the sheer joy of someone learning just what they can do in a new way or with a new or underutilized tool.

Some people don’t want to know.  Some people are paying you to come and do a simple thing each time and will actively look away, lest they learn anything.

Many people, in my experience most of all the frontline ones who live and breathe the productivity their boss imagines they will do anything to undermine, are just ecstatic when they grok a new tool or method.  It’s sad to have to sneak enlightenment to them in truncated bits.  That irritates me.

The whole digital coaching thing describes what I’ve done so much of since I became adept at computers.  Helping people in that way hasn’t been isolated to “users” or newbies.  I’ve probably done as much of it for people who were also geeks.  It’s what most of my job as TDL in Visual Basic support ended up being, both in a technical sense and in a “how to troubleshoot” or “how to look at a problem” sense.  Not exactly what Seth is talking about, but the same thrill of watching someone experience an awakening.

Reading that post made me realize something I was missing in marketing myself, be for a job or as a self-employed tech support person.

Perhaps there’s not so much a shortage of people who can and will do that sort of thing as a disconnect in defining that work.  Or perhaps it’s a matter of scope?  I mean, helping a person be more efficient or discover how to get more out of technology or work more effectively with it is one thing.  Formally analyzing how a business functions and reworking or improving how they do so, that’s another; a big step up in scope.  One that reminds me of how to analyze things in preparation for custom software, or design of a database.

So perhaps the whole things is a continuum.  Which makes the idea of digital coaching no less intriguing, as a focus or a new way of looking at work that’s not new at all.

Posted by on 01/21 at 11:37 AM

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