Torrance Journal for Applied Creativity

TIM and the Creative Coach: Using the Torrance
Incubation Model (TIM) to Strengthen a Creative
Coach’s Ability to Affect Change
by Trevor J. McAlpine
“Coaching is the art of facilitating the performance, learning,
and development of another” (Downey 2003, p. 21).
Creativity practitioners generally accept that “everyone is creative,” yet they
know that the quantity and quality of creative output differs greatly between an
untrained person and one who has actively (studied and) mastered the skills, tools,
processes, and methods designed to enhance personal and inter-personal creativity
(Puccio, Firestien, Coyle, & Masucci, 2006; Scott, Leritz, & Mumford, 2004).
The same is true for coaching. That “everyone can coach” is true in essence,
but training and apprenticeship are necessary to turn someone into a masterful
coach. Yet this does not mean that the act of coaching should be reserved for those
who practise it full-time. As with creativity, coaching is our birthright. Coaching is
a natural offshoot of our ability to dialogue and communicate (Senge, 1990).
We want to embrace coaching that strengthens people, the kind of coaching
that builds up their capacities to secure future results. So, we are not talking
here about directive coaching (e.g., from an expert who trains, suggests, tells you
what to do and how to do it) – this approach is so ubiquitous that most people erroneously
think this is the only way to coach. We embrace an approach to coaching
called Non-Directive Coaching (NDC), where we ask awareness-raising questions
that allow the person being coached much more freedom to determine what (and
how) to do to achieve the desired results – this builds people up to become more
self-reliant (see Directive vs. Non-Directive Coaching in the NDC – Key Distinctions
section for more details).
Since directive coaching leads to dependency on the coach for future
direction and guidance, our focus is to coach in a way that builds up those being
coached. The following functional description of the role of a (non-directive) coach
may help place the act of coaching into a bigger context:
A coach is anyone (a parent, teacher, administrator, leader, manager,
etc.) who helps another person detect opportunities and challenges, better
understand situations, and make improved free-will, positive choices in
a way that increases that person’s capacity to do so in the future (without
having to rely on a coach).
Few of us ever get to be full-time coaches. Most of us find ourselves acting
as part-time coaches who assume the role and use the skills, tools, and methods as
needed. Sadly, too few actively seek out how to be better coaches. All too often, the
great promise of effective coaching turns into real frustration for everyone when
poorly done. It is partly because coaching looks so easy that it is so hard to do well.
This work is an attempt to address such a challenge. It is not a primer
about coaching per se; rather, it is part of a continuing effort to determine how
coaches can leverage elements of the creative sciences to greatly improve the art of
coaching.
This work is written in a “generic”
language that describes a coach and the
person being coached, a person who
works inside a particular environment,
“an organization.” It only takes a little
imagination to tailor this generic model
to one’s own specific circumstances: a
teacher (or guidance counselor) and
a student in a school; a principal and
a teacher in a school; a parent and a
child in a family; a manager and a staff
member in a business or governmental
organization, etc. This tailoring is left to
the reader to do.
Coaching: A (New) Context in Which
to Use Creativity
The author’s formal merging
of coaching and creative sciences was
first published in The Creative Coach:
Exploring the Synergies Between Creative
Problem Solving: Thinking Skills Model
and Non-Directive Coaching, (McAlpine,
2011). That work showed how Creative
Problem Solving: Thinking Skills
Model (CPS:TSM) and Non-Directive
Coaching (NDC) mapped quite well
on to each other (CPS:TSM is described
in Puccio, Murdock, & Mance,
2007, 2008). This makes sense as both
evolved to help people solve problems
using creativity, be it explicitly in groups
or implicitly in one-on-one dialogues.
Ultimately, McAlpine (2011) showed
how both parties in a coaching dialogue
could start getting better results faster
by explicitly using creativity.
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