Episode #61 ~ So, Will Coaches be Replaced by Robots? with guest, David Clutterbuck

In this podcast episode featuring David Clutterbuck, a pioneer in developmental coaching and mentoring, the topic of integrating AI (Artificial Intelligence) into the world of professional coaching is explored. The discussion revolves around whether AI will replace human coaches or serve as a partnership.

David emphasizes that AI can excel at following processes and algorithms, making it useful for routine tasks, but it lacks the human qualities, such as empathy and wisdom, that are essential for coaching's deeper aspects. The key idea is that AI should be seen as a collaborative tool that enhances coaching by handling certain tasks, allowing human coaches to focus on more intricate, relationship-based aspects of the practice.
The emphasis is on creating a harmonious partnership between AI and human coaching, with coaches retaining responsibility for ethical considerations and decision-making.

The conversation also delves into the future of coaching, acknowledging that AI will likely disrupt the industry but ultimately lead to more skilled and capable coaches who can effectively partner with technology. The need for coaches to differentiate themselves from AI and continue developing their own capabilities is highlighted.

David Clutterbuck is one of the early pioneers of developmental coaching and mentoring and co-founder of the European Mentoring & Coaching Council. (EMCC)

Author of more than 70 books, including the first evidence-based titles on coaching culture and team coaching, he is visiting professor at four business schools. 

He leads a global network of specialist mentoring and coaching training consultants, Coaching and Mentoring International. 

Watch the full interview by clicking here.

Find the full article here: https://bit.ly/btp_clutterbuck

Learn more about David here.

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

In this episode, I talk with David about his article published in our June 2023 issue. 

Transcript

Garry Schliefer : 0:07

Welcome to the choice Magazine podcast, Beyond the page. Choice, the magazine and professional coaching is your go-to source for expert insights and in-depth features from the world of professional coaching. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer , and I'm thrilled to have you join us today. In each episode, we literally go beyond the page and dive deeper into some of the most recent and relevant articles from choice impacting the world of professional coaching, exploring the content, interviewing the talented minds behind the articles like David here, and uncovering his stories that make an impact. choice is more than just a magazine. For over 21 years, we've built a community of like-minded people who create, use and share coaching tools, tips, and techniques to add value to their businesses and of course to impact their clients. In today's episode, I'm speaking with David Clutterbuck. He's the author of an article in our latest issue, Technology and AI. Will it support or replace Human Coaching?

: 1:10

Happen to have my copy here. I've got like about a hundred of them , of course. Um, his article is entitled, "So, ill coaches be replaced by robots? No, but coaches will benefit from a coach AI partnership." David Clutterbuck is one of the early pioneers of developmental coaching and mentoring, and co-founder of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council , as we all know it , EMCC, author of more than 70 books, including the first evidence-based titles on coaching culture and team coaching. He's a visiting professor at four, not just one, two, or three, four business schools. He leads a global network of specialist mentor and coaching training consultants called Coaching and Mentoring International. Thank you so much for joining me today, David. Wow. I didn't realize you were one of the co-founders of EMCC.

David Clutterbuck: 2:04

Absolutely. Way back in 1991, when it was originally called the European Mentoring Center, and it was set up in the university at Sheffield Allen University with my colleague David Megginson, who's no longer with us. That was was the origin. That was a time when actually coaching wasn't really heard of in the business context. There w as just beginning to be a little b it of noise around it but it was all mentoring.

Garry Schliefer : 2:32

Yeah. Wow. Wow. Oh my goodness. What a history. And yes, I joined in 10 years later. I started my own coaching journey, and then two years after that started choice Magazine. So I was around for some of the beginnings of it all, but not back in 1991. Now, that being said though, and a lot of people we know say, oh, you know, now that I know what coaching is, I was doing this like way back. Right. Hindsight, always 2020. David, I don't know how we landed on AI at such a timely moment, but why did you decide to write for us about AI?

David Clutterbuck: 3:13

Well, I've been looking at this whole area of technology for the past 20 years as it's grown. And AI is one of a number of technologies, which we could see five or six years ago was gonna make a big impact on coaching. We'd seen sort of virtual reality worlds. That was one of the areas that's developed, but that had limited application. Now we've got virtual reality, and if anybody hasn't tried coaching in virtual reality, I recommend it . It's mind blowing especially if you do constellations work using using avatars and objects that you can step inside of .

Garry Schliefer : 3:53

Oh , wow. Well, I was speaking with Sam Isaacson who also wrote for this, but didn't you do a presentation with him and somebody else.

David Clutterbuck: 4:03

Sam, myself, and Yvonne Ronis. In fact, I was just talking with Sam this morning about some of the work we're doing. We're creating a working party looking at coach AI partnerships, getting behind the scenes here. What's happening ? What do we need to know? Because actually we have very little research-based data at all.

Garry Schliefer : 4:29

Yeah. Well, and you know, to the point of the article, will coaches be replaced by robots? You say yes. You say no. Chocolate vanilla choose.

David Clutterbuck: 4:42

I think it links in with the research we've been doing on coach maturity very much. So over the past five or six years, we've been in parallel, we've been looking at AI and , and other technologies, and we've been looking at how coaches evolve and the results of the coach maturity research tells us , firstly that coaches become more mature, more effective, add more value when they manage to focus less on process and more on being, on using themselves. In many ways, they become much more like a mentor. And when I say a mentor, I mean in the real sense of a mentor, not in the North American sense, which combines mentoring and sponsorship in some kind of directive relationship, but the proper meaning of mentor as it originates in Europe and in many cultures under different names, which is basically using your wisdom to help somebody else become wiser.

Garry Schliefer : 5:39

So as coaches become more mature, they become more confident in using their own experience to craft better questions, to empathize more with, with somebody, and also to give them context. If you think about it, if somebody's gonna do something really stupid and you know it's going to be stupid and you can give them some information that will stop them from doing it. Is it ethical not to give them that information? Of course, it's not ethical, right? And so the difference between giving context is giving somebody some information that will help them with the quality of their thinking. If you give them advice, you're doing the thinking for them. And so in that sense, what mentors and coaches both do when they are mature is help somebody think by using themselves as well as well as the process. And so the more that we rely on the process, the less we lose ourselves. So there's this whole evolution. AI is really good at doing process. It can follow a set of algorithms. It will do them much more efficiently than will a human . So a human pharmacist will make something, one study said that they would make one mistake in a hundred prescriptions. Now most of those mistakes get caught because they check them. But an AI pharmacist can do a million prescriptions without making a mistake. Without a mistake. Yeah .

David Clutterbuck: 7:24

Mind you , when it does make mistakes, they're probably bigger ones, but still. If it's predictability, if you're following a nice routine, if you're following the grow model then you know what's gonna come next. But you know, if you're really coaching as opposed to following a routine then the more that you can predict what's coming, the less you're really coaching.

Garry Schliefer : 7:56

Yeah.

David Clutterbuck: 7:58

So the AI can do the predictable bit. It's the unpredictable bits and it's the use of wisdom of your experience, of knowledge , that enables the human to stay ahead. So what's happening is those coaches who can't break out of using the process, who are wedded to following the model through, they're already obsolete. They just don't know it.

Garry Schliefer : 8:25

Yeah. Well, and okay, so a couple of questions out of that, and one to quote you directly here but coaches who lack personal maturity and those who are relying on a process will a lot less to offer exactly what we're talking about. Okay? But we all have to learn somehow. And isn't the system that's teaching us, like ICF and EMCC, going to teach us to move away, force us to move away from the model? Or does it need to start teaching us how to move away from using a process model?

David Clutterbuck: 9:01

Well, this is the big dilemma. Where do beginner coaches get to do this? We've got an article coming out out shortly that says what if everything we thought we knew about coach education were wrong? And then the article goes on to prove that, yes, actually one of the things we are going to do we are wrong. What's needed for coaches is to put much less emphasis on the process. The process is the easy bit. It's what you bring in addition. So putting them through lots of case studies, getting them to a practice and try diverse types of conversation. One of the big problems with say the grow model, for example or the basic model from the ICF and there's a big debate in the ICF about this now is that the model s ays this is the way you do coaching. However, it is an American, or it's a developed northern country, but particularly an American model of how you do it. It doesn't go down so well in other cultures which have very different ways d o it.

Garry Schliefer : 10:18

So you've got some issues of diversity to start with even before. And there is an implicit assumption here in that model that what you do, the process you apply at beginner level, say at ACC level, is the model that when you want to go to to PCC, you just do it more and better and deeper. Then on MCC and again, more and better and deeper. That's not what the research shows us. Right.

David Clutterbuck: 10:51

The research is very clear as you move between stages of competence, you actually let go of most of what you did before. So true mastery comes not from following the rules, it comes from knowing when and how to break the rules.

Garry Schliefer : 11:09

Oh, wow. What great way to think of that.

David Clutterbuck: 11:12

And so there's a tension here between the education process that says we need to have competencies and frameworks. Of course we do .

Garry Schliefer : 11:24

Right.

David Clutterbuck: 11:25

We need to have some sense of what's what appropriate. We need codes of conduct and all of those kinds of things. But the more rigid they are, the more susceptible they are to being done by a machine.

Garry Schliefer : 11:38

Well, and shouldn't they be used as like a framework or foundation or, I don't wanna say, a boundary but you know what I mean? A space within which to work. Like even the grow model I work with a company that uses the grow model to start with a client, but it's not one that you continue using. It's their version of an intake, getting started conversation. But once you're outside of that, you coach to your coaching skill and ability, right? And so I was quite thrilled with that. But even there, I would raise a concern and that is that if you always start your coaching conversations in the same way, you're probably always gonna get the same results.

David Clutterbuck: 12:28

And if we are truly client centered, we actually engage and actually find out what the client needs from us first. It's rather like in team coaching. We see there are people that say we do team coaching, and they go in automatically and that team diagnostic they happen to be fond of and they miss half of the critical functions or factors that are, affecting the performance of that team. Because if they're not in the questionnaire, they're not noticed.

Garry Schliefer : 13:01

Right.

David Clutterbuck: 13:02

So there's something here about yes, I think actually using the grow model or something like that as a precursor to individual or team coaching, that c an be really helpful. So getting a lot of the preliminary work done,

Garry Schliefer : 13:17

Right.

David Clutterbuck: 13:18

Defining the issue and then the team coach or the individual coach can get involved and actually add a greater amount of value. Always remembering that one of the studies from Harvard found where American coaches who tend to be more goal obsessed than those in other parts of the world. I think it was 192 out of 200 coaches said that if the coaching is any good, most of the time, the presented goal will evolve into something completely different or to some extent different.

Garry Schliefer : 13:56

Oh, yeah.

David Clutterbuck: 13:58

So, we have to be able to get away from the rigidity of systems, of treadlines. The AI will be able to do that brilliantly. So leave that to the AI, right ? What we have to work out is how do we add that extra value that comes from being a human being.

Garry Schliefer : 14:19

Wow. Thank you. Well said. And well written in the article too as well pointing that all out is the humanity. Computers aren't human. They can mimic humanity, but they aren't human. And when you're done with that paper, I hope you're gonna share with us and we can share it with our audience too .

David Clutterbuck: 14:37

Yeah . It'll be, yeah , it'll be coming out soon. I think it's coming out in one of the academic journals first.

Garry Schliefer : 14:42

Well, just like us, we want to be the first to publish.

David Clutterbuck: 14:47

What coming out more quickly later this month or early next month, there's a short sync piece, a blog. I do them several a month. And if anybody comes onto my, my website, you can just sign up to get these, and they tend to be quite fun. And the title of this one, I've just got it up here for us to refer to.

Garry Schliefer : 15:08

And while you're talking, what's the website?

David Clutterbuck: 15:11

Www.Clutterbuck-cmi .com .

Garry Schliefer : 15:18

Clutterbuck-cmi.com

David Clutterbuck: 15:22

You can get the access to all sorts of things. So the title of it is, "What comes between Humans and an Artificial Intelligence?"

Garry Schliefer : 15:30

Hmm .

David Clutterbuck: 15:31

A psychopath

Garry Schliefer : 15:33

You do have your titles, man.

David Clutterbuck: 15:38

I do. I , but you know, it , it , what what you see , um, um, we , we have this anthropo, anthropomorphic , um, idea that, that that computers think they don't think they compute.

Garry Schliefer : 15:50

Right.

David Clutterbuck: 15:51

That's a very different thing. And so one of the big issues, like with self-drive cars, who's in control when it matters. If the AI is in control, then we've got a problem or pushing it back a bit. If the process is in control rather than the human, then we've got problems and it's how do you find this middle ground between them? Because if we leave that middle ground empty, it's gonna get filled by the AI. If it gets filled by the AI, it's going to be filled in a way that's gonna be harmful potentially. And the comparison that I'm drawing out in this piece is that when you're thinking a bout, w ell, how do you recognize a psychopath? What does a psychopath do? It has a tremendous ability to fake empathy. Don't they? As does many of the AI programs that we have. It has an inability to feel emotion, like have a conscience or be remorse. It can pursue aims that can be harmful for other people without thought to the consequences because it is not part of its programming so it doesn't care. The psychopath has a tendency towards inappropriate risk taking. Look at some of the AI programs we've seen. And with a psychopath, the higher they get and the more the controls a re taken off t hem, the more deviant behavior we see. Sounding familiar? And t hen a h igher ability to manipulate others according to a hidden agenda So these are six qualities of a psychopath, and that middle ground between coach and AI will be inhabited by AI's that can be inhabited by A I that is exhibiting these psychopathic tendencies.

Garry Schliefer : 18:03

It reminds me of one of the Star Trek episodes where , TNG, the next generation and Data, who lacks all emotion meets his brother, who basically has emotion, but is a bit psychopathic.

David Clutterbuck: 18:19

Yeah.

Garry Schliefer : 18:19

Right.

David Clutterbuck: 18:20

Yeah, it's a lovely connection. We really have got to be thinking about what's the relationship here? And what I find concerning is that most of the people working in the AI space relating to coaching, are primarily trying to replace the coach and the coach's functions.

Garry Schliefer : 18:46

Yeah. Well, you talk about a partnership, not a replacement. Tell us the difference.

David Clutterbuck: 18:52

Well, in a partnership, you both place your strengths and you find ways of supporting each other in the service of an objective. In this case, the objective is the wellbeing of the client. So how does the AI support the coach in supporting the client? And how does the coach work with the AI in order to be able to support the client? But if we are thinking simply of replacing one with the other, the client gets left out of the triangle.

Garry Schliefer : 19:33

Good point. Well, and it brings up a question I've had for a while now. Something comes to mind, it's like AI's not gonna just show up and take over coaching, right? Like, somebody has to say to the computer, this is what I'd like it to do, here's how I'd like it to do it, da da da , da , da . Right? So aren't we still in control of the whole, where it works, when it works and how it works?

David Clutterbuck: 20:02

Well, let me give you a practical example. You are having a coaching conversation with somebody, and your AI is listening in, and it's constantly popping up suggestions or questions you could ask next.

Garry Schliefer : 20:18

Oh, that would drive me crazy.

David Clutterbuck: 20:20

It would. It would drive me nuts too. But you know, particularly if you're a beginner coach.

Garry Schliefer : 20:26

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Clutterbuck: 20:28

Yeah. So you may say, well, I'm making the selection of questions, but what's happening behind the scenes is that the selection of questions that you h ave i s being now limited a nd a nd controlled by the machine.

Garry Schliefer : 20:43

Yeah . Wow . Talk about not being present to your client.

David Clutterbuck: 20:48

Yeah. And to what extent. Then there's some ethical issues. So the AI is measuring the blood flow and the temperature and muscle movements in the client's face to give you an indication of their mental state and how tense they are and so forth. You really have to have the client's permission to do this kind of thing, you know ?

Garry Schliefer : 21:15

Yeah. Funny you should say that. I was just thinking like, how do they know this is going on? Do they have to know? Well do, a nytime you're recording a call, you have to let a client k now. Why wouldn't you tell 'em the same thing for AI?

David Clutterbuck: 21:29

Yeah.

Garry Schliefer : 21:30

It's a form of form of recording, isn't it?

David Clutterbuck: 21:34

Absolutely. So there's really intriguing ethical issues here. And then when you go to supervision and you take your AI and it links into the supervisor's AI and the recordings of the sessions ,

Garry Schliefer : 21:52

And then you go for a coffee while the two AI's talk to each other.

David Clutterbuck: 21:55

Yeah, exactly.

Garry Schliefer : 21:55

Yeah.

David Clutterbuck: 21:57

Let them do everything in fact, you k now?

Garry Schliefer : 21:59

Right. Yeah.

David Clutterbuck: 22:01

So we have a lot of work to do to understand how to create an ethical working environment that truly enhances the experience that the client receives.

Garry Schliefer : 22:17

Right.

David Clutterbuck: 22:19

Where we are right now is that coaches don't know how to do this on the whole and we are not even aware of some of the challenges and problems that are gonna come from this environment. Because new technology the problems often only emerge once the technology gets established.

Garry Schliefer : 22:41

Right? Yeah. Wow. Well, I mean, just like the one example we just gave of the AI being present with the call. It's like, okay, how much do you have to explain, how much does the coach actually know about what the AI is doing? Like you said in an article, these coaching platforms , are the AIs listening in? Now they say that they're not, but I'll be honest, I haven't trusted it for a long time. When it asks for notes, they're very cryptic, almost like one word, like leadership, w ork-life balance, just some standard things, because this is a private conversation between me and my client, and they want me to k ind o f recap at the end. I'm like, yeah, what are y ou using it for? And it says what it's using it for, but maybe I'm bringing up a whole new topic for another discussion, but what about trust?

David Clutterbuck: 23:41

Absolutely.

Garry Schliefer : 23:42

Is the AI only working with you, or is it off feeding something else? Did I miss something in the contract when I signed up to use that Ai, that version?

David Clutterbuck: 23:53

And we looked at the mechanics now, and we're going back seven years now, and we started looking at the mechanics of creating an AI coach which would be to emulate as much as possible what we would do, because we recognized it is gonna happen . What came out of it was you would need thousands of hours of recordings of coaching sessions in order to be able to capture the flow, the kind of questions that were asked, what the impact that they had and so forth. The biggest problem that we saw at that point was how do you know it was a good coaching session?

Garry Schliefer : 24:47

That's exactly what went through my head. Thousands of calls, but did you have good coaches? Did you have coaches on a good day? Like you said in your article, even coaches have bad days. Human coaches.

David Clutterbuck: 24:58

And over the past 20 years, we haven't done any since before Covid, but we did quite a lot of coach assessment centers. Now that's a process where we just identify this was with real clients in a company that wants to seek to get a coach pool from outside and wants to be able to say, well , can these guys actually coach? So we just wanna find out can they hold a reasonably purposeful conversation and the horrifying fact is, that in spite of the qualifications that a piece of paper they waive, consistently around 65 to 70% of the coaches can't even hold a meaningful conversation.

Garry Schliefer : 25:51

Wow. Not a good statistic.

David Clutterbuck: 25:56

It's not. It's horrifying. I mean, we a re not looking for mastery here. We a re just looking for a basic level of competence.

Garry Schliefer : 26:06

Yeah .

David Clutterbuck: 26:07

The adherence to a process is part of the problem because if you're trying to adhere to a process, you forget about everything else you're doing. So on that basis, I wouldn't want to be coached by an AI that had based iitself on those 65 to 70% of coaches.

Garry Schliefer : 26:30

Yeah. I think you've alluded to it, but let's get clear on, how do we reduce that percentage for one thing? Is that the school's responsibility? Is that the certification bodies? Is it all of them? How do we lower that percentage?

David Clutterbuck: 26:53

Well, I think it's everybody's responsibility, but I think actually in the new world of coaching , the rise of the AI is basically going to winnow out many of the ineffective coaches, the coaches that can't really use themselves, that don't have that, that capacity. So that will enable a shift, I think, into much more client centered coherent coaching. So we could say that's a good thing.

Garry Schliefer : 27:35

'cause that statistic was astounding. Like I was not aware of that.

David Clutterbuck: 27:42

It was scary to us to realize that you wouldn't want to hire people. So I think we have to shift the way we educate coaches so that it's much more about using yourself. So let's shift the emphasis of the training of coaches to what we see , what the evidence tells us. A major part of that is supervision. So , only some of the professional associations require coaches to have supervision. Now I hope we're moving in the right direction there but if you're not having supervision, you're not reflecting on your practice, you're not growing. And again, the maturity research tells us very clearly. What we did was actually go to lots of highly experienced coaches, well regarded coaches , and get them to talk about their learning journey and for pretty much all of them, the quality and breadth of their reflections was a fundamental part of that growth and maturing. And supervision played a significant part in that for almost all of them.

Garry Schliefer : 29:06

I cannot agree more. I just had a taste of supervision. I'm in a group supervision. We meet regularly for a year. I've just, uh, finished a course where I had mentor coaching. Both of them have been eyeopening, eyeopening. Simple things like simple things and you talk about process. I write a little bit of cryptic notes when I'm working with a client, I'm thinking, so I can remember for next time and I was challenged by being asked, so why is it important to know what they said before? They're not who they were. Just let them be who they are today. And so now I, I still do it for other things. We h a ve t o do reflective stuff, but I just welcome them as they are.

David Clutterbuck: 30:02

A bsolutely.

Garry Schliefer : 30:02

And they'll reintroduce all these things, but a very simple process thing I used to do that I don't do anymore, and I'd just be like 100% present. Sometimes I have to thank God they have their name on the screen because that's how I welcome them as an entirely new person, new life, new day. Who knows what's going on. So I really get that point.

David Clutterbuck: 30:25

One of the things that we've learned, had some really interesting online arguments about too, is the idea that coaches should take loads of notes. Yeah . And we said , where's the evidence for this and what evidence we could find told us exactly the opposite because what neuroscience is telling us, we don't have a bit of the brain that is dedicated to writing or capturing thoughts on paper. If we're doing that, we have to take that to cannibalize the bits of the brain that are there for attending to and listening to the other person. If you are taking all the notes, it's like taking the minutes of a meeting, you are in charge and so what we now say is, look, good practice is to pause every now and then and say to the client, what would you like to capture? B ecause what they think is important is probably not what you think i s important.

Garry Schliefer : 31:28

Oh , of course.

David Clutterbuck: 31:30

So it enables you to be fully present. It puts control back in their hands, not yours. But if you're trying to push through a process, you can't do that because you're focusing on making them fit the process.

Garry Schliefer : 31:47

Exactly. Yeah. I know. But simple things you don't think about. I remember years ago, a coach of mine would not only write all the notes, but send them to me after the session. Of course I never read them. And I challenged her later on to say like, just to let you know, I don't use them so it's not a good use of time. But now as a more mature coach, I realize that she wasn't being present to me a hundred percent. We were sharing between me and her notes, her note taking . So what do you see as the future of technology and coaching? Will we ever get replaced by. Seriously, you're a No, it'll never happen. Absolutely. With all technologies we've learned to accommodate to them. Mm-hmm . Now that may have all sorts of unforeseen consequences, but w e a re human beings. We adapt. But l et m e give you a couple o f analogies. Going back into the simplest of technologies, c hairs and shoes. Okay . Alright . David, go . Chairs and shoes.

David Clutterbuck: 33:08

Yeah . So the chair was a wonderful invention. What chairs have done is to change the way that we sit, that we do all sorts of things. They're one of the main reasons why we have so many back problems because our bodies are not designed to sit in chairs, but it's nice and comfortable. So we've got a technology that's actually has unexpected side effects. Shoes, our feet are designed to walk on rough ground and to accommodate. There is a cushion effect. By wearing shoes and we actually stop that effect so the qualities that the children seem to be able to run on anything.

Garry Schliefer : 33:53

I did. Yeah.

David Clutterbuck: 33:55

Because as adults it's painful and so what we've done is to reduce the flexibility of our feet. A lot of the physical problems we have with our feet relate to the fact that we are not walking with naked feet. So simple technologies like that can have long-term negative effects as well as highly positive effects. So we have to balance these together. And I can't see any reason why AI is not going to be the same. It's going to have a lot of positive effects. It's going to have to negative effects, which we'll have to ameliorate. Hopefully we're getting smart enough now to be able to do that. And I think , Linda Gratton, the professor at London Business School , I was recently at a lecture that she gave, and she was putting not just AI, but all recent technology advances into context. And she was pointing out that every major technological innovation has been highly disruptive and thrown people out of jobs. But over time, it's actually created more jobs. And one of the reasons it does that is by making something. The Loom, for example, it reduced the cost of clothing. So more people wanted to buy more clothing. And so you created a market. And so once it becomes cheaper, more people want it, which means you need more labor to produce it. So you get an equilibrium created if that theory is correct and it would seem that w e're gonna through a period of heavy disruption in the w orld of coaching for a good 10 years.

: 35:50

But coming out of the end of that, what we're gonna see is much better equipped coaches able to deal with much deeper issues and add much more value. One of the key parts of that for me is that we've been able to identify 10 levels of complexity that coaches can work with. Team coaching is somewhere in the middle.

Garry Schliefer : 36:12

Okay. What we can see now is that the AI will be invaluable in helping us to gradually cope with each of those levels of complexity and improve and enhance the way that coaches can interact with not just individuals or teams or organizations, but with society . The future of coaching in my vision is one where we actually are able to combine with the technology to create a better world. I couldn't agree with you more, and let's add on there and the human gets to have the final say. I like to say AI is everything, but there's still a plug somewhere that we can pull when we don't like it. David, thank you so much. What would you like our audience to do as a result of this conversation and your article? I think we've given hints of it, but let's get clear. Yeah. I'd like them to start thinking firstly about how their own attitudes towards the technology. You don't have to embrace it all , but at least to be aware of it and to see how it gradually will form a part of your practice. But the other thing is to think about themselves. How are you gonna differentiate yourself from the machine in the way that you coach? And how are you going to grow your own capabilities so that you can truly become a partner with the machine? Awesome. Yes. Well said. I agree. Knowledge is power. Thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode. David, what's the best way to reach you? Is it clutterbuck-cmi . com?

David Clutterbuck: 38:05

Absolutely. And if you wanna come to me directly, it's David@clutterbuck-cmi.com Hyphen, dash, whatever you call it. David, an absolute delight. Thank you so much for everything you do in the coaching world, for who you are, and I look forward to other articles, other conversations, and seeing you in person sometime soon . Lovely . Well, if there's still life in the old dog, yes.

Garry Schliefer : 38:31

Yeah . Hey, your mother made it to 101. I think you got a while to go. You're still young. That's it for this episode of Beyond The Page folks. For more episode, subscribe via your favorite podcast app. If you're not a subscriber, please sign up for your free digital issue of choice Magazine by going to choice-online.com or hyphen as we say today, and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer . Enjoy the journey of mastery.