This is a little April wandering. A thought half-reflection, half-daydream. I was projecting myself onto a new story of accompanying business leaders, a one-on-one approach, like coaching, like psychoanalysis. I imagined spending three months simply observing, without saying anything, without proposing anything. Like for example when taking on a new position. But in a support approach.

I was telling myself: difficult for the client, three months without saying anything, there’s a cost to being accompanied by “senior” coaches / managers / leaders (=old =with experience). Yes it can have a lot of impact, but three months just observing is a real cost.

I then imagined, to immediately provide value, offering them a logbook as I’ve already done in other support engagements (but never yet truly in a one-on-one approach with a senior executive). It’s about recounting what one observes and sharing it.

In this case it would be putting in writing all my observations and thoughts, unfiltered, up to them to decide whether to read or not, to take away or not what they wish from it. Then after three months starting to discuss and question, define, try.

In this April wandering, this last part of taking action quickly appeared absurd. All the interest resided in this very verbose silence of a flood of writings, of unfiltered collections of observations and thoughts. (Perhaps the pandemic is playing tricks on me on this subject through this stark formalism). No questions, no advice, no listening, no exchange. Hence this strange title of anti-coaching, and anti-psychoanalysis. Just the flow of my observations and thoughts. To read or not, to integrate, understand, be annoyed, wonder, or not. Up to them.

I would place myself in a “meta” position: I would give them a perspective. A perspective normally sharpened with experience in their field.

One imagines the first weeks the written observations of a codir (executive committee) where I find them seeking harmony at all costs, and where I express my perplexity about the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. Passages of text where I question the reasons for my presence.

A temporality would express itself: two months would have passed, and their posture of empathy seeking harmony would appear in my writings clearly as a flaw (for example). They could read in these writings my reading of their appropriation of this journal. In short, everything that would go through my head during my observations would be recorded as it flows: observations, thoughts, references/pointers to material (reading, seminars, workshops, philosophers, writers, authors, etc.).

This logbook would be intimate: reserved for the two of us. There would never be “you should,” but there might be a lot of “in their place I” in these writings. They would have complete freedom to take or leave it, there would never be judgment about what they did with this logbook. And ultimately these first three months would perhaps constitute the sum and culmination of this silent accompaniment.