While looking through the visitor stats the other day I noticed that coachaccountable.com has gotten 3 hits for the search phrase “what’s up with coachaccountable?”. For me that’s a fascinating  glimpse into the zeitgeist of the internet: there’s a small sliver of folks who saw our website, presumably thought what we were up to was worthwhile and on the right track, and accordingly wondered why things should be all shut down.

Something that I think is worth sharing to address that curiosity is the story of what happened when we used the polished version of CoachAccountable 1.0 for ourselves.

It was shortly after our initial release, in the summer of ’09.  Lee and I both signed up to be coaches in a months-long transformational program with Landmark Education.  We both had 4 coachees each, and wanted to give CA a test run as a tool for keeping up with the actions, game plans and progress of our people.  Though Lee’s was similar, I’ll describe my own experience.

Bottom line: after 3 weeks of using CoachAccountable with real people that I was coaching on a regular basis, I realized that I just didn’t like it.

This is a heartbreaking realization about something you’d just spent the last 18 months working on, but there was no denying it.  The displays made it hard to see what was going on over time.  The actions presented more work than they were worth.  The template system in all its elaborate glory made it clunky and inflexible to take session notes.  It was work to convince my coachees to use the system regularly, and without that the point was largely moot.

CoachAccountable 1.0 looks GREAT in its screenshots, and works poorly in practice.

Though we collectively had coaching experience in the past, not being involved in coaching actively while developing the software proved fatal, and our assumptions that our past coaching experience would guide us were naively optimistic.

With such a realization coming after we were at the end of our willingness to bootstrap and live lean, indefinite suspension of the project was a natural choice.

The Lesson Within

The lesson of all of this is well rooted in my mind as I pick up the torch once more to create CoachAccountable 2.0.  The last 3 weeks I’ve been coaching my people with our interactions based in the new software.  Some things immediately reveal themselves as great: they just work every bit as well as I’d hoped when I sketched the designs.  Other things are screamingly terrible, lacking, or cumbersome in ways I did  not imagine.  And with flaws laid so bare it is a simple matter and true joy to smooth them over, guided by insight from real experience.

The coaching and refinement of CA 2.0 continues, I’m excited for how good I know the end result will be.