Digital Coach Technology

Digital Coach Technology (DCT) is software designed to create the experience of being coached by a great personal mentor. Because this experience is software-based, it can be leveraged to hundreds or thousands of people at once, as contrasted to standard human coaching methods, which are limited by the available time of the coach.^[1] Many people report that their greatest learning experiences occur through personal mentoring relationships. DCT enables mentoring for many, without having the mentor present.

DCT was originally created to address two challenges; one with positive deviance and the other with knowledge management technologies. In both cases, excellent knowledge could be gathered, but it was difficult to get people to use the knowledge through standard learning methods. Work with highly successful private sector managers led to identifying certain key traits present in highly successful personal mentoring relationships.^[2] These traits are:

• Creating excitement about and engagement in a larger social or moral purpose
• Driving the mentoree to organize their work for greatest efficiency
• Guiding the mentoree to develop and commit to a specific action plan for applying the mentor’s knowledge
• Helping the mentoree proactively identify and manage risks
• Tracking the mentoree’s progress and holding them accountable for performance

DCT performs all of these functions creating an emotional, intellectual and behavioral response that is identical to having a personal mentor.

DCT was first developed by William Seidman and Michael McCauley in 1998. It began as an effort to coach large numbers of design engineers in a leading semi-conductor manufacturer to use positive deviant-derived microprocessor design processes. It was later used in a wide variety of private and public sector situations including retail chains, construction companies and federal and state agencies.

External links

• DCT and Behavioral Change
• DCT and Knowledge Management

References

1. ^ Humanistic Knowledge Technology. Seidman, William. Cutter IT Journal March 2002 v15, n3, pp. 25-31. A Behavioral Approach to Knowledge Management. Seidman, William & McCauley, Michael. Cutter IT Journal December 2004 v17, n12, pp. 11-18.
2. ^ 8 Minutes to Performance Improvement. Seidman, William & McCauley, Michael. Performance Improvement July 2003 v42, n6, pp. 23-29. The Performance Improvement Multiplier. Seidman, William & McCauley, Michael. Performance Improvement October 2003 v42, n9 pp. 33-37.