About this Substack
The Backstage of Becoming: A Practitioner’s Inquiry is a space for sustained thinking on coaching — its craft, its conceptual foundations, and what it is asked to hold in the world as it currently exists.
This Substack draws on over two decades of experience across organisation development and learning roles in leading global organisations, private practice as an executive coach, and a PhD in Organisational Change through action research from Hult Ashridge. It is a consolidation of that accumulated experience — an attempt to make visible what sustained engagement with the work, and with the scholarship that informs it, has produced. More about the author here https://www.kavithaiyer.com/about
How the Writing is Organised
The Substack moves across three streams:
Praxis — The Micro · The Craft On the epistemological and theoretical foundations of coaching practice — craft, meaning-making, and what it demands to build a rigorous praxis.
The Encounter — The Meso · The Room On how coaching engagements are constructed and what unfolds within them — the relational field, the dynamics that organise resistance, and the moments when something shifts.
From the Field — The Macro · The World The broader landscape — technological disruption, generational shift, geopolitical fracture — and what it asks of those who lead and those who accompany them. Occasional essays, not a recurring stream.
Each stream corresponds to a register of action research inquiry — first, second, and third person — moving between the practitioner’s interior, the relational field between practitioner and client, and the wider world in which the work takes place.
About the Writer
Dr Kavitha Iyer is an executive coach and leadership development professional based in Singapore, consulting internationally, with twenty-five years of experience accompanying senior leaders and organisations through genuine change. She is the founder of Crésca Consulting Pte Ltd and Lead Coach at INSEAD.
She holds a PhD in Organisational Change from Hult Ashridge. Her writing sits at the intersection of psychology, leadership and change towards what genuine transformation requires — the same terrain her doctoral work inhabits and underpins both her practice and the writing in this Substack.
A note on what this is
The writing here is informed by a postmodern sensibility: it treats knowledge as provisional, situated, and dynamic rather than fixed or final. Nothing here arrives as conclusion. It arrives as inquiry — shaped by the moment in which it is written, open to what comes next, and aware of its own partiality.
The goal is not to inform or instruct. It is to evoke — to stir something in the reader’s own thinking about their practice, their craft, and the questions they are living with.
This is a practitioner’s inquiry and will ask of its readers a willingness to remain with complexity, to resist premature resolution, to bring their own questions and experience into genuine contact with the ideas on the page.
If that is the kind of reading you are looking for, you are in the right place.
kavithaiyer.com
© 2026 Kavitha Iyer / Crésca Consulting Pte Ltd. All rights reserved
