These past few weeks of practice — spanning coaching rooms and leadership teams from Asia to Europe — brought me back, as practice often does, to a question that sits at the heart of this series: what does it mean to live and lead from one's own core? What follows sits at the intersection of theory and practice. This is what I understand praxis to be - the ongoing, living dialogue between theory and practice, each informing and transforming the other, neither complete without the other. This essay is one answer, or the beginning of one.

A Transformational Object

Christopher Bollas writes of the transformational object (Bollas, 1987) — the encounter that does not simply inform but changes us. His work has been transformational for me and has most shaped how I practise, how I inquire, and, over many years, how I see the world.

Christopher Bollas works in the British Independent psychoanalytic tradition and his sensibility is post-modern: resistant to grand theory, attentive to the singular, distrustful of interpretive certainty, and oriented toward ambiguity rather than resolution. His thinking speaks directly to my own gaze on leadership development, on not-knowing as an epistemic stance, on the irreducible particularity of each self, and on the unconscious as a creative intelligence rather than a repository of pathology.

Over the years, different bodies of literature have held me or simply settled into the background as my practice and thinking progressed. Bollas’s influence has stayed. Reading him has often felt closer to reverie than to study, and I have come to understand that this is not incidental. His prose is itself presentational, enacting what it describes - ambiguous, layered, more alive than any single reading can exhaust, often capturing me in the form of its sentences as much as in their content. There is both science and art in his writing, and he is, in the fullest sense of the term he himself gave us, an evocative object, one I keep returning to.

Sarah Nettleton, in her careful mapping of his thought, speaks of a Bollas metapsychology, a coherent underlying theory of mind that his writing carries without always announcing (Nettleton, 2017). Reading him does not always feel like encountering a system. Sometimes it is intellectually precise, a concept arrived at with such clarity that something in the mind shifts. At other times it is closer to standing in front of a Monet, held by the impression before you understand what you are seeing, moved by something you cannot yet name. His concepts are deeply interrelated and his language does not always make this easy. He gestures toward meaning as often as he states it, trusting the reader’s own unconscious process and their own idiom to complete what the words begin. This, I have come to think, is not a limitation of his writing but its own form of self-authorisation, a trust that each reader will make meaning that is specific to them, that no single formulation can or should exhaust. Nettleton’s introduction to his metapsychology is, for many readers, the most useful map into a body of work that resists being mapped.

I have long resisted writing about Bollas directly, not from lack of engagement but from something closer to its opposite; a sense that I will never do justice to the enormity of what he offers, or to the intricate connections between his concepts. I have come to see idiom not simply as a clinical concept but as an ontology, an organising principle, an epistemology, and a way of being in the world that resists reduction to any single formulation. I write about it now to honour the influence it has had on me and on my practice, and in the hope of bringing his work into the hands of other development practitioners — a way of seeing that changes not just how you work but how you live.

Bollas’s work has shaped how I practise but also something larger — how I see my children, my partner, the people I am close to, and how I move through the world. It has become, quite unassumingly, a lens through which I understand what it means to be human and to be part of a larger life process — the self continuously unfolding through the objects, encounters, and transformations it is drawn toward, what Bollas calls the processional nature of life. His ideas arrive most often unbidden, in the midst of a session, in the pause between a client’s words, in life’s most ordinary moments. Evenly hovering attention. The Freudian pair. The role of my unconscious in any encounter. The aesthetic as a form of intelligence. Beyond concepts I apply, they have become, a part of how I see and meet the world.

And perhaps what has stayed with me most is something that runs underneath all of it, a profoundly democratising idea that transformation is not reserved for the consulting room, the crisis point, or the coaching encounter, nor for a certain intelligence, position, or status. It is natural to human beings, always available in the texture of the everyday and the ordinary, if we are willing to pay attention. This saturation of potential and meaning in the ordinary and everyday is where Bollas has perhaps shaped me most quietly, giving a quality of attunement and presence to everyday life, that I try to embody.

The Irreducible Nucleus

Of all the concepts Bollas has given me, the one I return to most is idiom. He first developed the idea in Forces of Destiny (Bollas, 1989), describing it as “the psychic correlate of the human fingerprint” (Bollas, 1997, p. 12). It is not a style, a preference or a personality, but something more fundamental:

We have within us a sense of a nucleus that gives rise to our particular aesthetic in being. We have a sense of our own self-authorship, of something that is irreducible and that determines us. (Bollas, 1997, p. 29)

Idiom is the deep grain of how a person meets the world, selects from it and is transformed by it. It is not simply what happens to a person. It is the particular way they happen to the world.

Through the concept of the evocative object (Bollas, 1992), the person, place, experience or idea that stirs the psyche and calls the self into fuller awareness, Bollas gives us a way of understanding how idiom is elaborated: not in isolation, but through experiencing the world. Self-authorisation, as I described it in my doctoral inquiry (Iyer, 2020), is the enactment of this process - the willingness to bring one’s particular way of being into the room, even when the room has not yet made space for it.

In coaching leaders, this shapes everything. My role is not to install a model of leadership but to create an encounter that evokes what is already there, waiting to be elaborated. It means holding two fingerprints in mind simultaneously, my own and my client’s, oriented always toward the elaboration of theirs.

A Tension I Have Not Resolved

My ontology and epistemology are social constructionist, held within a post-modern gaze. Truth is not discovered but constructed - always partial, relational and contingent. Yet idiom, as Bollas conceives it, seems to belong to a different register. It is not socially constructed but prior to construction itself — a particular way of being that precedes language, relationship and the social world that will eventually elaborate it. The tension between these positions is real. In the interplay between my idiom and the object world, is experience socially constructed, or does idiom elaborate itself independently? I think the honest answer is both, although I do not yet fully understand how these positions coexist.

What I hold, tentatively, is that idiom itself may be existential, something we are before anything happens to us, while its expression is always socially constructed, shaped by the encounters and relationships through which it finds form. I offer this not as a resolution but as a question that continues to accompany my thinking and my practice.

These questions sit beneath every coaching conversation, every facilitation, every attempt to meet another human being in their development. The self is not a problem to be solved. Neither is the other. They are, as Bollas might say, to be elaborated: slowly, partially, always incompletely and always in relation.

What idiom feels like from the inside matters as much as any definition. It is not a concrete thing. I experience it more like a fragrance: something sensed rather than grasped, an impression that accumulates over time, an embodied experience that is felt and held rather than named and pinned down. Like every living thing, it ultimately resists complete description. I expect I will continue inquiring into it for the rest of my life. In many ways, that inquiry is what this writing has been about.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com. Photo from Unsplash.

Further Reading

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Free Association Books.

Bollas, C. (1989). Forces of destiny: Psychoanalysis and human idiom. Free Association Books.

Bollas, C. (1992). Being a character: Psychoanalysis and self experience. Hill and Wang.

Bollas, C. (1997). In A. Molino (Ed.), Freely associated: Encounters in psychoanalysis. Free Association Books.

Nettleton, S. (2017). The metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An introduction. Routledge.

The last three essays traced the ground of my practice. The first followed my formation, the encounters, and the intellectual influences that informed how I construct leadership development in my mind. The second went into the depth-oriented traditions, the psychoanalytic thinking, and what attending to the inner world asks of the person. The third brought in the evidence-based traditions, the research on change, and the discipline of grounding claims beyond intuition alone. Together they made the argument that the practice of leadership development lives at the intersection of art and science, of evidence and depth, of the objective and the subjective. A constant and demanding thread that is present throughout is what remains unknown; not-knowing, held as an epistemological stance rather than a competency gap.

This essay concludes the trilogy by asking what holding all of that simultaneously demands in practice. It attends to the epistemological, the structural, the relational, and the human, from the first conversation with an organisation through to the developmental encounter itself, whether with an individual or a team.

The Widening Frame

An earlier essay situated leadership coaching in organisational change. Leadership development, seeking some sort of change and betterment for individuals, exists inside organisations that are in constant change themselves. These leaders inhabit histories that precede them, both personal and institutional, and contexts that outlast them. They are temporary holders of roles, with someone before and after them in the role, and yet with an opportunity to bring their unique fingerprint to that role. Beyond performance or capability, developmental interventions attend to the whole person in the role and how they navigate change, in the midst of organisational, technological, and geopolitical disruptions that further complicate the picture.

The first conversations with organisations commissioning development work are around the purpose and objectives of the intervention. The framing, and what might be missing from it, is the earliest data about the organisation and the broader system. These include questions such as whether the developmental need sits with the individual, the team, or something their manager has to communicate, and whether coaching is the right intervention at all. Practicing from the intersection demands asking these uncomfortable questions and directly impacts how the boundaries of the engagement are established—clarity on goals, process, and confidentiality, among other areas.

These questions continue into the coaching relationship itself. In coaching, the chemistry meeting is where the intersection becomes most visible. On the surface it is an assessment about fit and yet, it carries epistemological and ethical undertones. The practitioner is asking, in real time, whether what she offers matches what this person needs, in this organisation, at this particular point in time. The postmodern gaze runs through that question as there is no universally good practitioner or universally right approach. The developmental intervention for a leader in a highly regulated financial institution is designed differently from one navigating a rapid-growth environment.

What Practice Produces

Over time, practicing with this intersection in mind produces something harder to name than a framework: a quality of attention, discernment, and in-the-moment awareness. A feel for when to highlight something and when not to, when to name and when to hold it. Critical insights and breakthroughs often arrive sideways, in the most non-directed moments. Present and in charge, not driven by anxiety.

In coaching leaders, I have come to understand this as an attunement, mirrored in their daily leadership, encountered almost unconsciously. When I ask how they made a particular decision or reached a conclusion, they will often say something did not sit right, or that they followed their instinct, or that they followed their intuition. This is after weeks of data gathering and careful analysis. The coaching relationship works with the same dynamic. What Polanyi (1966) called tacit knowing, what Schön (1983) named knowing-in-action, and what Bollas (1987) identified as the unthought known are all captured here.

Each leader’s process for such knowing and the way it is expressed is often unique and unseen. In Goffman’s terms (1959), it is the backstage of practice, the preparation that makes the front-stage possible. Coaching, as a developmental intervention, inverts that frame. The front-stage of the leader, the performed, managed, organisational version of the self, is exactly what coaching moves away from. The work is to create the conditions for the client’s backstage to become accessible, through contact with their own inner life and as a way to understand and re-frame the front-stage performance in their role.

The practitioner brings their own unseen ground to this. The traditions, the praxis-informed epistemology, the discipline, the inner work, not as a performance but as what makes genuine psychological safety and trust possible. An engagement moves across this terrain unpredictably, between depth and practicality, between action planning and psychologically dense inner territory, without imposing a hierarchy on what matters most.

In the end, all change, organisational or individual, eventually becomes personal. It lands in the person and in who they are in the process of becoming.

Seeing and Being Seen in the Process of Becoming

The traditions, frameworks, and disciplines of attention ultimately serve one thing - the capacity to truly see another person. In this process, the lens turns inward on the practitioner too. Through this work, I have come to see my own developmental arc. The messiness, the mistakes, and everything in between, as integral parts of a process that does not move in a straight line.

In the midst of the challenging inner work, something settles into a way of living and leading that is genuinely one’s own. Acting from agency and authorship, the moments of delight becoming more frequent, the lightness of being more available. The experience of being fully human, with all of it, the struggle and the joy, stops feeling like a contradiction and starts feeling like the point.

There is an aesthetic and an ethical dimension to this work. The aesthetic lives in the precision and grace of human change. It is beautiful in its unfolding and humbling in what it reveals. The ethical lives in the attention to boundaries and containment that allows both to unfold, and in the responsibility and discipline that holding a person’s inner material with care demands.

Coming to be is not a state arrived at. It is universal and singular at the same time. A process always underway, it asks of the practitioner and the client alike a deep compassion and commitment to what that demands. It is both ordinary in its constancy, such that one almost does not notice it, and extraordinary in what the human spirit does with it.

The work done between practitioner and client continues outside the room, often in ways neither party anticipated and situated in a bigger and broader life lived. This keeps the client’s agency at the centre. It is their narrative to define, to hold, and to carry forward. The practitioner accompanies. They do not author.

The intersection, at its deepest, is not between traditions or frameworks. It is where the practitioner and the client meet, each carrying their own becoming through the encounter.

Further Reading

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. London: Free Association Books.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. New York: Doubleday.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. Subscribe for free! If you found this useful, please share with attribution. Photo by Nikolai Rubanov on Unsplash

Meteorologists cannot tell you exactly what tomorrow will bring. But they can tell you, with considerable accuracy, what tends to happen when particular conditions converge, which informs how you prepare. You still have to step outside and read the sky yourself.

Research on human change and development works similarly. It cannot tell a leader exactly what is needed in a particular moment. It can show conditions that tend to support development and how others in comparable situations have navigated similar terrain.

This essay attends to what evidence-based research specifically contributes to the practice of leadership development and where its findings meet insights long held within qualitative and interpretive traditions.

My own exposure spans longitudinal studies, organisational frameworks grounded in practice, and reflective inquiry. Evidence-based is more accurate than science-based here because it honours that range without requiring all approaches to meet the same methodological standard. It is also worth acknowledging that cognitive behavioural coaching, solution-focused approaches, and competency-based models have substantial research bases of their own. What follows reflects the traditions I have been most immersed in.

Situating Coaching Within the OD Landscape

Leadership coaching rarely exists in isolation. In organisational settings it usually sits within broader questions of capability, culture, succession, performance, and system-wide change.

My years in Organisation Development and Learning exposed me early to Edgar Schein’s (1999) process consultation and Eric Neilsen’s (1984) work on becoming an OD practitioner. Both position the practitioner as a collaborative inquirer rather than an expert, attending to meaning and system dynamics rather than prescribing solutions. This sits closer to qualitative and interpretive traditions than to positivist science. At the time I did not fully have the language for why this mattered to me, though I can now see how formative it became.

Scale, Strategy, and the Organisation as a System

Qualitative and interpretive traditions attend closely to the relational encounter and the unconscious life of groups and systems. The Tavistock tradition and Bion's work extend this into organisational life through collective dynamics operating across teams and institutions. Evidence-based frameworks offer something different - replicability, consistency, and shared developmental language that can travel across large organisational populations.

My early experience scaling change management at Merck Sharp and Dohme through the Asia Strategy Group was formative. The group sat outside HR, OD, and Learning, placing me directly alongside senior business leaders navigating restructuring across diverse markets, cultures, and regulatory environments. It was an early encounter with what interdisciplinary integration actually required - holding the interior life of leaders alongside the structural realities of organisational change.

Boyatzis's (2006) Intentional Change Theory matters here because of its fractal structure — the same developmental frame applying across individual, team, organisational, and societal levels simultaneously. Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005) extends this to whole-system inquiry. Process consultation (Schein, 1999) grounds it further by attending to how work actually unfolds rather than how it is formally described. Together these illuminate something individual coaching alone cannot fully hold, the conditions under which development takes root within organisational systems and culture.

What Research Gives

Evidence-based research gives leaders and practitioners generalisable findings, accountability to research, and shared language for recognising patterns across people and systems. It also gives the field a form of visibility that individual practice cannot, aggregated across thousands of engagements, it offers organisations confidence beyond anecdote or self-report.

I refer to several evidence-based influences in my practice - Boyatzis’s research on emotional and social intelligence competencies, his later work on the emotional connection to a desired future as the mechanism of sustained change (Boyatzis, 2024), Kegan and Lahey’s immunity to change framework, and de Haan’s finding that the working alliance is the strongest predictor of coaching outcomes regardless of theoretical orientation. They also converge, from different directions, on insights the qualitative and interpretive traditions have long held - that authentic aspiration moves people, that the practitioner herself is the primary instrument of the work, and that the individual cannot be separated from the systems they inhabit.

Evidence-based approaches do not fully account for the messiness of transformation as it is lived as change is rarely linear or predictable. At both individual and systemic levels, it is uneven, relational, and shaped by forces that exceed conscious intention. Coaching research also struggles to isolate the coaching relationship as the variable producing change. Leaders’ lives are complex, many influences unfold simultaneously, including on-the-job development and attributing development specifically to a coaching intervention is inherently difficult. Positivist research seeks neutrality and controllable variables while interpretive approaches treat the practitioner’s subjectivity as part of the field rather than bias to eliminate. Both have limitations and each highlights different aspects of human development.

The Whole Person in the Whole System

Holding both evidence-based and interpretive approaches also respects where the leader is situated - in their role, their function, and how they make sense of their experience. In working with CFOs, risk leaders, or those in scientific and quantitative industries, the engagement often begins with the concrete and measurable before moving toward the more elusive and subjective dimensions of leadership. For others, particularly those who are highly psychologically minded or accustomed to working in ambiguity, the movement may be in the opposite direction, toward structure, data, and the grounding that evidence provides. The capacity to read a room cannot be captured in numbers alone, and arriving with only numbers, absent that quality of attention, will not land as credible either. Holding both is a practical response to the irreducible variety of the leaders and contexts the practitioner encounters and a fundamental respect for where the leader is situated.

There is also a more personal dimension to holding both. This is the backstage work of practice - the ongoing inner inquiry that keeps me close to what I actually know and attentive to what this particular leader, in this particular moment, needs. It is a small way to honour the trust that leaders place in me when they bring their complexity into the room.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com. Photo from Unsplash.

Further Reading

Boyatzis, R. E. and McKee, A. (2005). Resonant Leadership. Harvard Business School Press.

Boyatzis, R. E. and Akrivou, K. (2006). The ideal self as the driver of intentional change. Journal of Management Development, 25(7), 624–642.

Boyatzis, R., Liu, H., Smith, A., Zwygart, K. and Quinn, J. (2023). Competencies of coaches that predict client behaviour change. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 0(0).

Boyatzis, R. E. (2024). The Science of Change: Discovering Sustained, Desired Change from Individuals to Organizations and Communities. Oxford University Press.

Bollas, C. (1992). Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. Hill and Wang.

Cooperrider, D. L. and Whitney, D. (2005). Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Berrett-Koehler.

de Haan, E. (2008). Relational Coaching. Wiley.

Kegan, R. and Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.

Neilsen, E. H. (1984). Becoming an OD Practitioner. Prentice Hall.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin.

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship. Addison-Wesley.

Visiting Barcelona in 2015, the same year my doctoral programme began, I found myself standing in front of Gaudí’s work and recognising something I had not yet found language for. His structures are simultaneously the product of rigorous mathematical and natural science and of an aesthetic vision that could not have been produced by calculation alone. The art and science of human development is not so different. Freud and Jung were not opposing camps but two orientations toward the same irreducible mystery. Christopher Bollas’s creative unconscious is itself both a scientific claim about how the psyche works and an aesthetic sensibility about how to attend to it. That is the intersection I have begun to appreciate.

My dominant formation was in the practice world with twenty years of working inside organisations in OD and Learning roles. This gave me an internalised understanding of how organisations actually work, what they reward, what they resist, and what finally lands as useful to a leader navigating real complexity. Practice was and remains my primary home. Scholarship came later, not as a replacement for that grounding but as a way of bringing rigour, language, and a more conscious epistemological awareness to what I was already doing. The doctoral programme was the most sustained version of that turn toward scholarship and it changed not what I valued but how I could account for it.

For years I tried to resolve the tensions I experienced in my practice of coaching leaders - rigorous and relational, evidence-based and depth-oriented, measurable and mysterious, the individual and their organisation. Eventually I stopped trying to settle them and began working with them instead. That organisational frame has remained a constant check throughout, whatever tradition I am drawing on, the question is always whether it can reach the leader where she actually is, inside a system that has its own logic, demands, and constraints. This essay is an ongoing attempt to articulate what that shift gave to my practice and how I came to think about leadership development.

In the early days of practice, I operated without fully understanding the “why” or the place for humanistic and depth-oriented traditions that I briefly traced in Part One. The NTL process groups, Carl Rogers, the work of Manfred Kets de Vries and other exposures were not simply the soft alternative to the harder sciences of change. My doctoral inquiry gave me the language as it helped me locate where I was already standing epistemologically, and to understand what rigour looked like in these traditions. What I came to appreciate was that the science-based tradition was attending to a different dimension of the same irreducible complexity of being human.

An earlier essay, The Architecture of Coaching, explored how coaching sits within broader traditions of change and meaning-making. What follows builds on that ground by attending to a more specific tension within it, between the science of human transformation and the humanistic and depth-oriented tradition.

Five Tensions

Over time, I came to see the tensions I was grappling with as not singular but layered.

The first tension is epistemological: whether human change is best understood through objective measurement or through subjective and relational meaning-making.

The second is methodological: whether transformation is produced through evidence-based interventions, interpretation, dialogue, unconscious process, or some combination of these.

The third is ethical: what happens when traditions developed for therapeutic depth are borrowed into leadership development contexts operating with different contracts, boundaries, and expectations.

The fourth is organisational: how to remain attentive to interior life without losing sight of systems, performance, authority, strategy, and the practical demands leaders face.

The fifth tension is perhaps the most uncomfortable to name, the practitioner’s own relationship to depth. Working at the level of interior life and unconscious process can feel genuinely meaningful, giving a practitioner a sense of purpose, even vocation. The risk is that this can subtly become a need to be the one who sees what others have not seen, or who holds what others cannot hold. When that happens, the depth being pursued may be serving the practitioner’s own need for significance as much as the client’s developmental goals. Managing that pull honestly and remaining in service of the client needs is an ongoing discipline and one that supervision exists precisely to support.

I no longer experience these tensions as problems to solve. They have become the ground of the work itself. What I have come to call open tension (Iyer, 2020) is a disciplined willingness to remain with ambiguity and resist the pull toward premature resolution. It is both an epistemological and practical stance.

Different Grounds, Different Questions

Several traditions inform leadership development and each one rests on different assumptions, about what human beings are, what can be known about them, and how that knowledge is legitimately produced. The art and science of human development is not a claim about methodological range but about the irreducible complexity of the object of inquiry, the human being in the process of becoming. Science gives us patterns, conditions, and mechanisms. Art gives us attunement, presence, and the capacity to hold what cannot be systematised. Both are necessary not because the practitioner moves between two camps but because human transformation itself demands both.

What the Depth-Oriented Tradition Gives the Practitioner

Psychoanalytical thinking sharpens the practitioner’s understanding of how history shapes the present, how the unspoken organises what is spoken, and how presence itself becomes data. It introduces an essential democracy as both practitioner and client are subject to unconscious process. The practitioner’s assumptions, associations, and emotional responses are as implicated in the engagement as the client’s. Insight is socially constructed rather than discovered in isolation and the relationship itself becomes the site of transformation.

The humanistic tradition in being person-centered, experiential, and oriented toward human potential, understands development as the release of what is already present rather than the correction of what is deficient. Where psychoanalytical thinking attends to what is unconscious and historical, the humanistic tradition orients toward the present and the person’s own capacity for growth. What unites them is a shared conviction that the source of transformation lies within the person rather than in the intervention, and that human agency and innate resources are central to change.

My encounter with post-modern psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas during my doctoral program, and the years of psychoanalytical psychotherapy that followed, gave me a first-hand experience of transformation from the inside. More broadly, it also gave me a quality of attention to remain curious about what is happening beneath the surface of what is presented and that resists the pull toward premature interpretation. I learnt to use what emerges in the room, the atmosphere, the silences, the patterns of relating as data about what is actually happening. As explored in the Gravitas essays, seeing how a team operated often revealed more about what a leader needed than anything explicitly offered as judgement or feedback. That quality of attention cannot be borrowed from the outside. It has to be experienced, which is why the practitioner’s own sustained inquiry, through supervision, personal therapy, and reflective practice, is not optional but essential.

Christopher Bollas’s work exemplifies this orientation, attentive to the singular and the particular, resistant to grand unified theory, and grounded in the belief that the unconscious is a creative intelligence, shaping and selecting experience in ways that express the deeper self. His body of work is the most intense immersion I have had into psychoanalytical theory and will be the subject of a dedicated essay.

Groups as Systems: The Tavistock Tradition

Attending the Leicester Conference, the Tavistock Institute’s fourteen-day flagship experiential group relations event, gave me direct encounter with the unconscious life of groups. Grounded in the work of Wilfred Bion, the Tavistock model begins from a disorienting but powerful idea that in groups, individuals are never only themselves, they are also representatives of the collective. What appears as one person’s hesitation, dominance, or silence may communicate something the group itself cannot yet process directly.

Bion’s concept of basic assumptions gave language for what happens beneath the surface of leadership teams. Fight-flight, dependency, and pairing are not individual pathologies but collective emotional states organising group behaviour outside awareness. Attending to the emotional life of systems and holding the distinction between the individual and the group as separate units of analysis is what this tradition makes possible in leadership development work.

On Borrowing Responsibly

What I carry from these traditions into leadership development, apart from a quality of attention, is a sensibility rather than a method. Therapeutic concepts were developed within a specific context and cadence and psychoanalytical psychotherapy operates within a distinctive frame of free association, transference and counter-transference, within the consistency and duration of each session. The Tavistock tradition required me to experience first-hand basic assumptions, fight-flight, and dependency. My practice world of developing leaders operates differently, within shorter and more bounded relationships, than the context where some of these concepts were developed. Leadership development interventions draw on multiple perspectives including stakeholder feedback, psychometric tools, behavioural observation, and organisational dynamics, with a more active practitioner in dialogue rather than the relative anonymity of the analytic stance.

There is an ethical dimension to borrowing from any tradition that operates at a different depth and cadence. Working with these sensibilities can surface biographical residues, relational patterns, and collective anxieties that the coaching contract may not be equipped to contain. Borrowing responsibly requires clarity about what has been contracted, transparency about the depth of the work, and the discipline to recognise when referral is the most responsible response.

There is also a subtler risk of assuming that depth is inherently superior, or that leaders who do not engage at that level are somehow resistant. People differ in what they need, what they are ready for, and what is useful in a given context. Not every leader is carrying biographical material actively shaping their leadership, and not every culture shares the introspective assumptions underpinning much psychoanalytical thinking. A postmodern stance holds depth as one orientation among many rather than the default or ideal.

Clients also arrive with very different relationships to their own interior life. Some come with a well-developed capacity for self-reflection, a fluency with their interior life, years of self-analysis and prior exposure to coaching or therapy. For these clients, the more useful intervention may be structure, grounding, and permission to act - a movement toward clarity and the outer world rather than further introspection. The task is discerning what this person, in this moment, actually needs, even when that means moving away from depth rather than toward it.

The practitioner’s own ongoing formation through supervision, reflective practice, and other modalities where relevant is what makes this borrowing responsible. Beyond the traditions themselves, it is the practitioner’s sustained commitment to her own development within and across them that provides the ethical ground for the work.

The Continuing Work of Praxis

Over time I realised I was moving towards a praxis epistemology grounded not in a final loyalty to one tradition, but in the disciplined movement between theory, lived experience, process, organisational reality, and reflection in action.

The task, increasingly, has become learning to read what each moment asks, whether that is presence, structure, depth, or clarity - without losing either the human being or the organisational reality they are operating in. That, for me, is the continuing work of praxis. What the science contributes to that understanding, and how it both complements and complicates everything described here, is where the next essay begins.

Part Three attends to what the science opens up for the field of coaching within organisation development. In a world that is increasingly fragmented and polarised, the capacity to hold intersections of knowledge feels beyond a professional concern and more like an urgent social and political one

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com. Photo from Unsplash.

Further Reading

Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. Tavistock Publications.

Bollas, C. (1989). Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom. Free Association Books.

Bollas, C. (1992). Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. Hill and Wang.

Gergen, K. J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction. SAGE.

Jung, C. G. (1957). The Undiscovered Self. Routledge.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2006). The Leader on the Couch: A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organisations. Jossey-Bass.

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (Eds.). (2008). The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (2nd ed.). SAGE.

A coaching practice is shaped by far more than its methods which is rarely made visible. These three essays are an attempt to make visible the ground beneath my work - the exposures, the tensions, and the convictions that have shaped how I see and practice. Part One traces how I got here. Part Two attends to what the depth-oriented tradition offers. Part Three attends to what the science of coaching effectiveness opens for practice.

Coaching, as a field that has leaned heavily on self-awareness as its primary change mechanism, and on technique as its primary currency, has left itself epistemologically thin. What grounds the work? What theory of change sits beneath it? What does a coach actually bring, beyond a methodology and a coaching presence?

This three-part essay attempts to address these veryquestions that have organised my own development over several years. What follows is one practitioner’s account of how her craft came to be, offered through a postmodern gaze that action research makes explicit: how we are situated shapes how we see, how we narrate, and how we interpret. This practice has a name: reflexivity (Reason, Bradbury, and Torbert, 2008). Knowledge is always produced from somewhere, a claim shared across postmodern epistemology (Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault), social constructionism (Gergen, 1999), and action research.

Early formations

The development of my coaching craft is shaped by years of experiences that did not happen in a tidy or linear way. Some influences came simultaneously, others I encountered early but only understood much later, especially the place for humanistic traditions in organisations. It also happened alongside the forces of development themselves, the processional nature of a life being lived, with all the disruption, loss, growth, life experiences and reconfiguration that brings, that go towards shaping the person behind the practice.

What follows traces the major punctuation points in that journey. It does not account for everything: the coaching supervision, the shorter encounters with ideas and practitioners, or the ongoing connections made between theory and practice across years of organisational work. Those threads are present in the practice even where they are absent from this account.

Alongside these punctuation points, many people shaped my thinking: bosses who encouraged early and ongoing exposure to some pivotal learning experiences, leaders and executives whose complexity pushed the edges of the work, educators and programme directors, fellow participants in experiential learning, supervisors who held the practice over time, and doctoral companions whose challenges sharpened the inquiry. Their influence runs through everything that follows even where it is not named.

The educational, beyond the credentials, were containers for practitioner-led inquiry, one where live experiences in practice, each sustained engagement with a body of thought, was driven by questions that practice had raised and theory alone could not settle.

Starting in Organisations: Between the Visible and the Interior

My early professional world was one of the tangible and the measurable, the language of strategy, talent pipelines, business outcomes, organisational effectiveness, the currencies of the environments I worked in for twenty years. In my first job at Unilever, and subsequently at Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD in Asia), and American Express, the Organisation Development and learning functions were sophisticated and tightly linked to business goals. This was a world that trusted what was visible, quantified, and reported.

The first rupture in that world came when I was twenty-four, with exposure to the National Training Labs (NTL) Basic and Advanced Human Process, while I was at Unilever. I was clueless about what I was walking into, but struck immediately by the intensity of the experience. Those groups made visible what the organisational frame had no language for: the dynamics operating beneath formal roles, the unconscious patterns shaping how people related to authority and to each other, the way dependency and rivalry organised themselves without anyone naming them. That experience created a permanent tension in how I see organisations: between the world that measures and the world that attends, between what is reported and what is actually happening. And yet, I found it hard to “implement” what I had learnt back into my organisational roles, in any tangible way. It was the beginning of a question that practice kept raising and that eventually sent me back to theory, and theory back to practice, in a movement that has not stopped.

Along the way I was drawn to Carl Rogers, Carl Jung and other thinkers, who between them mapped the internal life of the human being from different angles and whose ideas became a part of how I think. They gave language to what the NTL groups had shown experientially: that what moves people, and what blocks them, lives beneath the surface of what they present.

From Interior Experience to the Science of Change

Twenty years ago, as I began coaching with INSEAD’s executive education, I encountered the work of Manfred Kets de Vries. His conviction that psychoanalytic insight belongs at the centre of leadership development, that what drives leaders is the unconscious, the unresolved, the biographical residue of a life lived before the title, was pivotal to my thinking. It also deepened a question that practice had already been raising: if this was true, what did it require of me? And was I equipped to work at that depth?

The question sharpened through my work in MSD’s Asia Strategy Group, where I was involved in rolling out change management across the region. This was change at a different scale entirely, spanning organisational design, restructuring, and the challenge of designing and communicating change coherently across the individual, the team, and the organisational level simultaneously. My existing frameworks, rooted in the intra and inter-psychic, in what moves and blocks people personally and in relation with others, gave me a rich understanding of what was happening inside and between people. But they fell short when the question became what this meant at scale, how to hold the interior life of individuals and the architecture of systems in the same frame, and how to translate that understanding into change that could travel across an entire region. Practice had outrun my framework for understanding and a growing restlessness around not knowing the ground my practice stood on took me to Case Western Reserve University’s Master of Science in Positive Organisation Development and Change.

While my earlier encounters had been a grounding in the subjective and the interior, Case Western offered an objective, science-based lens. Positive Organisation Development draws on positive psychology, complexity theory, and the science of human systems to ask what conditions enable flourishing and how we build deliberately from strength. Boyatzis’s Intentional Change Theory was central: a model grounded in neuroscience describing how sustainable change begins with a positive vision of a desired future. His work with Annie McKee on resonant leadership (Boyatzis and McKee, 2005) extended this into the relational dimensions of leading. Through Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider, 2005), I encountered the same premise at organisational scale: that systems grow in the direction of what they study. The programme also expanded my horizon to the systemic and the planetary, to the question of what kind of world our collective practice is helping to bring into being.

What Case Western surfaced, sitting alongside the psychoanalytic and humanistic traditions exposure I had, was a tension I recognised immediately, because it is the same tension that I experience and hold while coaching leaders in organisations. The head and the heart. The measurable and the mysterious. The evidence base and the interior encounter that no instrument can fully capture. I had been living on one side of that tension for years. The programme put me squarely in the middle of it. What I came to understand, slowly and not without discomfort, was that the craft I was developing did not resolve that tension but worked at the intersection of it. The science and the art of coaching are not opposing claims about what the work is. They are different lenses on the same irreducible complexity, and holding both without collapsing into either is offering something that neither tradition alone makes available.

Something else happened at Case Western that sent me inward in a way the program content alone could not have. As part of the curriculum, I worked with a qualified coach. In those sessions I encountered my own patterns, reflected back with enough clarity that I could not look away. It gave me insight into how I was operating, what I was avoiding, and where my own history was shaping my responses in ways I had not previously seen. Theory had sent me to Case Western. Being in the chair sent me somewhere else entirely, toward a recognition that my own interior is not separate to the work but is its very ground.

Working at the Intersections: The Art and Science of Coaching

These encounters, the organisational world, the NTL rupture, the humanistic traditions, INSEAD, Case Western, did not produce a settled framework. They produced someone who had learned to work from within a set of productive tensions: between the scientific and the subjective, between what can be measured and what can only be attended to, between the architecture of change and the mystery of what actually moves a human being.

This is the first of a three-part Praxis essay. Part Two attends to what the depth-oriented tradition opens - psychoanalytic thinking, the unconscious life of groups, and what encountering these traditions from the inside gave my practice with leaders. Part Three attends to what the science of coaching tells us

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

References

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.

Boyatzis, R. E., and Akrivou, K. (2006). The ideal self as the driver of intentional change. Journal of Management Development, 25(7), 624–642.

Boyatzis, R. E., and McKee, A. (2005). Resonant Leadership. Harvard Business School Press.

Cooperrider, D. L., and Whitney, D. (2005). Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Berrett-Koehler.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Pantheon Books.

Gergen, K. J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction. SAGE.

Jung, C. G. (1957). The Undiscovered Self. Routledge.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2006). The Leader on the Couch. Jossey-Bass.

Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press.

Reason, P., and Bradbury, H. (Eds.). (2008). The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (2nd ed.). SAGE.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin.

Torbert, W. R. (2004). Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership. Berrett-Koehler.

A note on naming: the leader at the centre of this series has not been named in the preceding three-part essay. I name her Layla here, a pseudonym, as the organisational complexity this essay attends to requires a more located presence than “the leader” can carry.

This essay re-enters the engagement with Layla — the leader whose biography, interior life, and development were traced across the three preceding parts of this series — not through the individual lens that organised those essays, but through an organisational one. It attends to what became visible when the coaching moved from the leader alone into the room with her team, and what that revealed about the broader system she operated in.

The postmodern position holds that meaning, identity, and behaviour are never produced in isolation. They are always already situated — shaped by the discourses, structures, power relations, and cultural norms of the systems within which people live and work (Gergen, 1999). The three-part series showed the role of biography in how a leader is situated. I now turn the lens to how she is constituted by the organisational context she inhabits: by what it permits and forecloses, by what it rewards and silences, by the assumptions it has normalised so thoroughly they are no longer experienced as assumptions. This is why individual coaching, however sophisticated, remains partial without accounting for the system.

What I was already noticing: The organisational architecture

Six months after the individual coaching concluded, Layla asked me to work with her leadership team — to build psychological safety, create conditions for honest conversation, and support her in setting her vision as a new leader.

By that point I had developed substantive understanding of her biography, inner workings, the internalised relational template enacted across stakeholder relationships, and how these connected to leadership competencies. But I had also been noticing patterns that resisted individual-level explanation. A cultural reflex had become visible: influence appeared to move through proximity to seniority rather than through role, showing up as the dropping of senior names to get things done. A dual reporting structure of Layla accountable to both regional and functional leadership had created competing expectations and ambiguous authorities. Her manager had sought to use the coaching relationship to convey feedback he had not given her directly. The contracting process, involving HR and Learning & Development, placed heightened visibility on Layla and the work. These dynamics gave me important data about the system’s political and social texture and raised a question I had begun asking myself: whether her changes to delegation, strategic perspective, the capacity to see and articulate “the forest among the trees” had a place to land in this organisation’s architecture? That suspicion became legible only in the room and it was beyond her immediate leader’s support for her development.

The team intervention: what the room revealed

The session was a structured two-day development for a ten-member team. I entered it with a tentative frame, making space for open tension (Iyer, 2020): attending simultaneously to the stated agenda and to what was organising the group beneath it.

Layla’s descriptions of her team were not inaccurate. But they were filtered through her own interior — her difficulty with self-authorisation, her anxiety about strategic adequacy, her irritation with a particular team member, her micro-management. In the room, the dynamics looked less centered on her and more reflective of systemic patterns. The predecessor’s culture was still organising the group: through shared assumptions about how leadership operated, through his name appearing often to validate a previous way of working, through how authority was distributed independently of her. Being present to all this “data” from the session, started to give me greater visibility of the soil into which Layla’s coaching focus would need to land.

What the room made visible: discoveries about the organisation

Several patterns came into focus, each casting the individual coaching in a different light.

Talent strategy and juniorisation. Several team members were operating significantly beyond their current experience, framed internally as stretch. It was Layla’s former manager, checking in informally after the intervention, who named it “juniorisation”: the organisation had been deliberately recruiting younger, less experienced talent. What had appeared as individual stretch was a strategy with consequences that moved through the whole system.

Juniorisation as the structural driver of micro-management. Micro-management here was not a leadership pathology. It was a situated response to talent that required closer oversight. What became visible was Layla pulling her role downward, absorbing the softer leadership dimensions of her direct reports’ roles, managing what they were not yet equipped to hold. Beyond personal biography, her micro-management was situated rather than just dispositional.

Getting things done as the primary cultural logic. The organisation’s centre of gravity was execution: speed, decisiveness, delivery. Leadership development was supported through encouraging development and not necessarily as part of day to day leadership roles, to build the next generation of talent

Name dropping as the social infrastructure of authority. Influence moving through proximity to seniority was not a political maneuver. It was how things got done in a system where formal authority was ambiguous and the predecessor’s cultural imprint had not yet been replaced.

The unexpected territory: organisation development. The intervention did not remain within its stated brief. A robust conversation emerged with HR and Learning & Development in debriefing: development not embedded in structures, leadership competencies absent from role expectations, the gap managed invisibly through individuals like Layla. What began as a team intervention became a conversation about the organisation itself. That was not planned. It was where the room led.

What observation surfaced that conversation could not

Most of what I have described was not information Layla gave me. She did not identify micro-management as a cultural norm, the talent strategy as producing systemic anxiety, or the developmental investment as disconnected from organisational structures.

Either these conditions were so thoroughly normalised that she could not perceive the contrast between the system she operated within and the leadership we were discussing in our sessions, or this was yet another manifestation of her struggle to hold the bigger picture, to step back from the immediate and perceive the “forest among the trees”. The individual coaching had attended to this pattern. The team intervention showed it operating at scale, in the very context she had never quite been able to name. After this intervention, I had a few individual sessions with Layla and integrated this more complex understanding of her and the system, into strategies going forward.

Throughout this engagement I found myself doing what Lather (1991) describes as working with and against: operating within the frameworks that structured the work while pressing against their limits. The “forest among the trees” was not only Layla’s developmental edge; it was mine too - the team intervention was the moment I finally saw the system I had been working inside all along.

Zooming in, zooming out

Individual coaching is an act of zooming in toward a particular history, meaning-making, and interior. Zooming out contextualised it, placing what had appeared as personal pattern within a larger architecture of organisational culture, talent strategy, and structural incentive. Action research offers a methodological frame for holding this movement: between first-person inquiry into one’s own practice, second-person inquiry into the relational, and third-person inquiry into the systemic. This three-person frame has become a backbone of my praxis.

The deeper point is not methodological but epistemological. From a postmodern position, change is never simply individual, it is situated in dominant discourses, structures, and power relations that constitute the context in which a person acts. What this engagement made visible was not the limits of coaching relative to systemic intervention, but the limits of any account of change that locates transformation primarily in the individual. Identity, behaviour, and development are produced socially and structurally.

The next three essays attend to the theoretical influences present throughout this engagement and to how I arrived at them, not as a retrospective account of ideas applied to practice, but as to how I encountered my own development in the process. In that sense, this entire series has enacted an action-reflection cycle: each engagement with the work folding back into thinking, each theoretical frame sharpening what the engagement made visible. The movement between bridging the world of ideas and the world of practice is central to how I build praxis.

References

Gergen, K. J. (1991). The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. Basic Books.

Gergen, K. J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction. Sage.

Lather, P. (1991). Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern. Routledge.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. More about my practice at www.kavithaiyer.com

This is the third and final part of this essay. Part One introduced the engagement and what was observable in the room before anything more substantive became available. Part Two attended to the biographical material that surfaced beneath the presenting goals and what it required of me as a practitioner. This part follows the engagement into the moment the presenting frame gave way, what was discovered beneath it, and what eventually shifted by reframing the developmental agenda.

Where the frame broke

Several sessions into the engagement, the leader described an experience she could not fully account for. In her leadership team meetings, she was struggling to provide clear direction and inspire the team. With a particular team member — one brought in by her predecessor — she found herself losing emotional regulation. She was reprimanding him in front of the group in ways she recognised as disproportionate and professionally costly. She was aware of what was happening and, yet, could not explain it.

I was struck by the specificity of this encounter; it was not a generalised leadership difficulty. It was a response within the relationship with a particular team member , producing a distinct pattern: the emotional dysregulation, the inability to hold authority or inspiration in the room with any settled quality. Conventional explanations — confidence, role clarity, transition anxiety — were partially valid but insufficient. The questions I held were: why this person, and what did this encounter carry?

Rather than moving toward interpretation, I held those questions and let the material unfold. What emerged over time was an implicit comparison. This team member appeared to embody, in the leader’s experience of him, the predecessor’s authority — decisive, technically assured, a bigger personality. She was measuring herself against an internalised standard, both real and constructed, and finding herself wanting. When we could talk about this unspoken comparison with her predecessor, I asked what made her available to such comparison rather than being in denial of it. This question was not immediately answered. Much later, it became a coaching question she often referred to. Remaining with her internal process of discovery, in timing, form and content, allowed each theme to illuminate something critical to her agency in making meaning of her behaviors.

The emergence of grief and fear

As these themes were engaged more directly, something emerged that did not belong in the initial framing: loss. The shift away from technical and functional authority was not only a strategic transition. It involved relinquishing the mode through which she had known herself as competent for two decades. This was not a skills gap that training could close. It was an experience of identity in suspension — no longer the professional she had been, not yet the one the role required.

Her difficulty providing direction, her emotional outbursts with this particular team member, and her continued focus on operational detail became intelligible in this light. These were not behavioural deficits. They were responses to disorientation and loss that had no organisational container. The early impression of passivity was also reinterpreted. It reflected exhaustion rather than disengagement. She was holding together a professional identity that was fragmenting, in a context that could neither recognise nor support that process. In such conditions, the coaching became the only space where the experience could be named.

Over time, a further layer emerged: her fear. When she reduced her functional involvement and stepped back from operational detail, she encountered an unfamiliar feeling of a lot of time in her hands. This did not feel like freedom. It felt like exposure. The detail had structured her time, protected her from engaging with strategic demands that felt uncertain, and given her a reliable sense of competence. Its absence revealed both anxiety and a potential lack of skills in areas the role was now asking of her.

What shifted, and how

Change was gradual and non-linear — consistent with a postmodern understanding of development as situated, emergent, and resistant to predetermined sequence. Periods of greater clarity were followed by returns to reliance on direction from me and renewed retreat into operational detail. There was no single turning point.

What altered over time was not confidence in a conventional sense. The earlier passivity gave way to a more active engagement with difficulty — an increasing capacity to remain in uncertain situations rather than micro-managing. The emotional outbursts became less frequent and less intense. Her relationship to the particular team member shifted: not resolved, but less charged, less organised around the implicit comparison that had been driving it. She also developed a more realistic view of herself and her internal struggles with the new role, including which aspects were genuinely about her skills and competencies, beyond an identity attached to functional expertise.

This engagement highlighted my role in not resolving the initial presenting issue but in sustaining interpretive openness long enough for the problem itself to reorganise across levels of understanding, primarily driven by the leader’s agency.

What these three parts demonstrate, and what they leave open

Across the three parts of this account, the individual lens has revealed something that no presenting problem and no competency framework would have surfaced unaided. Discovering the leader’s developmental areas required a sustained attentiveness that could not have been planned in advance. It was a word (“gravitas”) that had no location, a pattern of passivity that read as exhaustion, formative experiences that organised the present, a specific relational disruption with a team member that could not be explained by any single frame, an unacknowledged grief and fear — none of these were sufficient on their own. Together, in dynamic tension with each other, they began to constitute something closer to the truth of what was happening.

It also required of me, as a practitioner, to honour the humanity and the agency of the person in the room. To notice when the presenting frame was not adequate to her actual developmental needs. And to pivot — to find, with her, language that fit better than the language she arrived with. The sense of misfit I felt was data. It pointed to the organisation’s relationship to development. To the limits of the word gravitas as a coaching goal. And to the importance of linking her development back to the specific demands of her role. That twin focus — on the person and on the role — was crucial in moving her from self-awareness to meaningful, self-directed change.

A note on what this account does not capture

These essays have attended to what was most analytically visible: the leader’s interior experience, my attentiveness as a practitioner, and the meaning that accumulated between us over time. But the fuller complexity of the engagement is considerably larger. Two important dimensions are largely absent:

The craft of the sessions themselves. The account does not capture the clinical and relational texture of the work: the interpretive decisions, including the use of silence as a containing intervention; the questions that functioned as reframes; or the long stretches of apparently circular work that constituted the necessary conditions for later movement. What has been offered here is the meaning that emerged from the work. The “how” of the work — its craft, its judgement, and the moment-by-moment navigation of the engagement — remains largely below the surface.

The theoretical coherence beneath the practice. Also unspoken is how the theoretical traditions that informed this engagement — postmodern epistemology, scientific approaches to change, psychoanalytic thinking, and action research — were held together not as an eclectic mix but as a coherent and intentional epistemological stance. That coherence has shaped my craft. I will account for it — how I came to it and the iterative cycle of action and reflection that constitutes the methodological backbone of practice-based inquiry — in the essays that follow.

The essays in this series have thus far focused on the individual: the leader’s experience and how her biographical residues shaped her leadership behaviours. The next essay shifts to the organisational context. It examines the leader within her team and attends to what this reveals about the organisation’s culture, structures, and constraints. This broader lens surfaces dynamics that an individual account alone cannot access and offers, yet again, a reminder of the situated nature of leadership within a much broader system.

This is the second of three parts. Part One introduced the engagement, the presenting frame, and what was observable in the room before anything more substantive became available. This part follows the engagement into the biographical material that began to surface beneath the presenting goals, what that required of the practitioner, and how it led to a fundamental reframing of the development agenda.

What the biography carried

Within the first few sessions, something shifted in register. The leader began to speak about a pattern she had recognised across multiple contexts: a constant state of heightened alertness, an attentiveness to what might be about to go wrong, followed by a rapid impulse to move into fixing mode before failure could arrive. She traced this, without prompting, to early life - to her biological roots, family life in which she had assumed practical and emotional responsibility at a very young age. She spoke of it in a matter-of-fact way, that was itself telling, as if this were simply how things had been and how they still were, rather than something that had shaped her in ways worth examining. I suddenly felt I saw the person behind the role in her descriptions of the small town she grew up in, her humble beginnings, her parents struggles and her physically challenged sister.

The interpretive pull at this point was strong and legible: a formative experience of early, unwanted responsibility had produced a pattern of anticipating failure and moving quickly to fix. This was now being enacted in her leadership in a role that actively needed something else. It was an accurate account and in some way, felt complete. And yet I was cautious of that completeness, not because the reading was wrong, but because it was too tidy, and because the woman in the room was not primarily asking to be understood in that way.

My early impressions from the previous sessions against this emerging biographical material was accreting in not very visible ways. The passivity I had observed read now as something more like exhaustion; the exhaustion of being in a state of anticipatory vigilance for a very long time. I wondered if the coaching might represent, at some level, both a demand to do more and a permission to finally put something down, neither of which she knew how to respond to yet. The movement toward detail and control, similarly, was not simply a cognitive preference. I also considered other possibilities including is she carried guilt for her success, what hopes were pinned upon her, at a very young age etc. Against her biography, it became visible as a long-serving protective pattern: if she could manage the detail, she could prevent the failure; if she could stay in technical control, she could not be exposed as inadequate. This had served her extraordinarily well for decades. It had also made the transition now required of her genuinely threatening — not to her career, but to her sense of who she was.

What the biography asked of the practitioner

I was very moved in the way she narrated her history. There was a simplicity and a dignity in how she carried her life, no self-pity, no dramatisation, no bid for sympathy, that touched something in me that went beyond my role and analytical capabilities. At one level, it was simply a human moment, a moment that reminded me of how we all carry the residues of our biography as we go about our lives. She had built a professional life of real substance from beginnings that had asked a great deal of her before she was ready to give it. That deserved to be acknowledged, and not only as a skilled response. It deserved to be honoured, as one person recognising the weight another has carried without complaint. I noticed a simplicity about her, that perhaps was not acknowledged as a strength and, more importantly, as an authentic part of herself

I said something of this to her, not in an elaborate way, but directly and simply: that what she was describing spoke of considerable resilience, and that I was struck by the quietness with which she held it. Something shifted slightly in the room: a minor relaxation in her bearing, as if she had been given permission to be a person rather than only a leader working on her development goals.

At the same time, I was aware of something in myself that was harder to name: a sense of mismatch between the person in front of me and the developmental frame, around gravitas, presence, strategic confidence, being applied to her. The implicit assumption of that frame was that she needed to become something more than she currently was.

Sitting with her and her history, I was struck by a different feeling entirely: of a round peg being pressed insistently into a square hole, not because she was inadequate to the role, but because the developmental language available to describe what she needed bore so little resemblance to the actual texture of her difficulty. She did not need to acquire something new so much as she needed to lay something down. The gap was not a skills gap. The frame was not wrong, but it was too small for what it was trying to contain.

Reframing the development agenda

That recognition made it necessary, midway through the engagement, to return to the development goals established at the outset and rebuild them from the inside out. Gravitas, the word the leader had internalised as “good leadership” without fully owning, had by this point begun to reveal its actual content. What it was pointing toward, now, was not a quality of presence that could be acquired or performed, but something more interior: a settled relationship with her own authority, a confidence in her perspective that did not depend on the validation of others or the technical mastery that had previously been her source of certainty.

It was, at its root, a question of self-authorisation. My doctoral inquiry, situated within a feminist psychoanalytic frame, defined self-authorisation in leadership as a particular quality of natural confidence that comes from being at home in oneself (Iyer, 2020): an authority that is not performed, not derived from title or hierarchical position, not dependent on the validation of others, but that arises from a settled and genuine relationship with who one actually is. Nothing forced. A naturally commanding presence that belongs to the person rather than to the role. In this engagement, the leader did not yet have access to it — not because she lacked capability, but because the conditions of her transition had temporarily severed her from the ground it requires.

In place of gravitas, we began to work with three areas that were now genuinely her own: strategic thinking and the capacity to operate at a longer time horizon than her technical expertise had required; planning and decision-making in conditions of ambiguity, without the anchor of operational certainty; and inspirational leadership, the capacity to lead people toward something rather than managing the detail of how the work got done. These were not new goals. This was a reframing of what was in the presenting agenda from the beginning. But grounded in her actual experience and in the specific transition she was navigating, they became more accessible to work with.

This was also the moment to bring the biographical work back into direct contact with the leadership and organisational agenda — not as a departure from the coaching goals but as it’s necessary foundation. The biographical detour, as it might appear, was not a digression. It was the work itself: the ground without which the reframing of strategic thinking, planning in ambiguity, and inspirational leadership would not have happened. Biography is not context but essential to the content and process of coaching and its transformational potential. It is this postmodern and interpretive position that underpins this three-part series - that the interior life of the leader is not background to the developmental work but constitutive of it.

This conviction, that biographical understanding is not peripheral to coaching outcomes but integral to them, is one shared across psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to leadership development. The theoretical frame that informs this attentiveness, and the specific body of thought I draw from in my own practice, will be the subject of a dedicated essay.

Part three follows and attends to the moment the frame gave way, what was discovered beneath it, how the development agenda was rebuilt, and what eventually shifted.

Photo via Unsplash

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

The coaching engagement described in this series has been anonymised. Identifying details including the organisation, sector, role, and individual characteristics have been altered to protect confidentiality.

This is the fifth essay in a series that has, until now, moved largely at the level of the conceptual. The earlier essays established an epistemological architecture - what coaching is, where it lives theoretically, what the contemporary landscape asks of it, and whether the field is currently built for that demand. This essay marks the turn into the situated. It moves from the ground on which the work stands to the texture of the work itself, into the room, into the relationship, and into the particular.

What follows is an account of a single coaching engagement, presented across three parts published in close sequence. The first part attends to what arrived at the beginning, a presenting frame and early impressions in the room before anything more substantive became available. The second part follows the engagement into what the biography carried, what it required of the practitioner, and how it led to a fundamental reframing of the development agenda. The third part attends to the moment the frame gave way entirely, what was discovered beneath, and what eventually shifted.

This material will also be revisited in later essays through different lenses, what was happening in the relational field between coach and leader, what the systemic and organisational conditions were asking of both of us, and what the engagement required of me as a practitioner in my own interior movement. The same vignette will become progressively more complex as each new lens brings forward what the others leave in the background. This is not a structural device. It is itself a demonstration of what open tension (Iyer, 2020) makes possible - the capacity to remain with a situation long enough for its fuller complexity to emerge, rather than settling too early on what it means.

The account is entered here through three simultaneous intentions. The first is to demonstrate practice, to show what serious developmental coaching looks like across the arc of an extended assignment, rather than in the compressed snapshots that most coaching writing offers. The second is to show complexity, that what presents at the beginning of a coaching engagement is rarely what the work turns out to be about, and that the practitioner’s capacity to remain with the gap between the presenting frame and the deeper reality gradually becoming visible is not incidental to the work but constitutive of its quality. The third is to demonstrate multi-layered meaning-making, the process by which individual, relational, and systemic understandings do not replace one another but accrete, each adding to rather than superseding what came before.

A note on context: an organisation new to coaching

The earlier essays in this series argued that coaching is most consequential when it is embedded within a genuine organisational commitment to development, commissioned with serious questions about what a leader actually needs, held within a framework of accountability, and connected to the organisation’s broader learning and development strategy. That architecture matters. It shapes what the leader brings, what the coaching can reach, and what the engagement can ultimately accomplish.

This engagement existed without most of that architecture. The organisation was new to coaching. It had not yet developed the internal language, the feedback culture, or the organisational learning strategy that would allow coaching to be integrated into how it thought about growing its people. A previous engagement within the same organisation had shown me where the edges of useful challenge lay, what the system could hold and what it would deflect, and how much of the work would need to be carried by the space between coach and leader alone. For this engagement, the sponsoring manager did not attend the tripartite meeting for any meaningful contracting or support for the leader seeking the coaching. What the coaching was for, what it was connected to, and what the organisation would do with the outcomes, remained unexamined.

What this meant in practice was not simply an absence of support. It meant that the coaching was entering a system whose assumptions about performance, adequacy, and leadership remained largely unarticulated, shaping the work quietly from within without either party being able to name them.

This is postmodern thinking made visible in practice. The conditions of a coaching engagement are never neutral; they are always already constructing what is possible within it. The account that follows is as much an illustration of that idea as it is a story about one leader’s development.

A word without a location

In the chemistry meeting, the leader offered a single word as her primary coaching goal - gravitas. She wanted to develop gravitas. It was a term I had heard before in this kind of conversation, a word that carries significant weight in the language of senior leadership and that organisations deploy with confidence, as if its meaning were self-evident. I probed for specificity - what would gravitas look like for her, in the particular contexts she was navigating? What would be different if she had it? When did she feel its absence most acutely? The probing was genuine and sustained, but the answers remained elusive, not because she was being evasive but because she could not, at this stage, locate what the word was pointing toward in her own experience. Gravitas was what others had told her she needed. It was the organisation’s diagnosis of a gap, translated into a term that both parties had agreed to without either fully understanding what it meant for her specifically.

I noted this without yet knowing what to do with it. The word was real in the sense that it carried emotional weight, she clearly felt its absence as something significant, but it was not yet available as a working concept. It would need to be earned through the engagement, not assumed at its outset. I held the word lightly, as a placeholder for something that would eventually need to be translated into language that was genuinely her own.

What I noticed in the room

Before anything more substantive became available, something else was present, visible not in what the leader said but in how she was in the sessions. She arrived to each session like a perfect student, contained rather than engaged, low in energy and something I experienced in her presence that the conversation had not yet reached. She was compliant with the coaching process in a way that was, paradoxically, somewhat difficult to work with - she answered questions thoughtfully and was reflective and articulate, but there was a quality of going through the motions, of performing the role of coachee rather than being genuinely in inquiry. She did not take notes. She did not report back on experiments between sessions. We spent a significant portion of our early meetings getting an overview of what was happening in her role, her team, and her organisation, and while that material was real and relevant, I had little sense of how she was carrying what we discussed into action, or whether the sessions were landing anywhere beyond the room itself.

Two early impressions formed and held themselves in tension with each other. The first was the word passive. Not passive in the sense of resistant or disengaged, she was clearly investing in the conversation, but passive in the sense of waiting - waiting to be changed, waiting for the coaching to produce something, waiting for clarity to arrive rather than actively generating it. The second impression was that detail and control appeared to function as a way of managing difficulty. When the conversation touched on something hard, on the anxiety about the transition, on the dynamics in her team, on the question of what her expanded role actually required, there was a reliable movement toward the specific, the technical, the manageable. She would shift from the experiential to the operational, from the felt to the functional. It was subtle and not conscious, but it was consistent and also showed in her enthusiasm to the “how” and “what” coaching questions versus the “why” questions.

I did not name either of these observations to her directly, and not only because it was too early. I held them as data about something I did not yet understand, as indications of a pattern whose meaning was not yet available and that required more of the engagement before it could be named with any accuracy. This is what I mean by open tension as a practitioner stance - not simply that I withheld premature conclusions, but that I actively maintained the question rather than closing it. These early impressions became part of what I was attending to across sessions, returning to them as the work developed, allowing them to mean more as more became visible. At this stage, I did not know if my interpretations qualified as assumptions, observations or reliable data through a repeated pattern. All were possibilities.

Part Two follows shortly. It attends to what the biography carried, and what it required of the practitioner to sit with it honestly.

Photo via Unsplash

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

The first three essays in this series introduced open tension (Iyer, 2020), situated coaching within a postmodern understanding of change, and turned outward to the contemporary landscape in which this work takes place. Together they raise a question: if this is the world leaders now inhabit, and if development unfolds in the ways described, is coaching as currently practised equipped to meet that demand?

Before answering, it is worth pausing on a question that sits closer to home. What, exactly, is coaching, what authorises it to work at the depth it claims, and how does it differ from simply talking to a friend? In a largely unregulated field with wide variation in practice, these are not hostile questions. Coaching earns its legitimacy through the integrity and rigour of its practice, through theoretical grounding, ethical seriousness, and a willingness to account for what it does and how it does it.

The Expanding Demands on Practice

For practitioners, the implications of the current moment increasingly involve accompanying people through experiences that are more fundamentally disorienting, the loss of a professional identity, the pressure to reinvent mid-career, the erosion of expertise under technological change.

To work at this level requires remaining with what is still forming rather than reaching prematurely for resolution. It also requires honesty about the limits of one’s own understanding, moments when the practitioner is being asked to accompany processes they themselves have not fully integrated, like the impact of AI on professional identity.

At the same time, practitioners face a subtler risk. In response to this complexity, coaching can drift toward an over-identification with interiority, privileging affective experience, existential reflection, and broader life questions in ways that become decoupled from the concrete realities leaders are navigating. This is not always a sign of depth. It can function, unconsciously, as a form of avoidance, a retreat from the materially consequential terrain of organisational life into domains that feel more expansive and therefore more meaningful. It may also carry an implicit assumption that to go deeper is to move away from the organisational, rather than to engage it more rigorously. The demand of the current moment is the capacity to hold the psychological and the practical together.

On the Limits of Artificial Intelligence

Any account of coaching in current times must contend with the role of artificial intelligence. AI now offers leaders capabilities that were, until recently, the domain of coaches and consultants: synthesising 360-degree feedback, identifying patterns across behavioural data, generating development plans, and providing structured prompts for reflection. At the level of tools and techniques, its utility is real and growing.

Its limits are not merely technical. Where leaders confront questions of identity, meaning, and change, what is required is the presence of another human being who can remain with them in uncertainty, who can register what is not being said, and who can engage the relational and unconscious dimensions of the process as they unfold. This remains irreducibly human.

Is Coaching Built for This?

If this is what the moment demands, a sharper question follows - is most coaching built for it?

Much of what organisations commission remains closer to performance consulting — goal-focused, time-bounded, outcome-driven. It serves a purpose, but it is insufficient for the depth now required. Leaders navigating identity shifts and systemic complexity need practitioners who have undertaken their own interior work, and spaces capable of holding difficulty without prematurely resolving it. This has implications across levels, asking organisations to be clear on what development actually requires, practitioners to look beyond method to questions of what they can genuinely hold, and leaders to be willing to enter processes that deepen understanding of the self rather than simply increase competence.

Coaching has often been positioned as private, confidential, and therefore largely opaque to the organisational systems in which it takes place. While confidentiality is essential, the unintended consequence is that coaching can become suspect, a space where something happens but where neither its process nor its contribution is clearly understood. What is required is a more explicit articulation of its grounding, how the work engages both the realities leaders inhabit and the psychological processes through which those realities are lived and shaped. Coaching must take its place within organisational life by demonstrating its relevance to the arenas in which decisions, authority, and value are negotiated. Holding the privacy necessary for genuine psychological work alongside accountability to the organisational context is itself a form of open tension (Iyer, 2020).

An Unfinished Field

The field of leadership development is itself still becoming. Its most important work lies in the quality of inquiry practitioners are willing to sustain into what this work genuinely requires.

For those in practice, the bar is higher than it has been before, not simply to accompany others through uncertainty, but to remain in inquiry about one’s own positioning within it.

We are, in different ways, working within the same conditions we ask leaders to navigate. The question is whether we are willing to do so with enough rigour and honesty for that work to be of use beyond ourselves.

That is the provocation. And the invitation.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

In my first post on this Substack, I wrote about open tension (Iyer, 2020) — the disciplined practice of remaining with what is not yet known, resisting the pull toward premature resolution when something significant is still in the process of becoming. I framed it as an epistemological stance as much as a coaching practice: a recognition that the most consequential things rarely arrive through the directed, goal-oriented mind, but sideways, in the gaps, when the pressure to perform understanding has momentarily eased.

This essay steps back from the coaching room and asks what this world is asking of those who lead within it and of those who accompany them.

The past several years have fundamentally altered the environment in which leadership is required to operate. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the underlying assumptions of organisational life. Remote and hybrid work dissolved boundaries between the professional and the personal in ways that have not fully reversed. Collective grief, burnout, and a widespread reassessment of priorities reshaped what people expect from work and from those who lead them. Simultaneously, geopolitical instability, supply chain vulnerabilities, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence have together produced a quality of uncertainty that is structural rather than cyclical. This is not a temporary turbulence. It is the new condition of leadership.

Into this environment comes a generation of leaders more psychologically literate than their predecessors, more explicit in their advocacy for mental health, and more pluralistic in their understanding of what success means. Their arrival changes what leadership development must address and what it means to lead well at all.

The Complexity Leaders Carry

Leaders do not arrive at their organisations as role-players who leave their humanity at the door. They come with complex inner lives, conscious and unconscious thoughts, mundane and profound preoccupations, aspirations held alongside fears and anxieties. They come with histories, with formative experiences that shaped their particular way of seeing and responding to the world. The existential questions that surface in leadership - who am I in this role, who do I wish to be, why do I do things the way I do — are not separate from the work. They are woven into it, surfacing as a leader’s inner complexity meets an equally complex organisational life.

What Change Actually Demands

Understanding development at this level requires abandoning the linear assumption that change moves predictably from one defined point to another. Transformation is non-linear, relational, and shaped by individual context and meaning-making. Change is something people construct, often amid disruption and uncertainty, rather than something they progress through neatly. Open tension becomes essential here: the capacity to remain present to the ambiguity of genuine change rather than forcing premature closure.

This is increasingly relevant as technological disruption reshapes industries, career paths, and professional identities. Leaders who built authority within stable domains now face questions not only about how to lead but about what their roles are becoming. For many, the deepest challenge is the disruption of a professional identity built over decades. A postmodern understanding of change offers a different lens: identity is provisional, situated, and continually reconstructed. What appears as loss may also be the beginning of renewal.

The capacity to hold irresolvable tension, resist premature resolution, and remain effective amid uncertainty is not installed through better structures or competency frameworks. It emerges through sustained inner development, the often uncomfortable work of recognising one’s own defensive patterns and impulses toward certainty when continued inquiry is what the moment requires.

This is what open tension names, and what holding complexity, genuinely and without premature resolution, asks of anyone who leads or accompanies leadership in this moment.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.

Much of the coaching industry locates its work in the domain of self-awareness. The premise is familiar - if leaders understand themselves better, they will behave differently and outcomes will improve.

If we situate coaching more carefully within the broader literature on change, a more complex picture emerges. Leaders are agents of change within systems that are themselves dynamic, situated, and organic in how they make meaning. Organisational change does not occur independently of the people who must enact it. It is carried, resisted, and interpreted through them. Change in organisations is inseparable from change in the individuals who inhabit them.

At the same time, leaders are accountable to bottom lines, performance metrics, and timelines that do not easily accommodate ambiguity. They work within structures that distribute authority unevenly, within hierarchies that shape what can be said and by whom, and within cultures that reward certain behaviours while constraining others. Coaching that ignores this risks reflection without traction.

The interpretivist perspective adds something essential. While structures and constraints are real, how they are understood, enacted, and navigated is not replicable. Two leaders in the same system will experience and respond to it differently, shaped by their histories, identities, and how they make meaning. What appears as a fixed constraint at one level is, at another, mediated through perception, relationship, and interpretation.

Coaching lives at this interface, between the materially real and the socially constructed (Gergen, 1999). It creates a space in which leaders can examine both the system they are in and the way they operate within it, where they may be constrained, where they may be colluding, and where there may be more room for movement than initially assumed.

Coaching is impactful at the level where a leader’s history, identity, assumptions, and relational patterns intersect with the demands of their role. And it is precisely here that a more integrated understanding of change becomes necessary. Change is rarely a linear movement from one stable state to another. Individuals continuously interpret their experience through frameworks shaped by culture, language, and prior relationships. Coaching becomes a site of that meaning-making, re-framing and taking a step back.

In my own practice, this integration takes the form of holding multiple lenses simultaneously, not as techniques to be applied, but as a discipline of attention. At one level, the work attends to a leader’s aspirations and intentions for change. At another, it stays close to the less visible dynamics that may be organising resistance to that change. At a third, it situates the individual within the wider organisational system, its roles, expectations, and patterns of authority.

This way of working must also meet the organisational demand for clarity, movement, and results. Drawing on tools and frameworks from across different traditions, offers language to accommodate the material and human aspects of leadership. Held together, these perspectives allow coach and client to remain with a more complex truth - that the leader has agency and is shaped by forces beyond their immediate awareness; that change is both possible and difficult; that behaviour is both chosen and a result of historical patterns and that organisations are both rational systems and emotional fields.

It also requires something of the coach that competency frameworks often under-emphasise, the practitioner's way of being is the primary vehicle of change (Rogers, 1957). This a disciplined attentiveness to one’s own responses, assumptions, and interpretations in the moment. The coach is not outside the system they are observing and are part of it. This is where action research (Reason and Bradbury, 2001; Schön, 1983) becomes more than a methodology and begins to function as a way of practising, where understanding emerges in the interplay between experience and reflection, between what is intended and what actually unfolds.

To locate coaching, within the complexity of human change, is to move beyond the idea that it is simply a supportive conversation or a set of techniques. It is to recognise it as a practice and a space that holds the complexity of identity, meaning, and systems simultaneously

Further Reading

Gergen, K. J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction. SAGE

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (Eds.). (2008). The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (2nd ed.). SAGE.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.

There is a moment in coaching that I have come to recognise and to trust even though it feels, every time, uncomfortable.

It arrives when I realise I do not know what is happening. Not in the sense of lacking information, but in a deeper sense, the map I brought into the room no longer corresponds to the territory. Something is present that I cannot yet name. The client is speaking, and I am listening, and somewhere beneath the level of what is being said, something else is moving something I am still grappling with, not yet given form or language.

The temptation, in that moment, is to reach for resolution. To produce a reflection, an observation, an intervention, something that restores the sense of being in command of the work. To close the gap between what I understand and what is actually happening.

What I am describing is what I have come to call open tension - a concept that emerged from my doctoral inquiry into what genuine transformation in leaders and organisations actually requires. The term is deliberate. Tension because the state is active, not passive, it is not simply waiting, but a disciplined holding. And the tension is also my own, the anxiety that lives inside what feels ambiguous and unknown, held rather than discharged. Open because it resists premature closure and the resolution of ambiguity before the ambiguity has surfaced new insight and awareness.

Open tension is not theorised as a problem awaiting resolution but as an intrinsically creative condition, the very threshold through which genuine transformation must pass, and within which new meaning, new agency, and new possibility become available.

It is an epistemological stance as much as a practice. It rests on a recognition that the most significant things in a life, in a coaching relationship, in a leader’s development, rarely arrive through the directed, goal-oriented mind. They arrive sideways. In the gaps. When the pressure to perform understanding has momentarily eased.

Since the doctoral work, the concept has grown beyond the creative possibilities of not-knowing into something more encompassing, a way of holding the contradictions that are genuinely present in the territory where this work is done. Between the science of human change and the art of being present to it, the concrete rigour of assessment data and the sedimentary layers of personal history that quietly shape the present, between the positivist demand for validity, reliability, and measurement, and the recognition that matters of leadership presence, confidence, and authority exceed what can be diagnosed or captured, often residing instead in the accumulated residues of lived experience and between the certainty that frameworks are useful and the knowledge that they are never the whole truth.

Open tension is not the resolution of these contradictions. It is the discipline and, I would say the integrity, of remaining honest about all of them at once.

The coaching work I am describing happens in organisations with strategic priorities and budget cycles. It is commissioned with specific outcomes in mind. It arrives accompanied by 360 reports, by leadership diagnostics, by competency frameworks, by coaching proposals that describe, in the language organisations understand — what the engagement is for and what it will produce. There are development goals agreed at contracting, progress reviews at the midpoint, and measurable outcomes expected at the close. I work within all of this the data in a 360, the competency gap identified and the development goal agreed at the outset.

What open tension holds is something that cannot be captured by any of these instruments, the person inhabiting the leader, the biography shaping the pattern, something beneath the presenting issue that is doing the actual organising. The not-knowing I am describing is not the absence of data. It is the willingness to remain genuinely open to what the data cannot yet reach - what is happening in the room between us, what is moving beneath the surface of the stated agenda, what the client does not yet know about themselves and will not discover if the coaching stays at the level of the framework.

Senior leaders are not, as a rule, trained for this kind of not-knowing. Their organisations reward decisiveness, direction, the confident management of complexity. The development they most need is almost never about acquiring more of these capabilities. It is about developing the capacity to sit with what they do not yet understand about themselves, to resist the pull toward the explanation that closes things down before the more difficult, and perhaps more accurate explanation has had time to arrive.

The same is true for coaches. The professional development of coaching has produced an abundance of frameworks and methodologies all of which serve the goal of helping coaches feel competent and in command of the work. What is rarer, and what I think distinguishes the coaches doing the deepest work, is the capacity to put the framework down. To enter the room with genuine openness to what is actually there, rather than what the framework predicts should be there.

Open tension is not a technique. It is a disciplined willingness to remain with ambiguity, to inhabit the generative space of not-knowing and to resist the pull toward premature resolution. What it requires, above all, is integrity in the relationship, in the inquiry, and in the willingness to stay with what is genuinely difficult.

This is what this Substack is about.

Two streams, one for coaches, on the craft and depth of serious practice; one for leaders, on the inner life of leadership and what genuine change actually asks of a person. Both written from inside the work, in the hope that it inspires your own thinking about how you lead or how your coaching craft is informed.

I am glad you are here.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.