Coaching in a World That Will Not Resolve

Of Eco-systems and ego-systems

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