Part 1- How I Got Here

Dwelling at the Intersections: The Art and Science of Coaching - Part One

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.