Open Tension: On the Generative Power of Not-Knowing
For coaches & leaders
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.
Twenty-five years of practice have taught me that this is precisely the moment to resist that temptation.
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 — the resolution of ambiguity before ambiguity has done its work.
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 I think is one of the most important things I know about change: 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. Between 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. 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.
I want to be concrete about what this means in practice, because it would be easy to hear not-knowing as an abstraction, or worse, as a form of deliberate vagueness. It is neither.
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. I take it seriously. The data in a 360 is real. The competency gap identified in a leadership assessment is often accurate. The development goal agreed at the outset is a genuine beginning. None of it is irrelevant.
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, 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.
Kavitha Iyer is an executive coach, doctoral scholar, and Lead Coach at INSEAD. She is the founder of Crésca Consulting
© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.