The Forest Among the Trees: on systems, practice, and what became visible

On what individual coaching alone cannot access

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 two 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