We propose that any employee in an organization who must engage in work under the challenging conditions of complexity, unpredictability and turbulence—but particularly those in a formal or informal leadership role – can benefit from the assistance of a knowledgeable and skillful organizational coach. Complexity demands a level of cognitive functioning that often leaves us, as Robert Kegan (1994) suggests, “in over our heads.” We must be able to understand and grapple with complex issues that are often nested inside other complex issues or are juxtaposed with other challenging issues. In complex settings we are faced with an additional challenge: we must simultaneously be able to think about our own thinking and take actions. We must be able to learn from our mistakes and successes, as well as be aware of the particular settings in which we learn and in which we don’t learn (often called meta-learning)
We are even more challenged when faced with uncertainty. Under conditions of uncertainty, obviously, we can’t predict what will happen next. However, there is an additional challenge: we are continually faced with new information that comes from many different angles. We must continually accommodate to this new information while abandoning—at least temporarily—old assimilated models, assumptions, and social constructions of organizational reality (Berger and Luchman1967: Argyris and Schön, 1974; Argyris, 1989; Senge, 1990). Using Kurt Lewin’s (1947) term: we are always unfreezing and never have a chance to settle in with our new learning and new accommodation.
Turbulence further compounds the challenge, given that we, as decision-makers, must live in a swirling “white water world” (Vaill, 1989) in which rapid change intermixes with patterned change, stagnation and chaos. Somehow in the midst of this turbulence—which is driven by ever-accelerating change—we must find our own personal (some would say “spiritual”) core. We search for sanctuary from this turbulence and must always adjust to a world with new change-dynamics. At the end of the day, we can’t even remember what happened to us at the start of the day—because we have had to make so many adjustments throughout the day!
We further propose that if we, as organizational coaches, can demonstrate in our daily work the value of the services we render as being directly aligned with, appreciative of, and effective in addressing the challenges of complexity, unpredictability and turbulence, then we can anticipate that the profession of organizational coaching will be sustained and become a mature discipline or inter-disciplinary domain. It will be a profession that plays a growing and increasingly important role in 21st Century organizational life. This book’s purpose is to enable organizational coaches, internal and external, to deliver the highest efficacy to their dual clients: the organization and the person being coached.
