Systemic Coaching

Coaching as a new systemic profession
Notice that coaching as a new profession has developed within the past fifteen years. It is now present in almost all realms of personal and professional life. Considering such a relatively short time span to spread worldwide and the fact that the profession is still in its early developmental stages, coaching can today be considered much more than a passing fad, nothing less than a real social and political statement.
Notice also that during those same last fifteen years, we have been living what can be described as both a “post industrial” and a “post humanist” era. Indeed today, our modern personal and collective concerns are neither primarily focused on the production and consumption of products nor principally concerned with enjoying more and more services centered on individual comfort.
In these last fifteen years, the global social and professional context has been radically jolted if not almost completely revisited by a new capacity for immediate and global information circulation and communication. To a rapidly growing number of individuals, groups and organizations, the almost brutal intrusion of information technology into our lives is at the origin of a sudden and global growth of human consciousness. This relatively recent development is the most obvious cause and result of “globalization”.
This worldwide technological and social revolution is accompanied by more than a billion individuals connected to internet. Their number is not only increasing by fifteen to twenty percent per year, but their average “connection time” and speed is increasing at an even faster rate. Available information on practically everything that is going on worldwide bypasses television and printed media and can instantly be at everyone’s fingertips.
A completely new and still relatively undefined global social and political context is in the process of unfolding under our eyes. It rests on our new capacity for numeric if not “quantum” global information circulation that erases distances and permits, almost obliges, immediate connection through what was previously perceived as almost un-surmountable time and distances barriers. The Berlin wall tumbles, the iron curtain rusts and dissolves, the “third world” that used to be represented by Africa, most of Asia and Latin America are knocking at our doors. The western world is daily confronted with fundamentally different values and behaviors, often radically opposed to the ones it only recently considered were « universal ».
Coaching appears concomitantly with world-wide globalization and new « era of information ». Within this new context accompanied by an instant communication network and the explosion of the limits of human awareness, it so happens that the profession of coaching appears and rapidly develops. As if by chance, coaching is primarily concerned with the accompaniment of person to person “conversation” and yearns to facilitate the emergence of shared meaning. As if by accident, this profession is focused on the development of personal and collective dialogue within a resolutely “systemic” frame of reference tailored to take into account all pertinent interfaces with the global environment.
Of course, this last affirmation concerning the “systemic” dimension of coaching merits some explanation. A “systemic” approach is a conceptual frame of reference which explicitly takes into account the environmental influence on an entity such as a person, a family, a team, an organization. A « systemic approach » therefore rests on a point of view which obstinately considers an apparently “independent” or “autonomous” entity as an integral and inseparable part of the “whole” or general environment within which it evolves. No “man” is an island. No more than anything else.
As a matter of fact, consider that today, all the theoretical approaches which concern human activity are developing in a “systemic” context, taking into account the complexity of all the interfaces entertained with the global environment. More and more, economy, climatology, politics, ecology, medicine, etc. necessarily rest on « integrated » or almost « holistic » theories and tools that structurally take into account the global complexity of each field, if not of the interconnectivity of all fields.
Consequently, all modern sciences and professions now develop within a frame of reference resting on “complexity”, which integrate diverse applications of “systems thinking”, of cybernetics, of quantum mechanics as these are studied and developed by such researchers as Schroedinger, Bohm, Pauli, Dirac, etc. The same seems to be intimately true for coaching.
We do not wish to develop in this article profound nor complex theoretical and philosophical theories that are no doubt quite far from the normal day to day coaching profession. More simply, we wish to position this new profession within this new century’s context and underline this field’s convergence with what is becoming everyone’s more profound political, social, personal and professional concerns.

The « part », or the « segment » ?

We first need to understand the simple difference between what we perceive as a “part” or piece of a whole and what we consider is a segment or a “fragment” of that same ensemble. A “part” such as part of a cake or a car is intrinsically tied to the “whole” to which the word refers. The notion of a “part” reveals that in order to understand the “share”1 to which the word refers, one must necessarily refer to the “whole” or to the ensemble that existed before a “partition” or separation.

When we look at human reality with a really “systemic” frame of reference, we therefore have a perception which ideally integrates the whole environment as a complete and inseparable system, even if we choose to observe or deal with only one of its parts. Consequently, a truly systemic approach erases all forms of boundaries. These are simply considered as illusionary separations between an observed entity and its context.

On the other hand, when we approach the world with a more “mechanistic” frame of reference characteristic of the industrial era, we are often tempted if not driven to isolate or remove an element from its integrate environment so as to observe it as such, without accepting any influence or “interference” from the surrounding context.

That “scientific” or “expert” approach helps us better observe, understand and maybe even modify almost « in vitro » an element in complete independence, without allowing the latter to receive any “outside” influence, one way or the other. This approach automatically provokes a “fragmented” or “objective” point of view which pays little or no attention to the complex external interactions between the arbitrarily extracted “object” and its natural immediate environment if not its more general or global context.

We forget, however, that an entity’s interactions with its environment carry a wealth of complex meaning which helps understand its very existence. Consequently, if the said “scientific” approach is considered useful in our occidental frame of reference, it rests on a strategy which consists in fragmenting a whole or in extracting selected parts out of the surrounding context to attempt to understand what we suppose will be their “intrinsic” meaning. Unfortunately, evidence proves the approach as counterproductive if not misleading. The more we segment, cut, and fragment, the more we loose meaning, and the move we impoverish our capacity for comprehension.

A « fragment » is indeed a segment of something, of which we have broken all the meaningful bonds to the whole. Just like fragmenting a musical partition would impede our capacity to perceive its usefulness and its beauty. Consequently a fragmentary scientific approach is generally partial and sometimes even meaningless, as we could demonstrate below.

• EXAMPLE : Imagine for an instant that to understand this paragraph, we first cut it up in distinct phrases, then into separate words, and finally into letters. To be efficient, we could then logically regroup similar letters in columns and why not reorganize them by taking into account their relative width and/or height. We could then attentively study these group of letters to acquire a certain expertise on each group's intrinsic qualities.

This caricature of a “scientific” approach clearly illustrates that the meaning of a part is immediately lost when we remove that element from its context. Beyond the given paragraph, the page on which it is written, and even the whole text to which each letter belongs, their meaning and that of the words they form only exist within a context. This meaning exists in the midst of a collective frame of reference, for instance the “Anglo-Saxon culture” which carries a relative community of mind attributed to an ensemble of signs organized in interrelated words. When segmented or taken out of context, letters and words don’t mean a thing.

Consequently, if a fragmentary approach can appear efficient to experts, it is also the frame of reference at the origin of today’s obvious problems whether these be social, political, ecological, economic, etc. This frame of reference explains how we are rushing head-on into a number of rather costly dead ends.

EXAMPLES :

• Global scientific research as it stands is « specialized » or segmented into « autonomous » fields, managed by competing research organizations and by opposing national policies, implemented by jealously “independent” departments often led by solitary researchers. We are not surprised that this state of affairs leads to a lack of truly ethical and really probing concrete results. Throwing more money into a research environment in which both the whole and all the interfaces cruelly lack “systemic management” leads to real waste when the results are not clearly detrimental to our planet’s health.
• Unhampered technological development favoring highly specialized agricultural, industrial, chemical, nutritional, nuclear, etc. development, each within their own “fragmented coherences” is very concretely destroying the total « systemic » social, economic, ecological and human environment it is paradoxically pretending to improve.
• A large number of governmental and military decisions proposed by « experts » each very convincing in their own field, implemented by politicians who are surely each very competent in the elaboration of their exclusive ideologies invariably lead us to paradoxical « perverse effects » and other “collateral damages”. These results regularly motivate radical shifts in policy, which in turn actively keep us all just treading water, but truly going nowhere.
• Fragmenting and « independent » policies which rest on arbitrary historical national or regional boundaries would almost have us believe that global climatic, economic and migratory phenomena will stop like magic at our country’s protective gates kept by very diligent “customs officers” as if what is going on globally will not sooner or later cross illusionary boundaries and dramatically hit our immediate neighborhoods.

Consequently, the mainstream expert-driven political and economic frame of reference has proven completely unable to take into account the natural, climatic, political and social events that are accelerating at an alarming rate.

The coaching profession appears today and proposes a very different frame of reference. It is definitely not synonymous to an “expert” approach. This is stated loud and clear, and can obviously be very difficult to accept in the present “mechanistic” environment. Coaching is resolutely "systemic".

With resolve, coaching offers an alternative to segmenting experts so incompetent in managing the general human and global interfaces, even within their own fields of expertise. Individual, team and organizational coaching techniques are fundamentally tailored to help reveal and develop the evolution and transformation of shared meaning people and groups yearn to give their personal and collective existence by taking into account all their interfaces with their environment.

Consequently as a profession, coaching is resolutely « in synch » with the fundamental issues of our times.

Consequently also, a coach is focused on the client. It is clients that coaches accompany, taking into account their whole complexity as a simple reflection of all their interfaces with their whole environment. Coaching does not rest on « expert » arbitrary and illusionary “mechanistic” fragmenting segmentations of the world which would consist in also perceiving the client as a fragmented person.

In the same way, team and organizational coaching, consists in accompanying a collective ensemble by taking into account the complexity of its internal and external interfaces with its whole environment. It is not concerned with taking a team out of its context to try and understand it « in vitro », nor with proceeding as a specialist by privileging one or another exclusive dimension and forget the shared meaning carried by all the interfaces a team has with itself and with its general context or environment.

Consequently coaching is a profession that offers a very needed systemic frame of reference in the context of our organizations whether they be private and public, regional and national, unions and not for profit (notice that “or” proposes to divide and segment). All too often, those collective ensembles are not only hierarchically fragmented but are also segmented in specialized « silos » where each entity independently works and evolves, when they are not blatantly fighting against their surrounding context.

Not only does coaching propose a fundamentally different frame of reference but it offers a paradigm that can reconcile humanity with itself and with its environment so as to help achieve ambitious objectives without destroying all forms of life on the way.

If it is obvious that a coach cannot be an « expert ». It is the individual or collective client that can pretend to hold that position. Indeed the only person or group that can fully have access to understand the complexity and interdependence of all of their interfaces with their environment is the client. For a coach, clients can be the only competent entity that can define both the complexity of their own paths and the way they choose to take it. That is why coaches voluntarily and professionally choose to put their competencies at the service of their client’s deepest quest.

Consequently, with its non fragmentary “systemic” frame of reference, coaching aims far beyond its obvious goals focused on improving client results by facilitating personal, group and organizational transformation. Fundamentally, coaching is a new profession which actively participates in the sustainable evolution of our global environment by accompanying the gradual elaboration of humanity’s shared meaning.

1 A “share” refers both to the idea of a piece of something one may have to take away and to the other parts (or shares) others may also receive from the same whole. Interestingly, “sharing” both means dividing into parts, and giving to others, such as when “sharing” an experience or a story, in which case everyone gets to have the “whole”.

Alain Cardon