At first glance, not much.
Yet as I listen to clients, leadership teams and fellow coaches, I increasingly encounter questions that cannot be separated from the wider context in which we are living.
Questions about uncertainty, purpose, responsibility and leadership. Questions about who we are, where we are going and what kind of a future we are leaving for our children and grandchildren. What if the climate crisis is just one manifestation of a deeper set of crises involving how we organise our economies, govern our societies, relate to one another and understand our place in the world?
In other words, questions that sit firmly within what many are now calling the metacrisis.
And what if coaching needs to evolve in response?
A few weeks ago, I was asked whether I would be willing to be quoted in a forthcoming book on coaching in the polycrisis.
The invitation prompted me to revisit a blog post I wrote during COP26 . Reading it again several years later, against a backdrop of record-breaking heatwaves and escalating climate instability, I was struck by how relevant the underlying questions remain.
At the time, I was surveying different narratives about environmental problems and social change. Drawing on the work of political theorist John Dryzek and systems thinker Joanna Macy, I was trying to make sense of the diverse and often competing perspectives that emerge whenever we discuss climate change.
Some argued that technological innovation would provide solutions.
Others focused on reforming economic systems.
Others emphasised community resilience and regenerative approaches.
Others called for a transformation in consciousness and values.
Back then, I was interested in understanding these different perspectives and sharing a framework that could respect and honour these different responses.
But there’s a deeper question, which has been with me throughout my career; an interest in understanding what lies beneath them.
From Climate Crisis to Metacrisis
In recent years, the term metacrisis has emerged as a way of naming the interconnected threads that have led us here.
There are differing definitions, but broadly speaking, the metacrisis describes the way multiple global challenges are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Here’s part of the list:
- Climate change.
- Biodiversity loss.
- Political polarisation.
- Declining trust in institutions.
- Economic instability.
- Technological disruption.
- Social fragmentation, poverty and inequality.
- Mental health challenges.
These are often treated as separate problems requiring separate solutions. The metacrisis perspective suggests that many of these challenges emerge from deeper patterns in the ways we think, organise, govern and make meaning.
Climate change, therefore, is not merely an environmental issue. It is also a leadership issue. A cultural issue. An economic issue. A psychological issue. A spiritual issue. In short:
A worldview issue.
The more I reflect on my own career, the more I see that the seemingly different fields I’ve worked in have been grappling with exactly these kinds of questions.
Whether I was involved in sustainability, governance, organisational and leadership development or executive coaching, I was encountering the same underlying challenge:
How do individuals and systems respond to increasing complexity. How can our work make a positive difference? Or the question I remember asking myself back in 1982 when I made a big career change: ‘How can I be part of the solution, not part of the problem?’
The Importance of Worldviews
One reason climate conversations can become so difficult is that they are rarely just about facts. They are also about the often-unconscious assumptions we carry about ‘how things work’.
Assumptions about progress, growth and human nature.
Assumptions about the relationship between people and planet and what constitutes a good society.
In other words, they are about worldviews.
The framework I explored in my original article helped me recognise that different people can look at the same evidence and arrive at very different conclusions about what needs to be done because they are operating from different underlying narratives.
This insight feels even more important today.
Many of our current debates involve people talking across rather than with one another.
We often disagree not because we have different information but because we are starting from different assumptions about how the world works.
Recognising this does not eliminate disagreement.
But it can help us engage with greater curiosity, humility and discernment.
What Does This Mean for Coaching?
This is where my underlying approach to coaching differs from what was conventionally taught in the early days of our profession.
Traditionally, coaching has often focused on the individual.
- Helping people clarify goals.
- Improve performance.
- Navigate transitions.
- Increase effectiveness.
- Liberate potential and experience personal transformation.
All of this remains important. Yet many of the challenges clients bring into coaching today cannot be fully understood through the lens of individual success alone.
- Leaders are struggling with uncertainty about the future.
- Questions about organisational purpose.
- The implications of climate disruption and how to adapt.
- Artificial intelligence.
- Social division.
- Ethical complexity.
- Competing stakeholder demands.
- The tension between short-term pressures and longer-term responsibility.
These are not simply personal challenges. They are systemic challenges showing up in personal lives and organisational contexts.
As coaches, this raises an important question.
Is our role simply to help clients become more effective within existing systems?
Or can our work also involve helping them become more aware of the systems, assumptions and narratives within which they operate?
Coaching Across Narratives
I am not suggesting that all coaches should become activists for particular causes or advocates for particular political positions. But neither do I believe the opposite, still popular, position, that coaches should be morally neutral, blindly, unquestioningly following our ‘clients agenda’ in the name of a traditional view of what ‘ethics’ means in our profession.
There’s a tension here. As a coach I believe I need to be an ethical ‘agent’ and I also need to respect the agenda, positioning and worldview that a client brings. I wonder if the coaching profession’s greatest contribution may lie in its ability to skilfully hold that tension, to offer a wider space with curiosity, and help people explore complexity without rushing to certainty and pushing the ‘right’ solution. Our job isn’t to convert our clients to our position, but neither is it to keep things nice and cosy and collude with wilful blindness. I see my job as to help:
- leaders examine assumptions.
- notice the stories shaping their decisions.
- recognise competing perspectives.
- become aware of their own worldview and its limitations.
- work respectfully across difference.
- ask challenging questions about what they really, deeply care about, and what kind of future they want.
In a world characterised by polarisation, this feels like an increasingly valuable capability. The challenge for coaches is therefore not simply developing greater methodological expertise. It is also developing greater systemic awareness, and cultivating an open heart as well as an open mind.
Some of the elements of this are the capacity to recognise the wider narratives influencing both ourselves and our clients, to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to inquire into the beliefs and assumptions that underpin individual and collective choices and the willingness to ask challenging questions of ourselves and the people we work with.
In many ways this is worldview work. It is also, in the words of poet Mary Oliver:
My work is loving the world.
And I suspect it will become an increasingly important dimension of coaching in the years ahead.
Beyond Either/Or
One lesson I continue to take from systemic perspectives and coaching is that reality is rarely either/or.
Technical innovation matters, policy matters, economic reform matters.
Local action matters, inner development matters, transforming consciousness matters.
Back in the days when I was a student of psychosynthesis, the trainers would write on the board – “This is not the Truth.” I carry the provocation of those words into my work today. The challenge is not deciding which single perspective holds the one single, ultimate, true solution. The challenge is understanding how these different perspectives interact within larger systems.
The metacrisis cannot be adequately understood through a single lens. Nor can it be addressed through a single intervention.
It demands both systemic change and personal transformation.
Structural responses and shifts in awareness.
Practical action and deeper reflection.
An Invitation
Looking back, I think the thread running through my career has been less about sustainability, governance or coaching as separate disciplines.
It has been a fascination with how people make sense of complexity. How we navigate uncertainty. How we hold competing truths. How we respond when familiar assumptions no longer seem sufficient.
Perhaps this is one of the most important invitations the metacrisis offers to coaches and leaders alike.
To move beyond believing we should become experts with definitive answers, and become more aware of the narratives shaping our thinking, more conscious of our assumptions, more capable of working across perspectives and engage with complexity without immediately reducing it.
Climate change may be one of the most visible expressions of our predicament.
The metacrisis invites us to look more deeply at the conditions that created it.
And coaching, at its best, can help us develop the awareness, discernment and courage needed to respond wisely to both.
Or to quote Mary Oliver who sums it up far better than I ever could:
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
Here’s a link to the original post.
This post has also been published as a Linkedin article on my page.