Leveraging the Emergence of Complex Systems
In Aletheia Coaching, we view the client as a complex being who lives embedded within layers of additional complex systems (e.g., family, team, organization, culture, etc.). As complexity scientist Dave Snowden (2021) has shown, navigating complex systems is challenging because cause and effect relationships are only knowable retrospectively. That is, when faced with a complex situation, we don’t know exactly what action to take to shift from where we are to where we want to be. Instead, we can only answer the question “How did I get here?” This fact puts yet another nail in the coffin of self-improvement approaches.
The general strategy, when faced with complexity, is to experiment or probe the system, observe your success or failure, amplify what seems to be working, and dampen what is not working in your next experiment. We experiment by re-purposing existing capabilities, which unfold and emerge through successive experiments. This is a process that Snowden calls “exaptation” (Snowden et al., 2021).
Aletheia Coaching adopts an agile framework (Sutherland, 2019) which focuses coaching conversations on addressing the inner impediments the client experiences as they work toward fulfilling their goals and addressing their concerns. As clients work with and through the impediments they encounter, they build new skills and develop new ways of being that enable them to be more effective and more fulfilled in work and life. As more impediments are addressed through the coaching engagement, clients are more able to fulfill their goals and/or to update their goals as an expression of the unfoldment and self-development they are experiencing.
The Fundamental Attunement of Aletheia Coaching: Loving Truth, Beauty, and Goodness for its own sake
According to philosopher Martin Heidegger, we are always attuned to our experience in one way or another (Heidegger, 1962). How we are attuned determines how things matter as we address our everyday concerns. What we experience of the world is not raw sense data but things and entities that are useful, harmful, fascinating, messy, appealing, attractive, repulsive, etc. Shaped by our way of attuning, we encounter people, places, things, and paths that are already value-laden.
Historically speaking, there have been many different ways of attuning to our world. The prevailing attunement in our present-day world is a technological attunement (Heidegger, 1977). According to Heidegger, the phenomenon of technology displays itself as a capacity standing in reserve, waiting to be used. Consider your parked car right now, assuming you are not driving it while you are reading this. It is a capacity standing in reserve waiting for you to use it.
We live in a technology-centric world. Heidegger’s concern, which every coach would be wise to adopt, is that attuning to the world in this way has people show up as technology. We stop viewing an employee as a human being and instead see them as a Level 2 Software Engineer. An even more everyday example is how we see grocery store clerks, waiters, and waitresses, or other drivers on the road as capacities rather than as human beings. In this view, we see people as possessing or lacking capabilities and capacities, as being efficient or inefficient, as operating optimally or in need of optimization, and as working correctly or being broken. Perhaps the most emotionally painful instance of this is how, in this technological way of attuning, we experience ourselves more as technology and less as a human being. Often, we see ourselves as deficient and in need of improvements and performance enhancements. Indeed, the style of self-improvement coaching discussed above follows from this attunement. Some methodologies for self-improvement even claim to be “transformational technology.”
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