A folktale called “Stone Soup” has been told in many versions in Europe and North America, including ones by the Brothers Grimm, by storytellers from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, France, Portugal, and England, and by children’s authors and even cartoon characters such as Donald Duck.

In his very readable second edition of The Age of Heretics (2008), Art Kleiner champions a series of corporate reformers—heretics—as being “the closest thing we have . . . to a true conscience of large organizations” (p. 13). These heretics recognized that, “like monks, the managers of corporations in the 1950s and 1960s began to systematically, and unconsciously, cut themselves off from any sense of responsibility for the rest of the world, even as their influence over it grew broader” (p. 9).

Leading an institution simply to recategorize its current resources, replicate its existing systems, and advance toward where it already is does not qualify as leadership. What may now be considered heresy could be the very path that fulfills an organization’s potential. Coaches promote the development of leaders by encouraging them to stretch all the way from a meta-perspective of highest values to the concrete necessity of accountability without losing their humanity in between. Using a model that integrates well with coaching and a systemic worldview, leadership theorists Jeannine Sandstrom and Lee Smith (2008) describe five roles for Legacy Leadership^® (see Internet links):

Perhaps the most important heretical contribution to management and organizational theory was Kurt Lewin’s field theory—the proposition that human behavior is the function of both the person and the environment. Expressed in symbolic terms, the formula is B = f (P, E). This means that one’s behavior is related to (or a function of) both one’s personal characteristics and the social environment in which one finds oneself. This is a step beyond the tendency to ignore context.

In addition to his many other contributions, Lewin helped develop action research (1999). Action research combines empirical methods, social action, and controlled evaluation. That is, people plan to act, act, and then consider the results of their action in a spiral that uses this information to inform the next planning-action-evaluation cycle. This cycle, where results of past actions feed into consideration of what to do next, has been shown to be an element in the development of expertise (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). Lewin’s work is further developed in the action-reflection cycle (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005b) presented in chapter 5.

The intuition that the success or failure of societies and organizations often depends on the patterning of their internal structure is probably as old as humankind. This is implied, for example, by the emphasis put on descent lists in the Bible. Anthropologists have developed techniques for recording relatedness among members of tribal communities, and sociologists and urban ethnographers have mapped social connections within gangs and neighborhoods.

Coaches must be aware of their clients’ social networks. We are living in an increasingly connected world where actions of seemingly unrelated people can affect the lives of others drastically. Clients will have many networks that affect their behavior, including work, family, friends, sports teams, social clubs, and so forth. In order to spark insights about these effects, clients should be asked about all these networks. Coaches also should be aware of their own social networks in order to be more self-aware and to tap into resources that may be useful to clients.

This section relates to topics that are dealt with elsewhere in this book. We include the section here because, after all, a family is a type of organization, and many of the dilemmas facing parents are similar to those facing management. Describing this field may give a different perspective in applying the somewhat complicated concepts of systems theory. Family systems therapies also represents a practical bridge from mechanistic individualism to a systemic contextual approach.

We focus here on the concept of triangles since many business coaches confront this issue in their coaching practice. A triangle is a three-person relationship system. In psychology, a triangle is considered the smallest stable relationship because the system can continue even if, over time, every one of its members is replaced. Yet a triangle can contain a good deal of tension, as coalitions shift power among the relationships. Shifting the tension can stabilize the system without resolving underlying issues.

It may seem that businesses and organizations would be the last place to look for shifts from hierarchical to systems thinking and from deficit to strengths orientation. Yet, the idea of a command-and-control center that makes all the decisions while workers just take orders has been questioned not only as ineffective but even in some circumstances as dangerous. In important research in organizations that cannot afford to make mistakes—nuclear plants and aircraft carriers, for instance—Karl Weick and Kathy Sutcliffe (2001) found that distributing power throughout the organization actually made disaster less likely.

Many coach training organizations refer to Cooperrider’s appreciative approach, and most teach a form of coaching that has many similarities to it. Sara Orem, Jackie Binkert, and Ann Clancy wrote Appreciative Coaching (2007) in order to make the connections even more clear. They describe Cooperrider’s four-dimensional framework from a coach’s perspective, starting with a preliminary defining fifth element that is similar to traditional goal setting but is more like brainstorming:

Developments in organizational theory can be seen as systemic pillars that raise coaching above its mechanistic precursors. Several such developments contribute to the human capital movement.

In a special issue of The International Journal of Coaching in Organizations devoted to organizational coaching and human capital development, Brenda Smith (2007) makes a business case for coaching people to transcend the “Working Strategy” that focuses on driving shareholder value by increasing revenue or cutting costs. As Bill Bergquist describes in an article in the same issue, traditional accounting techniques consider investments in machinery and buildings to be assets, whereas investments in the human beings who do the work, through payroll and benefits, are treated as expenses. Although the shift to a new “Winning Strategy” is difficult and messy, Smith argues that a focus on soft skills and talent is crucial:

“Leader” is another name for the organizational “heretics” described by Art Kleiner (2007). Rather than preserving what is, which is characteristic of management, leaders have a vision of what could be, and they include others in defining and putting that vision into action. They understand that an organization is a dynamic system that cannot be held still. Like someone walking, an organization must maintain stability while it is adjusting to internal and external change. This is dynamic stability, the mark of a sustainable system. By developing specialized functions, redesigning existing structures, and increasing the communication among all these, it becomes an ever more complex system that can maintain greater stability despite even more intense challenges. Depending on what those challenges turn out to be, any person or any team might become the leader that the organization needs at that moment. The shift from manager to leader involves not just an orientation to the future but also the recognition of the importance of every person seeing himself or herself as a leader. How this can be accomplished is being investigated by a new field established by David Rock called “NeuroLeadership.”