Peter Hawkins: Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School and Chairman of Renewal Associates

In this episode of "Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee," host and CEO Alex Pascal of Coaching.com speaks with Peter Hawkings, a distinguished figure in organizational strategy, leadership, and culture change. He is celebrated for his extensive experience coaching over 100 boards and senior executive teams worldwide.

Hawkins speaks about his personal journey, and his early passion for drama and theater, which gradually shifted towards an interest in the human process and group dynamics, ultimately leading him into the world of therapeutic communities and organizational development. He reminisces about his initial encounters with coaching dating back to 1978, emphasizing how his diverse background, including roles in mental health, organizational learning, and consultancy, has shaped his approach to coaching.

A central theme in Hawkins' discussion is the significance of adult development in coaching. He introduces Bill Torbert's model of leadership development based on moral maturity and explains how it is vital for individuals, particularly those in leadership roles, to progress beyond the ‘achiever’ stage to effectively navigate the complexities of modern global organizations. He advocates for a holistic approach, emphasizing the necessity for coaches to possess a balanced blend of leadership experience, psychological understanding, adult development knowledge, and coaching skills.

Hawkins discusses his work on developing a vertical development assessment process for teams, aiming to raise the maturity level of teams and subsequently, enhance individual development. He stresses the importance of creating a healthy learning environment within teams, fostering continuous growth and adaptation to the ever-evolving challenges of the professional landscape.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Peter: That’s when this work becomes really tough, to see that’s a generous lesson from life that life has given him the advanced class. And just to ask the question, no matter how tough the lesson, what is life asking me to face and step up to it. We don’t get to choose the curriculum wherever we are in the world. We do get to choose how we respond.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is leading coach, consultant, writer and researcher in organizational strategy, leadership, and culture change. He’s coached over 100 boards and senior executive teams worldwide. His name is synonymous with team coaching and he’s also a great partner and friend of Coaching.com. Please welcome Peter Hawkins.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Peter.

Peter: Hi, Alex. Great to be with you.

Alex: It is so nice to have you in the podcast today. I know our audience very well and I know they love your work so I’m sure we have a lot of very exciting people downloading this episode and hearing this right now.

Peter: Well, I appreciate that it’s coffee time in Los Angeles but that you’ve agreed to join me for English afternoon tea.

Alex: I most certainly have. I’m excited for this. I’ve had tea with you in person a few times now and it’s nice to do it virtually.

Peter: To celebrate, I brought my late mother’s bone china so we could do it in a good Victorian style.

Alex: I wish I could match you with the Victorian era feel but I have my Japanese porcelain teacup that I just realized has a new chip on it so I’m a little sad but next time we do this, I’ll go and find some of my grandma’s china so that we can be totally matched up. 

Peter: Great. 

Alex: Well, again, so good to have you on the podcast. Let’s start where we typically start on this podcast. Take me through your journey. I know so much about your work but I don’t know too much about the personal journey that you’ve been on to get all of the things that you’ve gotten done. You have so many publications, you’ve been such an influential figure in the rise and evolution of coaching as a profession, so do you remember the first time you heard about coaching?

Peter: Well, I did wake up recently, Alex, that I saw had it somewhere that my first coaching invoice was 1978. 

Alex: Wow. 

Peter: Which was before most people had used the term. But actually, I think my journey goes back further because I started way back when I was a teenager, been really interested in drama, theater, TV, spent a lot of my time at university directing plays, doing street theater. I gradually got less interested in the performance and more interested in the rehearsal. This was the radical late 60s, early 70s, days of campaigning and street protests and radical youth movement and drugs, all of that going on, and you can imagine that rehearsals in the midst of all that were amazing kind of group events. I did direct all the plays, I even got done by the BBC and offered a job as a director, but by then I was far more interested in the human process that led up to the performance. And I went off to Canada to do a master’s in drama as an educational and therapeutic process, but found myself in Vancouver working between three different departments who didn’t speak together. I then changed to another university, was going to go back the following year, came back to UK, but then I got involved with mental health and I ended up in my mid 20s running a therapeutic community for people coming out of psychiatric prison, mental hospital, people who’ve had breakdowns, we had murderers, psychotics, arsonists, great people to learn about how to work with groups and themes. And to work with boards, by the way. Great training if you want to coach.

Alex: I was just thinking high level executives would be probably great preparation, and, by the way, before you continue, I’m just impressed you found an invoice from 1978. That is very impressive in and of itself.

Peter: Well, you could probably tell from behind me I’m not very good at throwing things away. I have a ridiculous amount of archives. Then what happened is I got promoted, I was global head of training and running this therapeutic community for a global mental health organization, and I got drawn into helping prisons and social services and hospitals and I started to realize that mental health organizations were often more disturbed than the people they were supporting and that’s where I got very much drawn into the world of staff development, organizational development, and that led me to enter the 70s, early 80s doing a PhD on organizational learning. Now, this is pre-Peter Senge. But by that time, I’d already trained as a psychotherapist, I’d already, because of that and my AD work, I started to get drawn into coaching some senior people and particularly helping professions, running kind of charities and hospitals. So that’s where my coaching kind of started. As I carried on doing consultancy, as I was teaching at a school of management very much about facilitation skills, group work skills, doing my PhD on how do organization learn and continuing to coach kind of senior people and gradually that, in ’86, we set up our consultancy group very much as an AD consultancy, working globally. And so coaching became kind of part of our offering rather than the major part of it. But as part of that, in developing the people within our consultancy, I ended up not only training psychotherapists and counsellors and group facilitators but coaches so I was very involved in that very early days of coaching in the UK. So, by the time the professional bodies came along, I was already an experienced coach and I have worked with all the professional bodies over the years. But one of the things I’ve always been interested in coaching is because of my background, I really believe to be good coaches, you need people who have been leaders, who run organizations, people who really understand adult development and have a good psychology-type background, and people who’ve got really good experience in coaching craft as well as understand organizational systems and dynamics. And that’s a big ask. You can often get people who’ve got two of those and occasionally three but to have all four I think is what’s really needed for people to be able to coach these days.

Alex: I love those pillars that you’re putting together. And I think you can train for the last two. You can develop an understanding of systems and organizational dynamics, you can develop an understanding and study adult development, but having a deep expertise in psychology and also being an executive, I see that typically there’s a tradeoff and when I’m thinking about a coach that might be a good fit for someone, typically, I find myself in this wedge where it’s like, okay, do I want someone that has kind of relevant executive experience or do I want to think about someone that perhaps is a psychologist, and it’s very hard to find both.

Peter: So I’ve just be very fortunate, really, partly because I got so much exposure very young and I’ve just been really lucky to have, I’ve started five organizations so I’ve experienced it from the tough business end.

Alex: Oh, I understand.

Peter: And I’ve gone on to chair a couple of organizations as the non-exec chair so that rounded experience is what I discovered chief execs particularly are looking for.

Alex: Yeah, that resonates. And adult development is one of my favorite topics. It’s still a topic that even with some advanced coaching practitioners, it’s an area of focus for continued development because I see that, sometimes, with this movement towards specialization in coaching, you can be very specialized in a specific type of coaching or methodology but sometimes the underpinning adult development framework is something that maybe you went through in your coach training briefly but I think it’s an area of opportunity for our profession as a whole to really ingrain more of the adult development frameworks. If I asked most coaches what is your preferred framework for thinking about adult development, I see kind of deer-in-the-headlights kind of looks, and it is such a foundational element of working with this kind of populations. Tell me a little bit of your thoughts around this.

Peter: Yeah, well, that’s a very interesting one because, right now, using the people who are on our senior practitioner systemic team coach training, we are developing the first ever vertical development and assessment process for teams, because I’ve worked way back, I met Bill Torbert back in probably the early 80s and worked with him on the GLA, that built the whole levels he has of leadership development and he built on the work of Kohlberg and Loevinger which is the notion that adult development is to do with moral maturity. It’s the ability not to make the right moral decision but what’s the breadth of perspective you bring to your decision making process? How big is your lens? And so his model, we’ve used a lot and introduced a lot. But what we’ve discovered is that in his model, you’ve got the opportunities to diplomat, the technician experts, the achiever, and what he now calls redefining and transforming and then alchemist. And what I got convinced of working with Bill over the years is that, as we grow more and more complex global organizations, we need more people who are post achiever, because the level of complexity you’re dealing with. Achievers are very good at driving short-term results, doing turnarounds, but to build a sustainable organization that continues to evolve, adapt to the changing world, which is usually a complex matrix, which is dealing with that levels of complexity, you need to have a level of adult development that’s beyond what Stephen Covey teaches, start with the end in mind, be results driven, and who can manage constant transformation not only to run the business of today but grow the organization to be future fit for the challenges coming over the horizon. And what we’ve discovered, you’ll notice, Alex, is that you can get leadership teams that function at a lower level than the average maturity level of individuals as measured on the leadership assessments. And you can get some that function higher than the average maturity level. So what we’ve got very interested in is how do you start to feed that back and play that back. So what we’ve developed is a method whereby we can watch a video of team meetings without us being there, and have two different assessors look at what’s the enacted maturity level of the team as played at in their team meeting and show them very clear ways they could increase that. And I believe also going right back to my therapeutic community days is if we could shift the inactive maturity level of the team, that will pull up the maturity level of individuals. It will be their best development forum. Yeah? Rather than going off to business schools or anything else. That they will be developing and maturing just through being part of a healthy learning team. 

Alex: Peter, this is one of my favorite topics and I’ve enjoyed talking with you about it before back together. I love that you’re bringing Kohlberg and Loevinger. I mean, these frameworks are so applicable to the work that we do. To your point earlier, when you’re looking at the ecosystem and the environment that people are operating on today, those higher bands of development that are more suited to be able to deal with paradox, to understand that something could be true and not true at the same time, to deal with nonlinear environments, I mean, we can have an environment that work or society at large where you’re required to be at those higher bands of development to make sense of it, that’s where culture and team dynamics can really help individuals navigate. And as I’m saying all this, I realize, one of the challenges to talk about adult development is the hierarchical nature of some of these models where we’re talking about, well, some people are at these higher bands of development and when you’re well versed in this topic, you understand that the lower levels of development, they’re all in that spiral, and at any point in time, if you think that you’re better than people at different levels, you may not be at the level that you think you are. 

Peter: Absolutely.

Alex: But where we are in society today, we’re very sensitive to hierarchical distinctions. Ken Wilber makes, I think, very good distinctions and I love his work and I love that I was sitting in your house, in your castle and then you’re talking about it and then you point to his book and it’s my favorite book literally right next to me as I’m talking. It was fascinating. But Ken makes a distinction between oppressor hierarchies that are the bad hierarchies that we all kind of want to get rid of and then there’s really like this development unfolding kind of hierarchies that, in fact, instead of oppress, release. Tell me a little bit more about how we can talk about development and adult development theories and models, acknowledging these hierarchies but without getting lost in some of the problematic aspects of working within hierarchical systems.

Peter: So, let me address that in two ways. First of all, I’m not sure people, first of all, understand systemic hierarchy notion. Yeah? At a very simple level, a tree is larger hierarchy than the branches and the branches are than the twigs and the twigs than the leaves. It doesn’t mean, you can’t say the tree is more important than the leaves because it wouldn’t exist without the leaf. Yeah? So we’re talking about in a systemic notion of hierarchy, you’re just talking about it’s a more encompassing system. The country is hierarchic to the states or the counties, we’re British, and they are hierarchic to the towns and the towns are to the estates within them and they to the houses. And you can also think about that, in human hierarchies, it’s not that you’re better because you’re higher up, it’s just that you are — you step to a level of taking responsibility for a wider area or a wider perspective. When I was young, I thought that somehow privilege would bring me freedom. I discovered it doesn’t, it just brings you more responsibility. Wherever you are, so that’s the first way which I think is very important.

Alex: Let’s stop there for a moment. That is such a clear way to think about hierarchy and translate that into responsibility at the individual level and I think that’s a very, very powerful connection so thank you for the example around the tree and the systemic perspective upon which kind of hierarchies unfold. I find it very useful and I think our audience will find it useful too. And let’s acknowledge that this topic is very nuanced and it’s easy to get lost in this kind of conversation but it is such an important component of understanding how growth unfolds, both in individuals and adults and systems so it’s always worth kind of geeking out a little bit and then coming back and saying, okay, does that make sense? How do we connect that with something very practical?

Peter: Well, I want to add one more bit to it, which is so important right now with the ecological crisis and that is to realize that the ecological niche is hierarchic to any species within it. Or as somebody says that we need to recognize that every organization is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecology and we better face up to that hierarchy, because the ecology could shut down any organization.

Alex: Absolutely. I think there’s usually confusion in terms of the hierarchical nature of where you place the biosphere and I think there’s been some contention in these circles of the people that are obsessed with this kind of topic around kind of the fundamental nature of kind of where humans line that spectrum. And to make it practical, at the end of the day, if we destroy the Earth, we’re kind of destroying ourselves. The Earth will regenerate, it will come back, maybe takes millions of years, but what we’re talking about, with this ecological, sometimes it’s good to shift it from, “Oh, we’re destroying the Earth,” to, “We’re destroying ourselves, the people that we love, the future generations.” It’s ecological suicide. And I know that you have a specific focus on the ecology, you have a book, Ecological and Climate-Conscious Coaching, so I definitely want to get to that a little bit later in our conversation but I think you were following a line of thought here.

Peter: And the notion that our biosphere in the Earth is totally dependent upon the sun, we need to recognize that and so the solar system is hierarchic to the planets within it.

Alex: Absolutely. And you know one thing that I love is that if you think that living in a world with no hierarchies is better, you should kind of think about that because that in itself is a hierarchical view. You’re just saying essentially no hierarchy is better than hierarchy. Damn, that’s hierarchical. And then that’s like this moment when you like this pathway opens or closes.

Peter: But you see, the other thing I want to say, which is, I think I’m probably the only person in the coaching field who’s really saying this strongly, is that whatever systems you are nested within, family, the community, the team, the organization, the sector, the species, the ecology, they’re all nested within you. So that’s why in my more radical talks, I say there’s no such thing as individual coaching in the executive world, in the business world because there’s coaching with an individual or through an individual but not of an individual, because when the individual comes into the coaching room, virtually or in person, the team dynamic arrives inside them. The organizational culture arrives inside them. The sector contention and conflict arrives inside them. And, by the way, it’s no good asking them tell me about your organizational culture because we define organizational culture as what you stop noticing when you work somewhere for three months. Chinese say the last one to know about the sea is the fish. So your coaching client can’t tell you about the culture but they can enact it in the way they engage with you. They can get you to fill the culture through the embodied engagement you have, the culture gets enacted. You meet the culture when you turn up to meet them on site and as you enter the buildings, the pictures, the waiting room, how you’re greeted, all of that, the signs on the wall. When I went to work years back for British Aerospace, do a lot of work with them, back in the 1980s, I was taken around the site and I was never allowed to pass an aeroplane without being lovingly introduced, but I walked past 300 people that I wasn’t introduced to. All the offices had pictures and models of aircraft, no pictures of people. You feel the culture, you imbibe it.

Alex: You’re taking me back to grad school and really thinking a lot about like Edgar Schein’s work and process consultation and being there with a client absorbing the culture is so powerful. And what training and preparation can do from a coach perspective is that when you’re sitting there with a client and you see certain hints, indications, pathways that align with certain types of culture, you’re able to understand that and use that as a mechanism to better understand the client and the environment that they operate in. And when we’re thinking about — you and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to best develop coaches and we’re really kind of thinking right now about how that process unfolds when the coach is sitting right there and that’s why preparation in coaching is so important and continuous development and education because to do coaching well, it requires a lot of training, requires a lot of being present in the moment. I mean, coaching is a beautiful thing. It’s a practice. It’s truly a practice. And it’s really about getting better over time and you’re tapping into some of the things that I love the most about coaching. You also reminded me of the thing that got me excited about coaching in the first place. So I was an intern at CCL, the Center for Creative Leadership, and I was deciding how I want to focus my time in grad school and how I came to focus on coaching was around some conversations about the systemic impact of coaching, the fact that you can have a one-on-one conversation, or a team coaching conversation but back then I was focused on one on one, the fact that you can have a one-on-one conversation with someone that is designed and purposely driven to create systemic change and the more coaching conversations happen and the more there’s alignment between coaching and the organization, the more you can have this cascading impact, I thought it was fascinating and I thought it was probably one of the most powerful ways in which you can impact the world because, at the end of the day, we’re talking about the environment. Organizations and the way they think about things and they develop products, services, that has such a tremendous impact in our ability to find that, so you just connected me with the reason that made me excited about dedicating my life to coaching.

Peter: But to achieve that, I believe, Alex, that we have to stop seeing the person in front of us as our coaching client and us as a supplier. We have to see them as our coaching partner and we shouldn’t be on their agenda or our agenda, we should be on the agenda that life is setting. So I’m not interested in asking the coachee what they want from coaching, (a), because in my however many years it is now, 45 years of coaching, 99 percent of coachees don’t know what they want or need from coaching. But more importantly, I’m much more interested in asking them and discovering with them because they don’t know the answer, what is the most important work we can do together, that your team, your team of teams, your organization, your world needs us to be focusing on, and that means we have to do a joint discovery process and we need to be shoulder to shoulder and we need to be looking at it all the people. So very early on, I will ask if you were my coachee, I could ask you, Alex, who and what does your work in life serve and you’d say, “Well, all the people who we train through Coaching.com, all the coaches, all the organizations they coach,” and I’d say, “Who else?” and you’d say, “Oh, the people that work at those organizations, our customers,” and I’d say, “Who else? Who beyond the people in your organization? Who beyond your customers?” and we keep going and then, eventually, I’d say, “Who beyond the human world?” You might include, “Well, my family, my friend,” then we might get to ecological and then I would say, “Okay, Alex, if we imagined all those people in this room right now, including the ecology, including your customer’s customers, including your employees, all the people you train in Coaching.com, the investors, the communities where you operate, if they’re all here, what would they be saying to the two of us is the work we need to do together? So the coaching agenda is set by your world and your life, not by you or me. Years back, we had John Greenleaf talking about servant leadership. Now we’ve got serving coaching, coaching that’s in service of the wider system. And, by the way, at the end, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, has this been helpful?” I’d be saying, Alex, if all those people we brought in at the beginning were sitting in the room listening to our coaching, what would they have valued about the work you and I have done together and what would their challenge be to us?

Alex: You know, I think it’s all about co-creation and systemic impact and understanding and I think very few people do the kind of work that you do where there’s really, really embedded systemic understanding of coaching. I think that’s what I enjoy the most about your work. Systemic, it’s an easy word to just say, “This is systemic,” “That is systemic,” but to truly embody systemic thinking, well, that’s a very different thing and it’s difficult and the one thing I appreciate the most about your work is that it is truly systemic.

Peter: Well, thank you. And it’s like so much literature gets stuck on systemic thinking but we need to also train in systemic doing and systemic being.

Alex: Tell me more about that.

Peter: Because, you see, I think — I’ve learned a lot from people like Gregory Bateson and Jay Forrester, Peter Senge, but to a certain extent, a lot of people have taken — Checkland, all these people, a lot of it became very cerebral and it was like I see coaches trying to expand their systemic thinking and they’re trying to say, “All right, so how do I, in my left hemisphere make sense of all they’re telling me about them, their team, teams above them, beneath them, upstream, downstream,” and they get flooded. The organization, its stakeholders, its communities, they’re, “Aaahh,” and try to do it all through data analysis and they’re trying to process it all through this part of their brain. And to a certain extent, we have to train coaches to be able to listen through what they’re being told, to be able to listen with their whole body, not just to you, what you’re saying, your feelings, but to listen to the system speaking through you and to be able to listen in a systemic way. Like you said earlier, a very common thing, I’ve never done a coaching where I haven’t been presented with either/or conundrums, polarities and like you, when the person says, “But this person in my team is saying this is best and saying that,” totally opposites. I just sit there and say, “So how could both be absolutely true?”

Alex: That opens up a pathway for understanding. And it’s the same thing when you’re facing problems and you start thinking about a problem in terms of could be the ultimate solution for some of the other problems that you have. It’s really a way — there’s so much of this that is mindset and I love the distinction there. How can both be absolutely true? Well, if the answer is they’re not both absolutely true, then we can actually go and say, “How are they relatively true? What’s the relative truth of this side and the other side?” and, oftentimes, you come up with a better answer, and you know what, that sounds nice to say. And, oftentimes, you don’t, but at least you stop and you evaluate, right?

Peter: Well, particularly when I come to America and do trainings, I have to also help because people talk a lot about, “Oh, the way out of either/or is both/and,” and I said, “No, it’s not. It’s the Indian approach of neti neti, neither/nor, not both/and, because if you’ve got a stuck either/or debate in your leadership team, your coaching, supervision, wherever, both could be absolutely true but both are partially wrong. So the danger in both/and is we combined two wrong solutions. And this is where I think it’s really essential that coaches understand triangulated thinking. The answer is not a both/and a compromise between two wrong solutions, it’s finding out what’s the need behind that solution? What’s the need behind that solution? And how do we find a third solution which is neither of those that actually connects the disconnected needs that lay behind the arguments?

Alex: I think that is so powerful and it’s so timely too with our times. We were talking about hierarchies before and value structures and value systems. Oftentimes, what we try to do is to say everything’s valuable, but that’s not very helpful. It’s nice and it sounds nice but it is not valuable. What’s valuable is to be able to say everything’s valuable but not everything is equally valuable, and the exercise of essentially adding weights to what’s more valuable, well, that is a very helpful exercise and that avoids where you’re coming from with that statement around not wanting to compromise with two wrong solutions. And this seems very nuanced as we’re talking about it but it’s really in the face of a lot of the problems that we work with as coaches and —

Peter: We teach to coaches or the team coach training addicts, we teach leaders how to work with polarities, how to get beyond either/or thinking, how to get beyond both/and thinking. These are things one can learn but it’s not just letting them hear, it’s like once you get it embodied ways, you kind of — some of the people I’ve trained for many years and still supervise, they’ll say, halfway through their sentence, “Oh, I’m just about to go into an either/or,” they’ll say to me, “Oh, Peter, that’s an either/or,” they’ll catch me as well. You develop a smell, you develop a taste, it becomes an embodied part of systemic being, not systemic thinking.

Alex: Absolutely. And it’s such a fascinating topic. Let’s go and explore a little bit deeper your ecological and climate coaches coaching. 

Peter: Before we do that, Alex, I just thought of one other very practical example of triangulated thinking.

Alex: Please.

Peter: You know I did this research, I was a professor at Henley Business School in Leadership part time for ten years, I’m still an emeritus professor there, and I did some research for them on tomorrow’s leadership and the necessary revolution in today’s leadership development. If you look at a lot of the leadership literature, you only have to go back 30 years and it was all about the heroic leader. It was based on a belief that leadership resided in great men, all men. Thomas Carlyle, I think, started this back in the 19th century. By the way, one of the best retorts to heroic view of leadership is really War and Peace where Tolstoy debunks the whole great men theory of leadership way before any of us. But then there was the move in the 1980s, 1990s to talk about leaders and followers, but even that is not systemic, it’s relational so it’s a step forward, it seemed that leadership resides in the relational connection, not in the individuals. You can’t have a leader without followers. But what I point out, as soon as you think triangulatedly, actually, you need a third element for leadership to be present. You can have a leader and followers without leadership, and all it ends up as, it ends up as celebrity-ism and the Twittersphere and celebrity stalking but that’s not leadership. You’ve got to have a leader and followers, but most importantly, you’ve got to have a shared purpose. So as soon as you start to get in a systemic way of thinking and being, you realize that leadership is not created by the leader or the followers, but the leader, the followers, and the shared purpose. It’s the purpose that creates the team, not the team that create their purpose. And so a lot of stuff we were doing back in the 1980s, creating mission statements and value statements become nonsensical in a systemic world.

Alex: Yeah, they need to be co-created. You can’t just say, “This is where we stand for,” you have to really understand what do you stand for and when you’re working together, what comes out of that, right?

Peter: Well, I always say a team doesn’t create its purpose, it discovers it. Why was it set up in the first place? You have to go back to that. Secondly, you have to find out who does our work serve and you have to go and ask all the stakeholders what do they value from what you currently do for them, what are they going to be different going forward. This is why I talked about thinking future back and outside in. If you’re systemic, you discover your purpose. Now, I didn’t set out to start five organizations, life landed a challenge on my doorstep and I couldn’t find anyone else who would deal with it so I just start an organization.

Alex: That’s a good away to do it. 

Peter: Well, as I say, keep asking the question what can you uniquely do that the world of tomorrow is needing, and if you could find that sweet spot constantly through your life, I say to people you may not end up being rich but you’ll never be out of work and you’ll never get bored. 

Alex: Couldn’t agree with you more. So now, delving into that topic that I know is very important to you, you make a connection between the challenges that we face in the Earth and our biosphere faces and you tie it to the need to shift human consciousness. So, how does coaching come into play and, more explicitly, what is ecological and climate-conscious coaching?

Peter: Well, as soon as we get into systemic, it takes us inevitably into the ecosystemic because it is the system that we all share. There is only one Earth that all organizations are part of.

Alex: Until we make it to Mars, we really got to take care of this one.

Peter: Yeah, not sure we — until we’ve learned the lessons that are here on this Earth, we have any right morally to go anywhere else and wreck another planet.

Alex: Absolutely. The idea of going and establishing, colonizing other planets seems foolish while we don’t really figure out our stuff here, right?

Peter: Yeah. You know, in Alcoholics Anonymous, they call that doing your geographical. Do your geographical means when you can’t face the problems in your family, you go and get divorced and start a new one or you can’t face the problem in this job, you go and change your job or you move to a different part of the country. But, actually, when you arrive at a different part of the country, your challenges are there waiting for you. They got there first. 

Alex: Absolutely. 

Peter: So we come back to the ecosystemic, the ecology. As you know, I’ve done many large coaching lectures, including many for WBECS, Coaching.com, and others, and when I first started talking about ecology and coaching, a lot of people got very upset and said, “But you know, we’re ICF trained and it’s not our job to bring the ecology into the coaching room,” and I after a while start to say, “Well, what a strange way of thinking,” and one very angry, very experienced coach said to me, “What do you mean a strange way of thinking?” I said, “Well, let me ask you a question. Do your clients eat? Do they drink? Do they breathe?” He said, “Of course, they do.” I said, “Well, in which case, the ecology is already in the room, it’s just you and I are not paying attention to it.” And as soon as your systemic, then ecology is present. The same way, even some very experienced people of this era, I was on a panel with people talking about coaching in nature, all of whom were very experienced about coaching out of doors, but I realized the assumption was that coaching in nature meant coaching out of doors, then that worries me because the implication is that everything indoors is unnatural, that somehow the ecology is out there. And that’s a fundamental space in our way of thinking, that nature is separate from human culture and civilization. So all coaching is happening in ecology. We are part of ecology and ecology is part of us.

Alex: Nested systems. 

Peter: Yeah. It’s a nested system. The second point I’d make that there’s a whole movement that I call the inner development goals, you can look up on the website, I’m sure you’ve probably come across it, Alex, where they’re saying we can look at the United Nations sustainability goals, all 17 of them, but, actually, we cannot solve any of them, (a), with our current way of thinking. Gus Speth, who started off as a lawyer, he said they’re all symptoms of human selfishness, greed, and egocentricity. First of all, all the challenges, biodiversity, migration, inequality, ecological collapse, all of them are interconnected and all of them at root are symptoms of a failure of human consciousness to evolve with a world we have created. And so that’s why I’m saying coaching is just a subdivision of the global enterprise to shift human consciousness. The challenge isn’t in the challenges out there, it’s can we mature our consciousness to be able to deal with the challenges out there which are not separate problems, they’re interconnected challenges. So, at a very practical level, I train coaches, every time a coachee says, “Oh, I’ve got a problem with my boss,” should just immediately reframe that and say, “I hear you’ve got a challenge in your relationship with your boss.” That is an amazing first step. We’ve stopped a bigger problem to be solved, we made it a challenge that life is giving you as the next lesson.

Alex: That’s a very powerful reframe. 

Peter: We’ve also taken the challenge and we’ve located the challenge in a connection. So people say to me, “Oh, but I’ve got an impossible boss, never communicates properly with me,” I’ll say, “I hear you’ve got a challenge. You haven’t yet found a way of engaging your boss in the communication you need to do your work.”

Alex: That’s a very different way to think about it and one that opens pathways for possibilities

Peter: And as soon as you stop locating problems in individuals or in teams or in parts of the system, change it to always locate it in a connection between levels horizontally or vertically. Move away from what I now train people in, which is the biggest waste of time in organizations and of energy is what we call polluting BMWs, which is not the car, it stands for blame, moan, and whine. If you could start to see anything that happens in your life as a generous lesson from life, not a problem to be solved but life knocking on your door saying, “All right, you’re ready for the next lesson,” your parents is going to die or suddenly you’re going to lose your job, whatever happens, an earthquake in Morocco, my heart goes out to these people who, a father I was watching on the news where his whole family has been wiped out and his home’s gone, that’s when this work becomes really tough, to see that is a generous lesson from life that life has given him the advanced class. And just to ask the question, no matter how tough the lesson, what is life asking me to face and step up to. We don’t get to choose the curriculum wherever we are in the world, we do get to choose how we respond.

Alex: hat’s powerful, Peter. With all of your experience, you’ve been doing coaching before coaching was a thing, we are at a very interesting inflection point where technology and AI are set to transform many facets of life and modern civilization. With that context, and we don’t have to make it just specifically about technology, but sitting from where you are today, what are some of the aspects of the future of coaching that you find interesting, that you find exciting, unnerving? From where you are right now, what does the future for this profession look like?

Peter: I think we’re at a very, very exciting inflection point. And when you mentioned AI, we have to recognize with humility as human beings that a lot of what we were doing in coaching in the first 20, 30, 40 years, a lot of what many coaches are still doing, AI can do better than we can. If your coaching is left hemisphere neo coaching, helping the coachee find the answer they already know and it’s fair ball that it’s based on left hemisphere ways of engaging, AI can do that better than we can. They’ve got all the best coaching questions from right around the world. They can match the person’s language, they can be available 24 hours a day, they can match the person’s emotional state, yeah, all the things that we’ve spent years learning to do, right? At this time, when AI is taking over all the things that our left hemisphere used to do and focus on, what worries me is that we’re training human beings to be more like computers, not using AI to liberate us to do the bits that computers can’t do. And by the way, the problem is when you’ve got competency-based models that drive us more to an AI way of thinking —

Alex: Very true. 

Peter: — rather than looking at what are the capacities, the human capacities a coach needs to develop. Competencies reduces it to measurable things that a computer can replicate, capacities can’t be measured in the same way. So what I’m saying is anything which is problem centric, let AI do. Anything that’s individual, helping them think better by themselves, let AI do. Let’s move on to what AI can’t do. Yet. I’d say it might, who knows what will come over the horizon. But coaching, even facilitating a team we’re probably going to train AI to do, but partnering a team on a journey of transformation, sitting in on their meetings doing timeouts and helping them shift the whole dynamic within the room, coaching them live with their stakeholders, and helping to create partnerships that are a win, win, win, not just transactional partnerships. We need to raise our game as coaches to move into the territory that AI will be way behind us all. But to do that, we need to be ecologically literate, systemically literate, develop our systemic being and that then I think coaching can play a major role in this number one global challenge of maturing human consciousness, but not in the way we have been coaching, not in the way we have been doing leadership development. Both need a radical transformation.

Alex: Peter, I couldn’t think of a better way to wrap up our episode today. We have so many more questions that I want to ask you but I’m sure we’ll have you back on the podcast and we’re doing a lot of really cool work together. So, for those that are interested and follow our ecosystem, they’ll be able to access a lot more of your thinking and work. We’ll be announcing some exciting things pretty soon. 

Peter: Great. And lovely to be chatting with you again, Alex, and, hopefully, we’ll have another chance in person before too long.

Alex: I think it’s happening in the next two months. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Hope you enjoyed this episode with Peter Hawkins.

Peter: Thank you, Alex.