Aligned Organizations – TGCN

The Evolution of Our Work: Where We Are Going

Peggy Marshall — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:57:08 +0000

If you have noticed fewer webinar invitations in your inbox recently, it wasn’t an absence. It was an intentional retreat to the writing desk to build what comes next.

For years, Global IOC focused on developing exceptional coaches. Through Core, Advanced, Master, and Chartered programs, we built deep fluency in inquiry, presence, and craft. That foundation remains vital.

Yet watching leaders return from immersive programs into entrenched organizational systems revealed a harder truth: knowing how to coach is not enough when the surrounding system continually invites you back into old patterns.

Individual capability matters enormously but sustaining it requires more. It requires internal agency, developmental infrastructure, and tools that help leaders work with what is happening beneath the surface rather than simply trying to change visible behavior.

What follows is the developmental architecture we are bringing forward to meet that challenge.

1. The Turnkey LeaderCoach System: Building Internal Developmental Infrastructure

Organizations do not need another leadership program that evaporates the moment external facilitators pack up. They need the capability to cultivate leaders from within and sustain that growth in the flow of work.

We have re-architected the LeaderCoach System into a complete, turnkey framework designed to give organizations the capability to bring leadership development inside:

Complete Developmental Toolkits: Participant learning modules and workbooks, workplace field application, mentor coaching guides, and the resources needed to carry the learning into practice.
Applied Learning Environments: LeaderCoach Labs where capability can be observed in practice and Integration Cafés where leaders return to examine what happened when they applied the work inside their organizations.
From Fluency to Systems Thinking: The pathway progresses from foundational coaching fluency through the Affiliate Professional Coach (APC) level into the deeper capacity of the Registered Professional Coach (RPC), where leaders examine their own thinking, navigate resistance, recognize patterns, and work with the complexity of leading inside systems.
Internal Sustainability: By preparing internal facilitators and mentors to carry the work forward, organizations develop the capability to sustain leadership development from within rather than remaining dependent upon an outside provider.
Scale at a Fraction of the Cost: Once the internal facilitators and mentors are prepared and the developmental architecture is in place, organizations can develop successive cohorts of LeaderCoaches internally rather than purchasing externally facilitated development for each new group of leaders. The investment shifts from repeatedly buying programs to building an internal capability that can reach significantly more leaders at a fraction of the cost.

That last point matters because RPC is not simply about becoming better at coaching someone else. To become the kind of thinking partner this work requires, leaders have to become capable of examining and changing their own thinking as well. The LeaderCoach System is designed not simply to teach coaching skills, but to develop leaders who can continue thinking differently when the system around them is exerting pressure to return to what is familiar.

2. Sustaining Impact: Mapping the Terrain from Insight to Alignment

Coming at the End of September

Why can intelligent, capable people know precisely what they want to change and still find themselves returning to familiar patterns? The barrier is rarely a lack of insight or intention. More often, something in the terrain beneath the behavior continues to pull us toward what we already know.

Arriving at the end of September, the revised edition of Sustaining Impact: Mapping the Terrain from Insight to Alignment and the updated Sustaining Impact Assessment provide a way of working with that terrain through Awareness, Activation, and Alignment.

This work is also becoming the foundation of our Team Development Sprints, focused 90-day engagements that move beyond generic definitions of a “high-performing team” and begin instead with the team that is actually in the room.

Using individual and collective assessment data, we map the team’s current terrain and identify the patterns shaping communication, decision-making, relationships, accountability, and follow-through. The team can then work with what is actually happening rather than trying to conform to a model of what someone else has decided a high-performing team is supposed to look like.

3. Agency Without Anger: Uncompromising Presence

Arriving in October

Then there is the book that has occupied a very large part of my summer.

Agency Without Anger: Uncompromising Presence grew from a question that became increasingly difficult for me to ignore: What happens to our own agency when another person, a team, or even an organizational system recruits us into a pattern that is not ours?

We find ourselves defending, appeasing, over-explaining, fixing, withdrawing, accommodating, or fighting back, sometimes before we even recognize that we have stepped into someone else’s pattern.

Agency Without Anger explores the personal capacity required to recognize that recruitment, before automatically responding to it, remain the author of our own meaning-making in the presence of someone else’s emotional pattern, and exercise responsible authority and clear voice without rigidity, blame, or the need to overpower.

The deeper I went into this work, the more clearly I could see its connection to everything else we have been building. A leader who cannot recognize when they are being recruited into someone else’s pattern will struggle to remain a genuine thinking partner when the stakes rise, just as a team whose members continually recruit one another into familiar responses will struggle to create sustainable change simply because everyone understands what they are supposed to do differently.

The Integrated Horizon

These initiatives are not isolated projects. They are part of a developmental architecture that connects what happens within us to how we lead, how we work together, and ultimately how organizations build the capacity to sustain development over time.

There is also a lineage to this work that matters to me. Detach from Drama began by helping us recognize the patterns that pull us away from intentional choice. Sustaining Impact asks what allows insight to become lasting change, while Agency Without Anger goes more deeply into what happens to our agency when other people and systems recruit us back into familiar patterns. The LeaderCoach System carries those questions directly into leadership practice and into the organizational environments where that practice has to survive.

We began by teaching people how to coach. Over time, that work has evolved into something larger: developing how leaders think, strengthening the agency that allows them to remain present when the work becomes difficult, helping teams recognize and shift the patterns shaping their collective effectiveness, and giving organizations the infrastructure to build and sustain developmental capability from within.

An Invitation to Build With Us

This is where the work moves from what we have been building to what you can begin using.

For individual leaders, Agency Without Anger offers a way to recognize recruitment before stepping into it, reclaim voice and authority, and remain present without being pulled into patterns that compromise how you want to lead.

For executive and leadership teams, the updated Sustaining Impact Assessment and our 90-Day Team Development Sprints provide a way to move beneath surface-level fixes, map the actual terrain shaping collective performance, and work directly with the patterns influencing communication, decisions, accountability, relationships, and execution.

For organizations, the turnkey LeaderCoach System provides a pathway for bringing developmental capability inside, preparing internal facilitators and mentors, and building an infrastructure that can continue developing leaders long after an external facilitator has left.

We have spent months building this next chapter of the work, and over the coming weeks I will be sharing access to the revised Sustaining Impact, previews of Agency Without Anger, and partnership details for the LeaderCoach System and Team Development Sprints.

If you see yourself, your team, or your organization somewhere in this work, reply directly to this email. I would love to talk with you about where you might begin.

It feels good to be back, and I am very ready to put this work into the world.

Warmly,

Peggy

What is the Terrain You are Actually Assessing?

Peggy Marshall — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:34:20 +0000

Why Systems Thinking Changes Everything You See as a Coach

That is the question I brought to the Comensa Conference in Johannesburg last month — one that I believe sits at the heart of every coaching engagement:

What is the terrain you are actually assessing?

Not the presenting issue. Not the goal the client walked in with. The terrain — the full landscape of forces, patterns, beliefs, and invisible structures that are shaping everything the person in front of you is experiencing.

Most coaches are trained to focus on the person. That instinct is right. And it is incomplete.

Because the person in front of you didn’t create their patterns in isolation. They created them in response to a system. And until you can see the system, you are only ever coaching half the picture.

The Dual Lens: Individual and System, Simultaneously

Systems thinking in coaching asks us to hold two lenses at the same time — the individual, and the forces shaping that individual — without collapsing into one or the other.

At the individual level, we are looking at patterns, beliefs, and narratives. The emotional logic that keeps someone safe. Behavior as information rather than as a problem to be fixed.

At the systems level, we are looking at the forces that surround and shape the individual — culture, structure, relationships, incentives. The invisible field that most people cannot see precisely because they are living inside it.

The master coach doesn’t choose between these two views. They learn to hold both — in the same conversation.

Nine Thinkers. One Throughline.

To make this practical, I draw on nine foundational thinkers whose work — taken together — gives coaches a complete systems lens.

Kahneman — reminds us that most of what drives behavior in organizations is invisible, even to the person living it. Your client isn’t resistant or stuck. They are being consistent — with a system of beliefs and emotional responses that has kept them safe until now.

Kegan — takes this further. People don’t resist change because they lack motivation. They resist because they have hidden competing commitments that are just as real, just as powerful, and almost completely invisible to themselves. The micromanager who says they want to develop their team isn’t weak-willed. They are running a perfectly logical internal system protecting something they haven’t yet named.

Dweck — asks us to distinguish between three completely different coaching terrains: a skill gap, a belief gap, and an identity gap. When coaching stalls, the question is which terrain you’re actually on — because each one requires a completely different intervention.

Senge — asks us to look beneath behavior to the structures that generate it. When your client keeps hitting the same wall, the question worth sitting with is whether this is about the individual — or about a pattern the system keeps producing regardless of who is in the role.

Schein — gives us the concept of culture beneath the culture — the unspoken assumptions that actually shape decisions, often invisible even to the people making them. Understanding what a system consistently makes possible tells you more than its stated values ever will.

Meadows — makes the case — without knowing she was making it — for why coaching is the highest leverage intervention available to any organization. Numbers, rules, and incentive structures are low leverage. The mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is where the real power lives. That is exactly where coaches work.

Bateson — asks coaches to listen for the pattern beneath the content, not just the content itself. The story your client tells about their organization reveals how the organization has shaped them. The story they tell about themselves reveals how they have learned to survive inside it.

Oshry — offers one of the most relieving reframes in organizational work: much of what people experience is generated by where they stand in the system. The overwhelmed senior leader, the pulled-apart middle manager, the disengaged frontline employee — each is responding to real forces that come with their position. Seeing that changes everything about how you coach them.

Scharmer — asks the question that every coach needs to sit with: From what place inside myself am I coaching right now? Am I coaching from my expertise — or from genuine presence to what wants to emerge?

The Destination: The Aligned Organization

The Aligned Organization isn’t a destination you declare. It is built at three levels — simultaneously. Organizations that learn to read their own systems. Leaders who develop the competencies to lead from alignment. Employees who bring critical thinking and agency into every partnership. When those three layers are working together, you don’t have misalignment. You have an organization that can see itself, develop itself, and sustain itself.

Coaches are not support staff in this vision. They are the connective tissue of a system that is trying to become conscious of itself.

Every coaching conversation that helps an individual see their pattern contributes to the organization’s capacity to see its own. Every relationship that develops a leader’s systems sight increases organizational capacity to read its terrain.

You don’t have to wait for your organization to become aligned before you start coaching systemically. You start where you are. With the person in front of you. That is how the Aligned Organization gets built. One conversation at a time.

The Question That Will Change How You Listen

I want to leave you with the question I closed with in Johannesburg — one I invite you to carry into your next conversation:

“What is trying to emerge in this person — and what would become possible if they trusted it?”

That question will not give you answers. It will give you better sight.

This Is the Conversation Our Field Needs — and You Are Invited

If this article sparked something in you, that is exactly the signal to follow.

In two weeks I am bringing this work live to the Global Coaching Network — a deep dive into systems thinking as a practical coaching lens, with frameworks you can carry directly into your next conversation.

Systems Thinking in Coaching Practice: What Is the Terrain You Are Assessing?

May 13 8 AM PST-11 AM EST
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83340208316?pwd=2YpMlaU8JuAN1eXCwa1CmqzjBK1eSH.1

This is not a lecture. It is a conversation — and the people who show up for it tend to be exactly the kind of coaches and practitioners who want to go deeper. I hope to see you in the room.