Next Steps

Several years ago, I conducted a series of interviews with coaching researchers to find out why they did what they did. The findings offered some useful insights in support of wider engagement by coaches in research. Respondents’ beliefs, value frameworks and thinking were challenged and stretched as a result of engaging in coaching research. As one stated “what you experiment with you learn from and research is a well-organized learning experiment.” This learning spiral depicts an upwardly emerging interplay between the processes of differentiation and inclusion.

Coaching research begins by taking a step back from the practice with an objective eye; becoming intimate with the observation experience; stepping back to look at outcomes; incorporating outcomes into practice; stepping back once again to assess and moving to higher levels of complexity at each step. Professional identity becomes rooted in the social network of the coaching research community. Coaching behaviors draw on and are polished by reflection on objective evidence. Coaching researchers acquire language and conceptual frameworks of increasing complexity to describe and enact coaching.

An inclusive coaching research model needs to include three elements. First, the model would use a “new sciences” orientation to the practices and processes of research. We must acknowledge that the quantitative, positivist orientation of the scientist-practitioner model has changed since its beginning. The scientist-practitioner model requires a minimum level of competence in statistical methods; recent views of the model have expanded to encompass evaluation, policy research and case studies as research contributions. Since its inception, the emphasis on scientific research has waxed and waned and while the ideal continues to be supported, effecting the ideal has not happened in large part because of the lack of research methodologies suitable to practice. In other words, “It is not that the idea was wrong but rather than inability to develop the tools to implement the idea.”  (Barlow, Hayes & Nelson, 1984, p 23) The Heisenberg principle in coaching research underscores the need for the coaching community to consider collectively what and how we view data. A new sciences perspective can inform a view of coaching research in which data encompasses both lasting and ephemeral objects. We can borrow a model for analysis of such data from quantum physics where systems emerge from relationships between and among the parts and to acknowledge that such research design is organic and interactive.