Bill Carrier: Probably at the ICRF, and please mention the Dublin Declaration as part of that.

Lew Stern: Sure.  It was about six or seven years ago.  There was sort of a rumbling, sort of an undercurrent across and especially within English-speaking countries, but in other countries as well, that somehow we needed to come together.  There were pockets of people doing research and defining coaching and training coaches and setting standards, and starting to do the kinds of things that it takes to build a professional discipline.  Coaching was, as the article in the Harvard Business Review said “the wild west of coaching.”  And it was the Wild West because there were few rules and standards.  Everyone was just going into coaching.

It was a fascinating field.  It gave focus and opportunity to people who were good as helping professionals, at working with individuals and groups to help them understand themselves.  People entering the field could support clients in understanding what they wanted to accomplish, to make decisions and to set plans in motion, to develop their capacity and to improve their performance– to have an impact and influence on the results of their organization or their community or their family or whatever it might be.

There was that rumbling. So a large group of people came together in Dublin for a forum of people who represented ten different categories of what was going on in coaching.  They were leaders of about 250 people who had been meeting virtually as multidisciplinary and international teams for a year, having teleconferences, to talk about each of those ten categories. For example, the ten categories were things like the definition of coaching and the training and education of coaches, research in coaching standards of coaching practice and the measurement of results–all those kinds of things that would go into moving coaching into a more professional space and into a more evidence-based space.  Evidence-based simply meaning that we wouldn’t just do things by guessing what might work, but that we would actually have data to support that it would be more likely to work, and that you were accountable to your client for best practices.

That was the field of coaching emerging.  I think it was five days long in Dublin, in Ireland, and basically what we did was to share the work of the ten teams and what we learned.  We gathered statements for each of those ten areas about what the status was, where we were, and what needed to be done to move it to the next step.

We then put together a declaration based on our experiences and our interactions as a group of professionals from around the world, which included academicians and practitioners and trainers and certifiers and you name it.  Given the involvement of that relatively representative group of people, we asked ourselves:  What do we declare about where coaching is? Where does it need to go? What are the priorities and stages of how we need to make that happen? That was done, and that document and supporting white papers are available online.