In a recent article, my friend and colleague Eric Martin laid out what Adaptive Leadership is: the practice of mobilizing people to confront what actually needs to change – and building, through that struggle, the new capacities, identities and futures that genuine progress requires.

In essence, from an Adaptive Leadership perspective, the people with the problem are the problem – and they’re the solution.

As a practitioner of Adaptive Leadership for over a decade across a range of organizational contexts, this orientation of deep systems sensing – recognizing the relational reality of what we experience as problems and solutions – and for whom – is deeply embedded in how I move through the world. As a result, when I began my work as a professional leadership coach, I was drawn in by what I perceived to be a similar essence: the client enters the coaching engagement as a whole person with the capacity to (re)activate their own agency to change.

As coaches we take care to understand our clients’ goals and practice behaviors and apply frameworks that keep us in the role of coach. Our work is to ask questions and hold space for the client to access meaning and answers within themselves.

However, as I went further into the profession of coaching I discovered a gap between this deeper invitation and the reality of how the practice is unfolding at scale. By focusing on the technical competencies and mechanics of what makes coaching distinct from other disciplines, our emerging field has lost connection to the unique purpose we could be serving in a world that is facing profound institutional unraveling and uncertainty – a world that is ripe for co-evolution.

To me, coaching facilitates co-evolution at the level of recognizing that one person, one relationship, impacts the system as a whole. For coaching to be in true service to our moment of collective disruption and new possibility, coaches must move beyond the technicalities of proving their professionalism. Coaches must share the call to lead adaptively.

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One way that this gap is taking shape today is in the realization that AI can serve as a coach. To use language from Adaptive Leadership, if the client is looking for a technical fix to their adaptive challenge, AI can provide it. The AI large language model responds to the prompt it gets. But the work of understanding the client’s deeper goal and diagnosing the challenge involves shifting from a desire to find a technical fix to owning the work of an adaptive journey.

Technical problems are defined by their existing solutions – for a technical problem, the expertise and knowledge to resolve it exist somewhere. And if they exist, chances are high that AI can access and repeat them.

Adaptive problems, however, have no known solution. There is no existing expertise or authority that is sufficient to truly resolve the problem. Adaptive problems require learning on the level of lived experience – they call for a willingness to discover, let go and open up in completely new ways – ways that might not feel accessible to the client on their own. Adaptive Leadership Coaching in this sense is not the application of the answer but the vessel for shared learning in the face of the unknown.

This is where an AI coach falls short. Not because it lacks the ability to feign empathy or offer relevant advice, but because it cannot do anything other than regurgitate answers that already exist. In adaptive work, the experience of doing the work is the container for the learning – and what makes adaptive work so difficult is the quality of support that is required to sustain it over time to get to a place of real progress.

This is where an adaptive coach becomes essential. Someone who is deeply attuned to where the technical work ends and the adaptive begins. Someone who can pace the work such that the client has full ownership of and access to their agency throughout the process. This attunement can only come to the coach through ongoing lived experience of holding steady in their own adaptive work. That experience, the hard-earned lessons as well as the grace of uncertainty revealed through the journey, becomes the embodied co-creation container of possibility, healing and resolution in support of the client’s deepest becoming.

Adaptive Leadership coaches can let go of their own preferences or needs to perform not because they are ‘better’ than others, but because their capacity to let go and let come is held by a deeper understanding that the client’s becoming and their own becoming are purposefully connected.

In Adaptive Leadership Coaching, the coach’s job is not to speak the language of Adaptive Leadership for the client’s sake. The coach’s job is to embody the practice of Adaptive Leadership to be able to participate in a deeper co-creation with the client – one that truly holds space for the (re)activation of their inherent empowerment to be their own solution – and to intervene in the problem they know is truly theirs to step into.

In this sense, Adaptive Leadership Coaching invites a shared call to lead. Staying true to the practice of coaching at its essence, staying true to the client’s becoming, and staying true to what wants to emerge through the coach’s unique adaptive capacity.

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A few years ago I found myself frustrated, curious and hopeful in this gap of what I sensed as the coaching profession’s true possibility and the technical emphases of the advanced certification process. I longed for coaching education and community to go deeper – to find its fullest expression where true Adaptive Leadership lives. As I struggled in that gap and wondered how I might be part of the problem, I one day found myself participating in the solution.

This is the heart, embodied practice and living invitation from which the ICF-accredited Adaptive Leadership™ Coaching Certification was born. And as each cohort gathers, I step into what is uniquely mine to do and thereby discover what wants to come true through us collectively.

If you want to join a community of Adaptive Leadership Coaches co-evolving what leadership coaching is truly for, the next opportunity to join us will be in January 2027.