I used to think my design background was something to leave behind when I became a coach. I was wrong.
For years I kept the two worlds separate. Design was the previous chapter: I trained at RISD, then spent over a decade running a strategy and design firm. Coaching was the new one. I figured becoming a coach meant being purely a coach.
But the separation didn’t hold. In session after session, the designer kept showing up. I was listening for what wasn’t being said. I was treating each leader’s situation like a brief: what exists, what’s missing, what wants to be built. For a while I fought it. Then I noticed my work was better when I didn’t.
That’s when I started seeing what each discipline was missing.
Design taught me to see what others miss and to make what doesn’t yet exist. But there’s a boundary to it. Design can solve problems brilliantly. It just can’t transform the problem-solver. It can reimagine systems, but not the person running them.
Coaching works on the other side of that boundary. Where design asks how could we solve this, coaching asks who do you need to become. For a while I thought I’d left one discipline for a better one. I’d actually found the missing half of the first.
Every problem a leader faces exists at their current way of seeing. The options that feel available, the constraints that seem fixed, the strategies that look realistic: all of it reflects who the leader is today. Better analysis expands the options a little. When the leader evolves, an entirely new set comes into view.
This is why some problems don’t respond to better solutions, no matter how many you try. The growth plateau that survives every new tactic usually isn’t a tactics problem. It’s the ceiling of the identity that created it. The question everyone asks is how. The question that matters is who. And organizations spend years on the first before anyone asks the second.
My practice today is built on holding both at once. The design side does what it’s always done: reframe the problem, find what’s almost visible at the edges, give direction a form that can actually be built. The coaching side works on the person the direction will require.
Neither substitutes for the other. A transformed leader inside an unchanged system hits walls. A redesigned system led by an unchanged leader falls back. I spent years on each side of this divide before seeing they were two halves of the same problem.
When a problem has survived several good attempts at solving it, stop asking how to fix it. Ask instead who this problem needs you to become. The first question gets you a plan. The second gets you a new way of leading.