Are you buying capacity or confidence?

“So many teams… leaders… organisations…”

Ever noticed how often insight posts start this way?

Says who? What’s the evidence, your lived experience, anecdotal data, repeated patterns?

When I hear this kind of framing, I get curious. If we keep seeing the same patterns everywhere, what does that say about how we are making sense of the world, before we even get to someone else’s?

What if the recurrence isn’t a universal truth, but a reflection of our own filters? Could it be that emergence, complex adaptive systems, or bias toward pattern recognition are at play? And in that pursuit of pattern, are we missing the subtle cracks, nuance, and contradiction that make each team, leader, and organisation different?

As coaches, how do we protect our clients from our own assumptions and meaning-making?

Not by pretending we don’t have any, but by learning to see them more clearly.
Their hooks.
Their emotional tone.
Their repeated storylines.

Here’s the rub:

As someone who coaches in all these contexts, the last thing I’d want as a buyer (of coaching) is a coach who already knows what’s happening and how to fix it. That’s not support. That’s a sales pitch masquerading as certainty.

And certainty is not the same as insight.

Buyer beware:

You might be buying confidence, not capacity.
Solutions, not sensemaking.
A map, not the terrain.
And yet, I feel this tension too.

How do we offer potential clients enough confidence that we can support them, without selling them something they don’t need?
Maybe that’s the real double bind.