From Goal-Setting to Sense-Making

Like me, you’ve probably started many coaching conversations with the simple question:

"What would you like to achieve?"

It is a sensible place to start, and is how many of us have been taught to structure our coaching. Goals are the critical first step of the GROW model and provide direction, create accountability and help people focus their efforts. Whether explicitly or implicitly, much of modern coaching is built around helping clients move from where they are today towards a desired future state.

Yet I have noticed something increasingly common in conversations with leaders. Many of them struggle to answer that opening question. They may be ambitious, or they may be motivated, but the question requires a degree of specificity that is sometimes missing.

For many leaders in the corporate world, the core challenge stems from working inside a series of competing demands and shifting goalposts. A project is underway, but the scope keeps changing. A transformation has begun, but the vision and objectives remain unclear. They might be trying to improve team performance while the organisation is also changing strategy, restructuring or responding to external pressure.

It’s hard for people to think about goals, or even articulate them when the terrain keeps moving beneath their feet. When you operate in an environment where the future is unclear, trying to be certain about what you want to achieve can feel almost impossible.

Goal-setting remains central to coaching for good reason. Clear goals provide direction, focus and accountability. But they are easiest to work with when the client’s environment is reasonably stable, and when progress can be tracked against a path that still makes sense.

For many business leaders today that is increasingly not the environment they are operating in. They find themselves operating in conditions of ambiguity, competing priorities, changing expectations and increasingly complex organisational systems. In these environments pursuing a goal is less like following a map and more like finding your way through fog.

This distinction is subtle yet has important implications for coaching.

Let me illustrate this. As a former military pilot, I was taught that having a defined destination was clearly an important part of successful navigation, but it was only one aspect. Even when the objective was clear, we still had to respond to changing conditions such as the weather shifting, information changing, and assumptions proving incorrect Success was not about rigidly adhering to the original plan, but about maintaining awareness of what was actually happening and adapting accordingly.

The destination was still important. But there needed to be an emphasis on orientation, not just the goal.

The goal is about, "Where are we trying to get to?"

Orientation considers something different: “What is happening around us right now, and how does it impact me, my team and the goal?

When the environment is uncertain, the second question often becomes more important than the first.

This is where I believe coaching has an opportunity to evolve.

Rather than focusing exclusively on goal-setting, coaches can increasingly help clients make sense of the situations they are facing. This does not mean abandoning goals. Rather, it means recognising that they often need help understanding the landscape in which they are operating before people can move forward confidently.

Sense-making is a term often used in complex systems research, but in essence it’s a simple concept. It’s the process of helping people understand what is happening to them when there is no obvious answer.

I’m certain many coaches are already doing this. In practice they help clients examine assumptions, explore competing interpretations of events or identify patterns that may not be immediately obvious. Coaching is meant to create space for reflection when there is overwhelming pressure to act. These techniques support navigation when the conditions are volatile.

The work I do in the corporate world has shown many leaders with a real sense of frustration. These people will question themselves because the environment refuses to behave predictably. Or they assume the problem lies within them, when in reality they may be experiencing the limits of a certainty-based approach in an uncertain world.

So the coach’s role is becoming particularly important at a time when certainty is becoming harder to find. But this involves moving the idea of coaching beyond what many senior leaders and organisations expect. Too often coaching is seen as a way to help them or their team members to have the right answers, to create the perfect plan and then execute it flawlessly. In many modern environments that aspiration is becoming increasingly unrealistic.

This is not a rejection of the GROW model. Rather it’s an argument for taking the Reality stage more seriously. If a client cannot yet define a clear goal, that shouldn’t mean the conversation has failed. It may mean the most valuable work is to focus on Reality and try to examine what is changing or uncertain, what assumptions are being made, and what the client is starting to notice.

The coach can ensure there is time for the client to be anchored to their reality. Goals, options and actions can still emerge, but later, after the client has made better sense of the environment they are working in.

In these conditions, the greatest impact might come from helping clients remain curious when answers are unclear, adaptable when things keep changing and grounded when surrounded by ambiguity.

In other words, the coach can help people navigate.

Yes, goals continue to be important and provide purpose, motivation and direction. But in a world where the path forward is increasingly difficult to predict, coaching may need to become as much about orientation as destination.

When the map is unclear, the most valuable coaching conversation might not begin with "What is your goal?"

It might need to begin with a different question: "What are you noticing?"