Coaching with Natural Systems: Evolve your Practice

How do we bring our skill as coaches to address the most urgent ecological challenge of our time?

Coaches who care about nature can play a powerful role in strengthening leaders’ capacity to make sense of and act into the challenges presented by the unfolding Climate Crisis, helping clients stay with the ambiguity of short-term demands versus long-term transformation. Nature-connected coaches can bring an ecological awareness to decision-making as well as a groundedness borne of understanding ourselves AS nature.

Coaching with Natural Systems is not just a matter of having the ‘right’ information or focusing on only one part of the problem. Creating the agency and confidence we and our clients need means shifting our own relationship with the natural world, becoming aware of ourselves as intrinsically part of it. Through this reconnecting and recentring, we expand the possibilities for more systemic and deeper relational understanding and insight, with ourselves and with others. In the process we become more grounded, more creative in the options we can conceive, and more resilient: all vital prerequisites for the work that lies ahead.

A programme for coaches who care about nature

Designed for experienced coaches, the programme offers an immersive space, grounded in nature, to reflect on and deepen your practice in response to the changing Earth. Drawing on Gestalt theory, Action Inquiry and nature awareness, you’ll explore the challenges facing our world and expand your repertoire of interventions to help leaders and ultimately people, society and nature flourish.

Designed and delivered by Prof. Ann Knights (Ashridge Business School) and Dr Alexandra Stubbings (Talik and Company) with Andrew Raingold (Change in Nature), this hybrid programme combines virtual sessions with a two-day ‘residential’ at Hawkwood College near Stroud, a magical natural learning space where we can deeply explore our own nature awareness and connection to ourselves, others and our world. Beyond the formal programme completion in December, a further three virtual supervision sessions will follow the seasons to support continued action, exploration and learning through a full turn of the year.

The synchronous elements of the programme are supported throughout by access to our virtual learning platform with content for reading and viewing and a private discussion forum for your cohort.

Learning Objectives

• Gain greater awareness of how the political, business and social responses to our ecological emergency are changing what’s required from coaches
• Understand how to apply an ecological frame to coaching at every stage of the relationship
• Practice systemic sensing and diverse methods of relating in coaching
• Deepen own awareness of nature and how to bring nature into practice
• Learn and apply an Action Inquiry approach to learning and coaching

Coach Development Team

Professor Ann Knights

Ann has been coaching leaders individually and in teams for 20 years and supervising and developing coaches for 15 years. She is a lead member of faculty on Ashridge’s Masters in Executive Coaching and the Masters in Team Coaching as well as Programme Director for the Ashridge Coaching Skills for Leaders Programme.

Ann is co-author of Coaching in Organisations, a significant piece of research into how coaching Is and can best be delivered in organisation commissioned by the CIPD.

Andy Raingold

Andy is a coach, speaker, facilitator and environmental campaigner. He is Co-Founder and Director of Change in Nature, where he facilitates leadership and personal development programmes in nature.  He has trained with Cambridge University, Schumacher College (Call of the Wild), The Living Leader and Sussex Wildlife Trust.

For over seven years, Andy was the Executive Director of the Aldersgate Group, working in the corridors of power with CEOs, Government Ministers and thought leaders to drive action for a more sustainable world, influencing policy development and corporate strategy.

He is a certified coach (accredited with the Association of Coaching), helping clients to identify, create and sustain personal and professional change. He specialises in coaching in nature to help provide creative inspiration, shift perspectives and connect to the bigger picture.

Andy has written for the Guardian and been interviewed on BBC Newsnight, The Sunday Times, BBC Radio 4, The Independent and Guardian Environment Podcast.

Dr Alexandra Stubbings

Alex is a systems change consultant and coach with over fifteen years’ experience in helping leaders embed pro-social, nature-oriented and low carbon practices into their organisations.

Alex led the sustainability consulting practice at Ashridge for five years and taught on qualification programmes, also completing her coach training, Masters and Doctorate there. For the last nine years she has led Talik, the OD consultancy founded with the express mission to develop organisations that enable people, society and nature to flourish. She facilitates learning internationally on sustainability leadership and culture change.

Her research and thought leadership on organisational engagement with sustainability has been published in a number of articles and her change model taught on MBA programmes. She has been an expert speaker for The Telegraph and Academy for Sustainable Innovation, Canada.