RESEARCH
Three tensions that don’t resolve.
Peer-reviewed research into what leadership in complex environments actually requires, and what it changes about how development is designed.
Case Formulation for Futures-Focused Coaching: An Adaptive Polarity Framework
For the moment when what made you effective stops being enough.
Roger Maitland, Brett Anderson-Terry & Pam Moore
LifeLab’s two directors and an associate coach
International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring (2026), 24(4), 626–637
doi.org/10.1177/17418305261460695
PEER REVIEWED
Published in a peer-reviewed coaching and mentoring journal
FUNDED
Supported by a research grant from EMCC Global
AFFILIATED
Conducted in partnership with Stellenbosch Business School
THE THREE ADAPTIVE POLARITIES
Twenty-four experienced coaches were interviewed independently, with no framework given in advance. Three tensions appeared consistently enough across contexts and theoretical orientations to constitute a pattern.
Temporal adaptation
Present-moment grounding ↔ Future visioning
Leaders and organisations must hold the tension between being fully present to current reality, what is actually happening and what is needed now, and maintaining orientation toward possible futures. Effective leadership requires both, simultaneously.
75%
of the 24 coaches, the most prevalent of the three
Over-focus on the present produces reactive leadership disconnected from direction. Over-focus on the future produces disconnection from the conditions that must be navigated today.
Systemic adaptation
Individual agency ↔ Systemic engagement
Leaders must navigate the tension between developing and exercising individual capability and embedding that capability within broader organisational and stakeholder systems. The capacity to move fluidly between these levels characterises effective leadership in complex environments.
67%
of the 24 coaches
Solutions that work at the individual level often fail at the systemic level. Systemic thinking without individual agency produces learned helplessness.
Strategic adaptation
Responsive adaptation ↔ Intentional direction
Leaders must hold the tension between emergent, responsive adaptation to unfolding circumstances and intentional, goal-directed planning. Maintaining strategic direction while remaining genuinely adaptive, planning in the continuous tense, is one of the most demanding capabilities complex environments require.
58%
of the 24 coaches
Pure responsiveness produces reactive leadership without coherence or direction. Pure intentionality produces rigidity when circumstances change.
WHAT IT CHANGES IN PRACTICE
Most leadership development asks what the problem is and how to solve it. We ask what the tension is, and how to hold it. Most problems in leadership do get solved. The ones that bring people to us do not, because they are not problems.
A leader who has to deliver this quarter and build what the business will need in three years is not facing a problem with an answer. Both demands are real, both are permanent, and attention given to one is attention taken from the other.
The study examined individual leaders, but the same orientation runs through everything we do: the tension a cohort shares becomes the curriculum of a programme, and a function or a business is read the same way, which is what tells you where development will hold and where it will wash off. It is not a model we apply. It is a lens for seeing what is actually present in a specific context.
Between 2022 and 2024 we conducted an empirical study with 24 experienced coaches working at the intersection of leadership development and futures-oriented practice, across Southern Africa and Europe.
The method was repertory grid interviewing, a technique grounded in Personal Construct Theory that surfaces how practitioners actually organise their professional knowledge rather than how they describe it when asked directly. Each coach was interviewed independently and no framework was given to them in advance. What we were looking for was convergence: the patterns that appeared consistently across coaches working in different contexts and from different theoretical orientations.
The three polarities are offered as pattern recognition criteria for case formulation, rather than as a diagnostic instrument: a structured way of identifying what a leader or organisation is actually navigating, so that development addresses the right tension rather than the wrong problem. The paper builds on Lane’s case formulation approach, polarity management theory, and adaptive leadership frameworks.
What the study does not claim is worth stating plainly. Twenty-four coaches is a sample that supports identifying patterns, not making population-level claims, and the three polarities have not yet been validated as a measurement instrument. That is precisely what the next study is for: testing whether the polarities can be identified reliably from coaching conversation data, independently coded.
The published framework describes tensions at the level of the individual leader, drawn from how experienced coaches formulate cases. An earlier strand of the work asked a related question one level up: how organisations navigate complex change.
That strand draws on doctoral research conducted between 2014 and 2019 at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, with corporate sustainability as the domain of inquiry. Two financial services organisations in Southern Africa were studied using a mixed-methods design: an organisational survey analysed through self-organising maps, alongside narrative interviews with 44 managers in Namibia and Botswana.
The finding was that for genuinely complex challenges, top-down linear change programmes are not sufficient on their own. Change also emerges through self-organisation, and it does so when conditions are cultivated across several levels of the system at once: the meaning-making of individuals, the collective culture of the organisation, and the relationship between the organisation and its environment. Direction still matters. What does not hold is the assumption that direction alone produces change.
The two strands are not one derived from the other. They are related inquiries at two levels: how change actually happens in complex organisational conditions, and what leaders operating in those conditions are holding. What carries across is the orientation. Cultivating the conditions for change, rather than driving a predetermined outcome, is the appropriate intervention at either level.
Maitland, R. & Baets, W. (2021). The Rise of Emergent Corporate Sustainability: A Self-Organised View. Systems, 9(2), 35.
Read the article →
WHAT WE ARE TESTING NEXT
The next study has been awarded a research grant by EMCC Global. It asks whether the three polarities can be identified reliably from coaching conversation data, coded independently and blind against the published framework. It is the second EMCC Global grant awarded to this programme; the published framework was supported by the first.
The polarities are implemented on CoachNova, the AI-augmented coaching platform the study draws its conversation data from, and on which LifeLab also delivers coaching. That dual role is stated here rather than left to be found. The implementation is what the study is testing, not evidence that it works.
That work sits in an emerging field concerned with AI-augmented coaching and hybrid intelligence: how machine pattern recognition and human judgement combine in professional practice. The question is not whether a machine can coach. It is whether pattern recognition at scale helps a practitioner see what they would otherwise miss, and whether the judgement that follows is any better for it. Keeping the human in the loop is a design commitment, and testing whether it holds is part of what the study is for.
Which of the three are your leaders actually navigating?
Most conversations begin with a 30-minute call, no obligation, just a chance to explore whether the framework is relevant to what you are facing.