Can a coach really stay out of the client’s meaning-making altogether?
In the 1980s, systemic practitioners learned to see themselves as part of the systems they observe. Known as second-order cybernetics, this was a movement away from a one-up position where the work belonged to the client alone.
Later, systemic practitioners found that even the second-order cybernetic position was overly practitioner-centric. This resulted in a shift aligned with postmodernism generally, where social constructionism took hold. Now, the practitioner's attention was focused on meaning-making.
Clearly, social constructionism has had a great influence on the coaching world at large, whether via narrative, dialogical, or other postmodernist approaches. However, the claim that meaning is made by the client alone holds up best within a psychodynamically informed tradition, where countertransference is routinely acknowledged and examined.
Outside that frame, I think we risk losing sight of the subtle ways in which the coach's inevitable meaning-making contributes to the relational encounter.
Systemic practitioners address their meaning-makings head-on and make use of them in the moment. This is called self-reflexivity - a concept that underpins the unique contribution of systemic practice to relational work.
This allows the systemic coach to hypothesise as opposed to interpret. As the Milan team put it, a hypothesis is neither true nor false, only more or less useful.
Thanks to Sudhir Daya whose recent LinkedIn post on letting clients make meaning sharpened my thinking. We describe our relationship to meaning-making in the coaching encounter differently, as people naturally do, and I've learned a lot from him in his role as faculty at the AoEC - The Academy of Executive Coaching.