What If Some Change Doesn’t Take Months?

Nobody designed executive coaching. It just sort of evolved.Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, something called coaching emerged at the intersection of several older disciplines — sports psychology, psychotherapy, management consulting, organisational development — and borrowed a structural assumption from all of them: that meaningful change is measured in time.

Monthly sessions. Quarterly check-ins. Six-month programmes. Annual reviews. The retainer became the default unit of coaching engagement not because anyone proved it was the right model, but because it was familiar. It looked like therapy. It looked like consulting. It felt like the kind of sustained investment that serious change should require.

The coaching industry is now enormous. The International Coaching Federation estimates the global market at over twenty billion dollars. There are more than a hundred thousand credentialled coaches worldwide. Coaching has moved from a niche intervention for executives in difficulty to a standard feature of leadership development in most large organisations.

It has done a great deal of good. It has also imported, largely unexamined, an assumption that deserves scrutiny.

What Coaching Does Brilliantly.

The best coaching relationships are genuinely valuable, and it is worth being precise about why.

Senior leaders are often the loneliest people in their organisations. The higher the position, the fewer people there are who will speak honestly, challenge directly, or hold a thinking space without an agenda. A good coach provides exactly that: a relationship in which the leader can think out loud, examine their assumptions, test their reasoning, and be genuinely challenged by someone who has no stake in the outcome.

This is not a small thing. Isolation at the top is one of the most reliable predictors of poor decision-making, and the coaching relationship — at its best — directly addresses it. The reflective capacity that a regular coaching conversation builds is real and cumulative. Leaders who engage seriously with coaching over time typically develop greater self-awareness, stronger ability to regulate their responses under pressure, and a more sophisticated understanding of how they affect the people around them.

The ICF’s framework — the competencies it certifies, the ethical standards it maintains, the rigour it has brought to a field that had none — has been genuinely important. Coaching is better for having a professional infrastructure.

A good coach gives a senior leader something almost no one else in the organisation will: an honest conversation with no agenda attached.

None of this is in dispute. The question is not whether coaching works. The question is what it works for — and whether the model that delivers it is always the right one.

The Floor Coaching Works On.

Coaching, in its dominant form, is a cognitive and reflective practice. It works with the thinking mind. It builds self-awareness. It helps leaders examine their assumptions, reframe their challenges, and develop new strategies for situations they find difficult.

This is valuable when the problem lives at the level of thought. When a leader needs to think more clearly about a strategic decision, manage their time differently, or develop a more sophisticated model of how their organisation functions — coaching is well-suited to all of it.

The difficulty arises with a different category of problem. Not a thinking problem. A pattern problem.

The leader who knows they avoid difficult conversations and does it anyway. The founder who understands intellectually that they need to delegate and cannot bring themselves to do it. The executive whose colleagues have given clear feedback about their behaviour under pressure — feedback the executive accepts, agrees with, and then cannot act on when the pressure actually arrives.

These are not problems of insufficient self-awareness. In most cases, the leader is highly self-aware. They have named the pattern. They understand its origins. They have discussed it, in some cases, across years of coaching sessions. And it persists.

This persistence is not a mystery. It is a feature of how automatic behaviour is stored. Patterns of this kind do not live in the conscious, reflective mind that coaching addresses. They live in the nervous system, in implicit memory, in the body’s automatic responses to specific triggers. A conversation — however skilled, however sustained — operates on a different floor to where the pattern is held.

The coaching relationship is working on the right problem. The question is whether it is working at the right level.

The Assumption in the Retainer.

The monthly retainer contains a philosophical claim that is rarely made explicit: change is gradual. It accumulates across sessions. Insight builds on insight, pattern recognition deepens, new behaviours consolidate over time. The investment is in the process, and the process takes as long as it takes.

For the kind of change coaching does well, this is probably true. Developing reflective capacity, building a richer model of one’s leadership, growing the range and sophistication of conscious response — these are genuinely cumulative achievements. They benefit from time.

But the neuroscience of the last thirty years has identified a different model of change that applies to a different category of problem. Memory reconsolidation research — developed by Bruce Ecker and colleagues, grounded in neurological studies of how implicit emotional memories are stored and updated — suggests that certain kinds of change are not gradual at all. They occur in a specific moment, when the right conditions are met, and they are complete. The pattern does not fade over time. It simply stops.

This is not a theoretical claim. It is an observable phenomenon with a documented neurological mechanism. And it suggests that for automatic behavioural patterns — the kind that persist despite sustained coaching, despite good insight, despite genuine effort — the relevant question is not how many sessions are needed, but whether the intervention is reaching the level where the pattern is stored.

Two Models, Two Problems.

The most useful way to think about coaching and single-session intervention is not as competitors but as instruments suited to different work.

Coaching excels at building conscious capability over time: reflective practice, strategic thinking, relational sophistication, the ongoing accountability that helps leaders sustain development between the pressures of their role. These are not problems you solve in ninety minutes. They are capacities you build across a relationship.

Single-session intervention addresses something specific and different: a pattern that is known, named, and not shifting. Not through lack of awareness or effort, but because awareness and effort are not the tools the problem requires. The intervention works at the level of the nervous system, the implicit memory, the relational field — the level below where coaching operates.

The two approaches are not in competition. Organisations that invest seriously in coaching develop leaders who arrive at a single-session intervention better prepared — more self-aware, more able to articulate the pattern, more ready for the work. And leaders who address a persistent pattern through a targeted intervention often find their subsequent coaching work accelerates considerably, because the thing that was absorbing the coach’s attention session after session is no longer there.

The retainer is not the wrong answer. It may simply be the answer to a different question.

The coaching industry was built on a genuine insight: that sustained, skilled attention to a leader’s development produces real and lasting change. That insight remains valid.

What it did not fully anticipate was a category of problem that sustained attention, however skilled, cannot reach alone. Not because the coaching is inadequate. Because the problem is on a different floor.