What Frontier Coaching is, and where it came from

For four years I sat in rooms where a company with around 80,000 people and a presence in roughly 180 markets was trying to do the hardest thing a business can attempt, which is to deliberately dismantle its own most profitable product.

I was not the chief executive. I want to be precise about that, because the value of what I saw depends on it. I was close enough to watch senior leaders make decisions under real pressure, and far enough from the top job that people said things in front of me they would not have said to the board.

That vantage point is where this practice comes from.

The formal version of my role was Entrepreneur in Residence, across three postings in Benelux, then globally, then Europe. In practice it meant being handed the parts of a transformation that had no owner yet.

The tangible piece was launching a new product category online across 28 European markets, with a budget of €21M and a team of nineteen, in a category where almost every sentence you publish is regulated and several of the obvious marketing moves are illegal. Before that, Google. Before that, an agency I co-founded, built from three people to eleven, and sold to McCann in 2017.

The intangible piece is the one that turned into this.

I watched a lot of very capable executives make decisions in conditions where nobody could tell them whether they were right. Not because they lacked information. Because the information did not exist yet, and would not exist until after the decision had been made and lived with for two years.

Across markets, across regulators, across national cultures that agreed on very little, the same three patterns kept appearing. I did not expect that. I expected the Netherlands to look nothing like the Gulf, and in most respects it did not.

The best leaders were not the most certain. They were the ones who could hold a position firmly enough to make an organisation move, while privately keeping the possibility open that they had it wrong. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is exhausting to maintain without somewhere to put the private half.

The decisions that mattered were rarely the ones on the agenda. The agenda had the strategy, the numbers, the launch. What actually determined the outcome was usually a question about a person, or about pace, or about how much dissent to tolerate, and those questions were resolved in corridors and cars and on the phone at ten at night.

Everyone senior was under-advised in one specific way. They had consultants, who were paid to deliver a recommendation. They had teams, who needed direction rather than doubt. They had boards, who required confidence. What almost none of them had was one person with no stake in the answer who knew the whole situation.

That last one is the observation this practice is built on, and it is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to hear as a sales line.

It is not that chief executives have nobody to talk to. They have too many people to talk to. It is that every one of those conversations carries a price, and the prices are invisible.

Talk to your executive team and you have set direction whether you meant to or not. Talk to your board and you have spent confidence. Talk to a peer and you have borrowed against a relationship you will need later, which is why most leaders ration those calls without ever deciding to. Talk to a consultant and you get a recommendation, which is a different thing from being helped to think.

So the real questions get edited down before they are asked. What is left is a version everyone can afford to hear, and the version with the fear in it does not get discussed at all.

The frontier is the edge of your own playbook. Not the edge of technology, which is what the word has come to mean lately and which is precisely not what I mean by it.

Everyone who has been good at something for long enough arrives there. It is the point where the instincts that made you effective stop reliably working, and where there is no obvious person to copy, because the people you respect have not faced this particular version of it.

It rarely announces itself. In my experience it shows up as a decision that keeps sliding to the bottom of the list, or as a growing gap between the person you are at work and the person you are at home. Very few leaders describe it as a strategic problem, because it does not feel like one. It feels like being tired.

It is a twelve month relationship: a monthly session of three hours, access between them, two longer sessions a year. Eight of them at a time, which is a number set by attention rather than by marketing.

It is not therapy, and I say so early when the boundary is close. It is not consulting: no strategy documents, no team, nothing implemented on your behalf. It is not a network you are buying access to.

What it is, most weeks, is a room where you can say the version with the fear in it and find out what you actually think, in front of someone who has watched a lot of people be in exactly that position and has no interest in what you decide.

I would not claim this transforms anyone. The claim I will make is narrower and I think more useful: leaders who have one place to think out loud make fewer decisions they regret, and they make them earlier. Earlier is most of the value. Almost every expensive mistake I have watched was visible to the person making it several months before they acted on it.

If you have read this far, these are more useful than anything else on this page.

When did you last say something about your company that you had not already decided how to say? If you cannot remember, you are not being advised. You are being confirmed, by people responding to a position you had taken before you opened your mouth.

And what have you not told anyone? Not a secret. Just the thing you have been carrying unexamined because there is no obvious person to examine it with. Most senior people have one of these at any moment, and it is reliably the highest value item in their head.

That second question is the whole practice, really. Everything else is scheduling.