Holding What No Algorithm Can: The Case for Systemic Team Coaching

Artificial intelligence is not just changing how organisations work, it is sending a signal about what they value. It optimises for the linear: fixed problems, predicted outcomes, discrete solutions. And here lies an uncomfortable truth for team coaches. The coaching many practitioners are most comfortable with: structured, goal-oriented, intervention-based, and one which ironically operates in exactly the same register that AI is rapidly colonising.

Meanwhile, teams are navigating a world of genuine complexity. Post-pandemic relational thinning, geopolitical instability, and accelerating uncertainty mean that what teams most need is not more efficient process, it is a coach who can hold the whole system in view, read what isn’t in the data, and resist the pressure to resolve complexity before it is ready.

This session explores the conundrum at the heart of contemporary team coaching practice: the pull toward linear comfort in a world that urgently needs systemic depth. Drawing on the Spiralling the Field model and the linear/systemic distinction, Tammy invites participants to examine where they are truly operating, and what they are being called to hold that no algorithm can.

The session closes with a single question for breakout reflection: In a world that optimises for efficiency over emergence, what is the irreducibly human act of team coaching?

About the Speaker

Tammy Turner is CEO of Turner International and one of the world’s most experienced systemic team coaches, with over 12,000 coaching hours across 120+ industries, 70+ CEO clients, and 80+ C-suite executives. Since 2001, she has coached over 100 teams and groups at all levels, supervised and mentored coaches, and trained leaders and HR professionals in the art and science of systemic practice.

She holds ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) and Accredited Team Coach credentials, EMCC Master Practitioner accreditations in both team coaching and supervision, and the Global Individual Supervision Accreditation (GISA). She won the 2023 EMCC Global Supervision Award. As a practitioner, supervisor, and educator, she has taught Hawkins’ systemic team coaching methodology and CCMI team coaching materials to practitioners across the globe.

Tammy co-edited the Team Coaching Casebook with David Clutterbuck and co-authored the Spiralling the Field reflexivity model with Michelle Lucas, published in the Oxford Brookes International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring (IJEBCM). She has authored over 25 books and articles on team coaching, coaching supervision, and multicultural coaching.

An Australian who has lived and worked across multiple continents, Tammy brings corporate leadership experience from IBM, Lexmark, and Sybase alongside a genuinely multicultural systemic lens to her work developing the next generation of team coaches.