written by Dr Ben Koh, Founder of Coach Masters Academy
Certified Master Coach I Global Top 50 Coaches
Abstract
Transformational” is used widely across executive leadership and the helping professions, yet it often carries different meanings—ranging from organisational performance shifts to inner reorganisation of identity and meaning. This article offers an integrative account that bridges both spectrums without polarising transactional and transformational approaches. It argues that coaching becomes transformational when it develops capacity: the maturation of meaning-making that expands the quality of choice and makes change durable across contexts. Vertical development serves as a descriptive lens for capacity growth; transformative learning clarifies how deep change occurs; and learning agility is framed as a behavioural signature that tends to stabilise as meaning-making matures.
The article further proposes that transactional execution achieves its greatest impact when it is intentionally chosen rather than applied mechanically. Practices associated with CMA—such as cultivating brain–heart integration—are presented as one pragmatic discipline that can support reflective agency and integration, without being treated as the sole explanatory frame. The essay concludes by pointing to a new frontier: building choiceful individuals and organisations by treating adult learning and vertical development as strategic infrastructure for meaningful change.
The word transformational appears everywhere: leadership programmes, coaching credentials, organisational narratives, and culture initiatives. Its popularity signals something real—an appetite for change that is meaningful, not merely busy; durable, not merely intense. Yet the term has also become elastic. It can refer to a strategic turnaround, an operating‑model redesign, a personal breakthrough, a new leadership style, or incremental improvement with a compelling label.
This vagueness matters because language shapes practice. When a term becomes broad enough to mean almost anything, it becomes difficult to know what it asks of us. In such conditions, “transformation” can drift into theatre: more goals, more tools, more urgency—without a corresponding increase in the capacities that make change sustainable.
In a contemporary environment marked by rapid development, constant stimulation, and continuous adaptation, the risk is not a lack of change. The risk is frequent change without deep learning, and repeated interventions without lasting capacity. This article, therefore, treats transformational as a term in need of disciplined clarity. It proposes a practical anchor: coaching becomes transformational when it develops the capacity to learn at depth, expand choice, and translate intention into sustainable action.
Executives and helping professionals often use the same term while pointing to different realities. This difference is not merely semantic; it reflects different vantage points and accountabilities.
In executive settings, transformational commonly refers to strategic movement: shifts in performance, capability, operating model, or culture. The language is typically system‑facing—alignment, agility, innovation, scale. Transformation is validated by traction: what the organisation can now do, deliver, or sustain that it previously could not.
In the helping professions—coaching, mentoring, counselling, psychotherapy—transformational more often points to inner reorganisation: shifts in meaning, identity, emotional integration, relational patterns, and agency. The language is typically person‑facing—insight, integration, coherence, wholeness. Transformation is validated by durability: what a person can now embody and sustain, not only understand.
These are not competing truths. They describe different altitudes of the same landscape. Organisational outcomes are shaped by how people make meaning and choose action; inner shifts become consequential when they translate into decisions, relationships, and execution. A useful account of transformational coaching should therefore do more than pick a side. It should show how inner capacity and outer performance reinforce one another—and how coaching practice can serve both.
Because “transformational” is contested, a small set of working definitions helps stabilise the conversation without narrowing it.
Transformational coaching
An approach that develops the client’s underlying capacity for meaning‑making and intentional choice, such that new behaviour becomes durable and transferable across contexts. It targets not only what a person does, but how they interpret experience, decide, and author action.
Transactional coaching
An approach that strengthens performance within an existing frame of reference through goals, plans, habits, skills, accountability, and feedback loops. It is often essential when the frame is adequate, but enactment is inconsistent or undisciplined.
Vertical development
Growth in meaning‑making capacity: the way a person organises experience, interprets reality, and forms judgements and choices. It differs from horizontal development (adding skills and knowledge) in that it changes the structure through which skills and knowledge are applied.
Transformative learning
A depth of learning in which underlying assumptions and interpretive frames are examined and revised, resulting in shifts in meaning, identity, and the range of available choices. It differs from informational learning (knowing more) and behavioural learning (doing better).
Learning agility
The capacity to learn effectively in unfamiliar conditions—situations where existing scripts do not fully apply—by updating mental models, integrating feedback, and adapting action in ways that remain aligned with intention and values.
CMA coherence discipline
A practical discipline, expressed through brain–heart integration, that can support integration, reflective agency, and intentional action. In this article, it is treated as a supportive applied practice rather than the primary explanatory frame for transformational change.
These definitions establish the paper’s intent: to distinguish levels of change without elevating one as morally superior, and to connect depth with execution through an integrative developmental pathway.
A common distinction in coaching is between transactional and transformational approaches. The distinction becomes unhelpful when it is moralised. Transactional coaching is not inferior; it is foundational.
Transactional coaching strengthens execution within an existing frame of reference. It supports goal clarity, planning, feedback loops, habit formation, and disciplined follow‑through. It often produces meaningful results, especially when the interpretive frame is already functional, and the challenge is structure, skill application, or consistency.
Transformational coaching strengthens the frame itself. It develops the client’s capacity to interpret experience, examine assumptions, integrate competing demands, and choose intentionally. When this capacity develops, behavioural change is more likely to endure because new actions become coherent with a revised way of making meaning—not merely maintained by effort, compliance, or external accountability.
Integration is where the practice becomes mature. Transformational work without enactment can become reflective but inert; transactional work without deeper learning can become efficient but brittle. Transactional coaching improves what we do. Transformational coaching improves how we decide and who we become while deciding. The aim is not to replace transaction with transformation, but to harmonise them so that execution becomes authored rather than automatic.
To keep the argument cumulative rather than episodic, one pathway holds the essay together:
Vertical development describes growth in meaning‑making capacity: how a person organises experience and forms judgement.
As meaning‑making capacity grows, reflective agency tends to expand: the ability to notice assumptions, widen perspective, and choose deliberately.
Reflective agency enables transformative learning, through which frames of meaning are revised and integrated.
As learning consolidates, the quality and range of choice expand.
Transactional execution becomes more effective when guided by intention rather than mere compliance.
Learning agility becomes an observable expression of this capacity: the person adapts with discernment in unfamiliar conditions because their way of making sense can update.
This pathway connects the executive concern for outcomes with the helping‑profession concern for depth. It also frames the practical role of coaching: not merely to improve behaviour, but to strengthen the human capacities that make behaviour sustainable.
Modern development ecosystems privilege horizontal growth: new skills, new tools, new frameworks, faster execution. This is necessary and often beneficial. Yet capability can grow extensively without becoming wise—especially when the interpretive frame remains unchanged.
Vertical development concerns the structure of meaning‑making: the internal architecture that shapes how we perceive, interpret, and choose. As meaning‑making capacity develops, people often become more able to:
hold multiple perspectives without collapsing into relativism,
examine assumptions without identity defensiveness,
integrate competing values without paralysis,
maintain direction without rigid control,
relate to complexity without rushing to premature closure.
From a coaching standpoint, this is a decisive reframing. Some change challenges are not solved by more effort, stronger accountability, or better tools. They require growth in how the person is making sense—what they take as true, what they assume, what they fear losing, what they are protecting, and what they are becoming.
This is also where the paper’s bridge gains traction. Executives can recognise these shifts as better judgment, better leadership presence, and more adaptive execution. Helping professionals can recognise them as greater integration, agency, and coherence. The language differs; the phenomenon overlaps.
Many change efforts focus on behaviour: what needs to be done differently. Sometimes that is sufficient. But durable change often depends on learning at the level of meaning.
Three depths of learning clarify the relationship between learning and change:
Informational learning expands what we know.
Behavioural learning expands what we can do.
Transformative learning revises assumptions and interpretive frames.
Transformative learning helps explain why some changes stick. When assumptions are examined and reframed, new behaviours become coherent with identity and values rather than imposed externally. This does not require dramatic moments; it can be gradual and cumulative. Its hallmark is transferability: change shows up across contexts because the person’s way of seeing has changed.
For coaching practice, the question shifts from “What should you do differently?” to: What must be learned—and perhaps unlearned—so that a different choice becomes natural rather than forced? This shift protects coaching from becoming a cycle of repeated interventions and invites a deeper standard: change as capability, not compliance.
Learning agility is widely valued, yet it is often treated as a standalone competency that can be trained directly through stretch roles, novelty exposure, or frequent feedback. Such experiences can contribute, but they do not automatically create agility. A key variable is whether the individual can revise meaning rather than only add technique.
In this essay, “learning in unfamiliar conditions” refers to situations where existing scripts do not fully apply: new roles, ambiguous problems, changing constraints, unfamiliar stakeholders, shifting priorities, or novel technologies. In these contexts, what matters is not only what someone knows, but whether they can update how they make sense.
From the pathway proposed here, learning agility tends to become more reliable when:
reflective agency is strong enough to examine assumptions rather than defend them, and
meaning‑making capacity is developed enough to hold complexity without reverting to rigid certainty or avoidance.
Agility then becomes more than speed. It becomes discernment with movement: the ability to update understanding while remaining anchored in intention and values. Seen this way, learning agility is best treated as an observable expression of deeper capacity—an outward indicator that learning is occurring at a level that changes choice, not only behaviour.
The harmony between transactional and transformational approaches is not achieved by mixing methods. It is achieved through choice.
Transactional tools—planning, routines, feedback loops, goal-setting—are powerful when they arise from intention and clarity. They lose power when applied mechanically, driven by scripts, ambient incentives, or habitual coping. The difference is not the tool; it is the quality of agency behind it.
Contemporary life complicates agency. Many everyday choices are shaped subtly by defaults, norms, incentives, constant informational prompts, and social comparison. Without reflective agency, action can look productive while remaining internally unchosen.
Transformational coaching expands the quality of choice available. It strengthens the capacity to pause, interpret, and select actions with soundness of mind and alignment with values—so that transactional execution becomes an expression of authorship rather than automation. This is where the two spectrums can meet: depth that improves execution and execution that expresses depth.
A persistent challenge in integrative writing is balance: how to honour a distinctive discipline (such as CMA) without making the paper sound like it is simply rebranding existing ideas—or, conversely, allowing borrowed frameworks to dominate the narrative.
CMA’s coherence work can be positioned most cleanly as an applied discipline that supports the pathway already described. By cultivating brain–heart integration, practitioners may strengthen conditions that are relevant to transformational change: integration, steadiness of attention, and reflective agency. Importantly, this claim is not offered as a universal mechanism that explains all transformations. It is offered as a pragmatic contribution: a practice discipline that can help people enact what the developmental and learning lenses describe.
Placed here—after the pathway has been established—CMA no longer appears abruptly. It becomes what it is best at being in this article: an enabling practice that supports the broader integrative argument.
When transformation is framed as capacity development, the role of the people enabler shifts. The work becomes less about dispensing interventions and more about shaping conditions for learning, agency, and sustainable action.
Across roles—coach, mentor, counsellor, therapist, leader—several commitments become salient:
Design for learning, not compliance: support assumption work and meaning reorganisation, not only behavioural adoption.
Hold meaning and execution together: connect commitments to values and identity so that action becomes sustainable.
Strengthen reflective agency: cultivate the ability to choose intentionally rather than operate on autopilot.
Use practices with precision: disciplines such as CMA coherence work can support integration and clarity, while respecting boundaries between coaching and clinical work where relevant.
These commitments make the essay’s bridge operational. Executives gain a model that links development to outcomes without collapsing into metrics-only thinking. Helping professionals gain a model that honours depth while insisting on enacted change.
A clear argument becomes more credible—not less—when it states its boundaries.
The account offered here is most relevant in contexts where complexity, ambiguity, relational dynamics, or identity-level change meaningfully affect performance and wellbeing.
Transactional approaches may be sufficient where challenges are primarily technical, structural, or skill-based and where the interpretive frame is already functional.
Practices that support integration (including coherence disciplines) are not substitutes for clinical interventions when clinical needs are present; coaching and therapy differ in scope and safeguards.
This is an integrative essay rather than an empirical test; future work can deepen this account through measurement, evaluation, and longitudinal inquiry.
These boundaries preserve the paper’s central claim while preventing overreach: transformational coaching is a developmental practice concerned with capacity, not a slogan that must apply to every change situation.
If transformational is to retain meaning in our time, it must be tied to a disciplined understanding of what change requires. This essay has argued that transformational coaching is best understood as capacity development: the growth of meaning‑making capacity that expands choice and makes execution intentional and durable.
The frontier ahead is not more coaching, more frameworks, or more speed. It is the cultivation of choiceful capacity at scale—individuals and organisations that treat adult learning and vertical development as infrastructure rather than optional enrichment. In an age of accelerating technology and widening complexity, the limiting factor is increasingly not information but integration; not activity but discernment; not motion but authorship.
The invitation is therefore both practical and ambitious. To make transformation real, we must build environments where deep learning is normal, where reflective agency is protected, and where transactional excellence is guided by intentional choice. That is a different kind of competitiveness—one grounded not only in capability, but in the maturity of the humans who wield it. In that frontier, “transformational” becomes less a claim we make and more a standard we live: the steady development of people and systems that can change meaningfully—again and again—without losing what makes change worth having.
If you’ve been sensing that coaching needs to do more—especially when people already know their options but still can’t move—this is the space where real impact begins.
And if this kind of coaching speaks to you, you’ll want to explore what it takes to grow into it.
We invite you to read: The Future Coach: Shaping Change in an Unfinished World, written by Dr Ben Koh.
In this article, Dr ben argues that if you’re still coaching for performance, you’re behind the curve, and he offers a deeper look into the mindset, presence, and capacity of the Future Coach. He understands where professional coaching is heading, and what kind of coach this moment needs.
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