Tag: Myles Downey

I first came across Myles Downey while I was in coach training, and someone recommended his book, Effective Coaching, Lessons from the Coach’s Coach, as one of the best they had read.

Myles often refers to a coachee as a “player”, as in “you are the player in your game of life”. This reflects his roots in Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game, where the job of the coach is to essentially create the conditions under which the player can be in the best possible state for learning. I thought “Player” was the best label I’d seen.  As I was nearing the end of the book, I was thinking, “This is the closest thing to an integral approach to coaching that I’ve seen – he uses the inner workings of someone to increase awareness of the external actions, all within the context of the situation or organisation”. I turned the page and saw “The Four Quadrants”. I jumped out of my chair, did one of those tennis-player-type fist pumps, and had to settle back down to see what he said about Ken Wilber.

There are two big themes in this book that I want to bring together here in order to provide a lens through which you might view an organisation. The first of these themes is the idea of Inner and Outer, and the second is the notion of the Individual and the Organisation.

I Googled Myles Downey, and found a news item about his London School of Coaching being bought by JMJ Associates, a US company. Curious about that, I looked for JMJ Associates, and found that they are also a company doing organisational work based on Wilber’s Four Quadrants. I contacted their Director of Global Development, Rick Strycker, who, it turned out, was an original member of the Integral Institute. I arranged to speak with him, and that’s how I learned about how JMJ Associates and the School of Coaching were joining their efforts.

At that point I asked for and received an introduction to Myles Downey and asked him if we could do an interview for the Integral Leadership Review (where I am the UK bureau chief). Curiously, he told me he didn’t actually think of himself as “Integral”. But I’m keenly interested in the practical applications of the theories (and not so much the debate of the theories themselves, these days), and this was perfect.

So I’ve had a wonderful conversation with Myles Downey, originally of Dublin, recently of London, and now of the world — an Integral practitioner and one of the leading coaches in the world, who does his work through the framework of the Four Quadrants.

This interview will be published in Integral Leadership Review’s June 2010 issue. Subscribe to ILR via that link: it’s free.