IX Coach

Coaching approaches

Ontological coaching

Ontological coaching treats conversation as a form of action. The coach works with the requests, promises, moods and interpretations in what you say, in order to change what you are able to do. Fernando Flores worked with Terry Winograd on a new foundation for design (Winograd & Flores, 1987), and the coaching form is usually attributed to Rafael Echeverría, Julio Olalla and Alan Sieler. No outcome study of ontological coaching turned up in the searches for this page, and the peer-reviewed work found is a qualitative study of perceptions.

What it is

The approach starts from the idea that talking is a way of acting. A request, a promise or a declaration changes what people can do next. A coaching conversation listens for these acts, for the mood a person is speaking from, and for interpretations that present themselves as facts. The coach asks whether a request is clear, whether a promise has been made, and whether a concern is a fact or an interpretation.

Its vocabulary of commitments, moods and assessments is central to the practice, and it is one reason the approach can sound technical. The approach is described in handbook chapters (Sieler, 2024; Shabi & Whybrow, 2018). Its philosophical base is not established by the outcome research cited on this page, and this page does not present it as settled.

Where it comes from

The approach is usually traced to Fernando Flores, who worked with Terry Winograd on a new foundation for design, published in 1987 (Winograd & Flores, 1987).

Rafael Echeverría, Julio Olalla and Alan Sieler are usually named as the people who developed the approach into coaching. Alan Sieler's handbook chapter describes it (Sieler, 2024).

The principles underneath

Language is a form of action

Saying something can make a request, a promise or a declaration. Conversation therefore changes what people can do, not only what they know.

Interpretations are not facts

The coach helps separate what happened from the judgement made about it. The judgement can be looked at, and revised.

Commitments carry the work

Progress is tracked through clear requests and promises, and through whether they are kept, renegotiated or dropped openly.

Mood is the background of action

Mood shapes what seems possible and what gets done. It is worked with directly rather than treated as a side issue.

How a session runs

  1. Describe the situation you want to work on in your own words, and notice the verbs and labels you use about yourself and other people.
  2. The coach asks you to separate what happened from the judgement you have made about it.
  3. Look at the requests and promises involved, including any you are making to yourself, and check whether each one is clear.
  4. Name the mood you are speaking from, and what it makes you more or less likely to do.
  5. Agree one commitment, stated as a specific action with a date, and how you will know it is done.

When it tends to fit

  • You keep telling the same story about a situation and want to see what else it could be.
  • You are not sure what was agreed in a promise, a request or a handover, and want to clear it up.
  • A mood such as resignation or irritation keeps shaping your decisions, and you want to work with it directly.

What the research shows

Evidence: Practitioner tradition — little or no outcome research

No outcome study of ontological coaching turned up in the searches for this page. A Crossref search for ontological coaching evaluations returned handbook chapters that describe the approach and a 2025 qualitative study of nurses' perceptions of it (Shorey et al., 2025). That study describes perceptions and does not test outcomes. The nearest outcome research is a meta-analysis of coaching's effects on individual outcomes in organisations (Theeboom et al., 2014), which covers coaching in general rather than this approach. Winograd and Flores (1987) is a theoretical article, not an outcome study.

Where the evidence is thin: No study has tested whether the approach changes outcomes. Its terms are specialised, and the research on it is qualitative or descriptive, so claims about results should be read as expectations rather than findings.

Sources

  1. Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1987). On understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design. Artificial Intelligence, 31(2), 250–261.
  2. Sieler, A. (2024). Ontological Coaching. In The Complete Handbook of Coaching. SAGE.
  3. Shabi, A., & Whybrow, A. (2018). Ontological coaching. In Handbook of Coaching Psychology (pp. 219–228). Routledge.
  4. Shorey, S., Ng, S., Goh, M., Binte Mohamed Rian, S., Mordiffi, S., Matthews, J., Chan, P., & Chiang, T. (2025). Perceptions of Ontological Coaching Among Nurses (OCN): A Descriptive Qualitative Study. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 82(1), 632–646.
  5. Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1–18.

Where it stops

The approach works with language and commitments. It does not address trauma, depression or other conditions that need clinical assessment, and a coach should not take those on. Those are better handled by a qualified clinician.

Its vocabulary can read as jargon. If a term is unclear, ask what it means in ordinary words. You do not need to adopt the language to take part.

Its philosophical base is not established by the outcome research cited here. You are free to test its claims against your own experience rather than accept them as given.

Practices for this approach

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