In the end, Wanda goes somewhere unimportant: a bar. There are workers and their lady friends. We can see Wanda's blonde hair standing out against the darkness of the set, deep and clearly welcoming, not needing to be shown, recognized by everyone, inhabited by everyone. Indescribably familiar.

There are friends singing—zim zoum zim boum zoum—checkered shirts, sounds mixed together like promised embraces, the golden hum of fraternity.

At each table, drinks are poured and tirelessly drunk. Wanda lowers her head a little and the image freezes.

The bar: a horrible bed where my partner is always moving away.

Having left office in 1990 with the lowest approval rating in Peruvian history, former President Alan García Pérez, a brilliant orator and protégé of the legendary APRA leader, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, reinvented himself in the course of the 2006 presidential campaign. Billing himself as an elder statesman who had learned from past mistakes, he targeted his message at younger Peruvians with no memory of his disastrous first administration. During the campaign, García promised “responsible change,” embraced the neoliberal model and positioned himself as a defender of the status quo (St John 2006b; Crabtree and Durand 2017, 1, 125–26). In the first round of the 2006 election, García came in second behind Ollanta Humala Tasso, a populist retired army officer, but in the second round, García overtook Humala, winning the presidency with 52.8 percent of the vote (St John 2006c).

Peru experienced strong economic growth during the second García administration; nevertheless, government policies were slow to reduce poverty levels, leaving the majority of Peruvians increasingly unhappy (Economist, 12 May 2008). President García also failed to address pressing social issues, like indigenous rights, corruption, drug trafficking, and human rights, and his attempts to open the Amazon rainforest to exploitation and development led to spirited indigenous protests. In the highlands, indigenous elements protested living and working conditions at multiple large mining sites, including La Oroya, considered one of the 10 most polluted places in the world. Additional sources of discontent included coca farmers opposed to coca eradication efforts, informal miners rejecting efforts to integrate them into the formal economy, and splinter groups of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla–terrorist movement active in remote regions of the country (La República, 4 June 2011). Constrained by limited popularity and the absence of a legislative majority, the García administration appeared largely content with strong macroeconomic figures, ignoring the paradox between economic growth rates among the highest in the region and dysfunctional governance. President García focused on his coastal base mostly ignoring the interior and failing to bridge deep socioeconomic divides in a country marked by severe inequality and widespread social discontent (St John 2006d).

Blending Old and New

In his 28 July 2006 inaugural address, President García stressed domestic issues.

Toward the end of Liberté, la nuit (1983—scene 25 in the script), Philippe Garrel connects three shots in a small but impeccable sketch of the classical principles of modern cinema.

Shot 1

A white rectangle against a white background, a sheet of paper on a creased sheet: a letter from Gémina (Christine Boisson) addressed to Jean (Maurice Garrel). “To tell you what's on my heart.” The surface rises in the frame, completely filling the optical space. The visual dazzle provoked by its whiteness erases what preceded it, creating a hole in the film's logical continuity like a bit of untouched canvas in a painting. The effect of reduction, of shedding is so intense that the screen itself can re-enter the shot, a screen conceived as an ideally pure dimension (perhaps due to the non-visible nature of the subjectile) maintained at the heart of every moving image.

Principle 1

In representation, the image is not an a priori given (no more so than the framing or lighting). However, the filmic economy elaborates a structure. Just like their rhythmic or plastic properties, the shots have a function and differential energy organized by the editing. Here, the shot of white-on-white is literally a barricade: It barricades what came before, contains the narrative pressure and derives the fable from the forms. For modern cinema, this means that any shot can alter, refuse, stop or restart a film, that moment to moment every shot is an adventure for the film.

Shot 2

In front of an iron railing and a white wall, over the course of a two-minute scene, Gémina and Jean act out every possible amorous emotion in a feverous arc building toward joy: destruction, sorrow, disapproval, passion, fusion. All of the episodes required for a love story can be discerned—abandonment, separation, dispute, complicity, declaration, intoxication—through their gestures and postures: prostration, tears, vivacity, trembling struggle, murmurs, kisses, hugs. If this scene is described and suggested rather than narrated, it is because a bedsheet spasmodically gets in between the actors and us, at the discretion of very violent wind.With its noise and light, it carries away the image and sound, sometimes partly and sometimes entirely, like a sudden fade to white occurring randomly throughout the sequence shot.

Too much population or too little? Which social groups should have children, and which should rather be kept from childbearing? And also: Who should be allowed to cross national borders, who should be given the right to stay, and who should definitely not? These ways of addressing some lives as more and others as less valuable involve highly timely and explosive questions. The hierarchization of lives as foundation for global power relations involves multiple dimensions of structural violence: from the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean to the socially unequal consequences of the climate crisis, wars and pandemic policies, from class-selective migration management to coercive antinatalist programs in the Global South.

Even if this appears often hardly tangible, at the heart of these political hierarchies of living and dying there is a specter doing its mischief: the specter of population. This specter makes it possible to link together stratified fertility and migration policies in a problematic way. It provides a common ground for powerful agendas of controlling borders and reproductive bodies, based on dangerous imaginaries of an effectively managed national or global demographic future. And it thereby lays the foundations for reproductive racism. The specter of population makes it possible to translate abstract calculations into class-selective and racist strategies of governing. And it links together the management of social groups and individual reproductive bodies. It thus permeates the project of global capitalist statehood itself and shows up within Malthusian narratives. These narratives provide ways of reinterpreting nearly every current crisis as a demographic crisis, ascribing paradoxically poverty, hunger, refugee crises or ecological destruction to those groups and bodies that are most exposed to these harms. By interpreting social and ecological crises as demographic ones, the specter of population thus makes it possible to leave the status quo of systemic social relations of care, inequality, racism and global capitalist destruction untouched.

In the context of demographic rationalities, reproductive racism also comprehends stratified reproductive policies that aim to shape the reproduction of whole national or global populations in an unequal way. Reproductive racism thus addresses both the power relations that define which and whose children should be born und which and whose should better not be, and also those hierarchical strategies that define who should be part of an imagined national or global future, with border and migration policies as important elements.

Certain approaches and models have tended to dominate the practice and teaching of executive coaching. These approaches and models, which have largely been developed in response to curricula and scholarly research, seem to assume that the practice of coaching, as a way of helping executives perform better, is a prominently linear set of events set in the pattern of questions and responses. More recently, however, it has been recognized that creativity, and the use of art, in coaching practice is increasing (see Jen Gash's 2017 book Coaching Creativity – Transforming Your Practice and Anna Sheather's 2019 book, Coaching beyond Words – Using Art to Deepen and Enrich Our Conversations).

While the ability to ask questions remains a core skill, along with listening and the use of silence, there are many other ways for coaches to elicit responses from their coachees. Qualified coaches have a variety of means at their disposal to explore the challenges and issues faced by their coachees. This is important to remember, since the purpose of executive coaching is to induce some meaningful action on the part of the coachee, not just to contain the perceived coaching process in an action-free bubble.

In this chapter, I explore some alternative ways in which coaches can engage with their coachees – ways that are different from conventional textbook methods. These creative approaches are partly based on my own leadership development research between 2008 and 2013, and the subsequent close examination of the ways in which adults learn through practical work ‘in the field’ with both leadership and coaching students in and outside of the university setting (see the ideas that were outlined by Steve Kempster, Arthur Turner and Gareth Edwards in A Field Guide to Leadership Development, 2017). In addition, I take a tentative glimpse at other leadership development techniques that help to shed light on the more creative and emergent interventions in coaching practice.

Here are a few guidelines for those who want to use greater creativity in their executive–coaching interactions:

1. ● Introduce the concept of creative coaching to the contracting process so that the client is not over-surprised by your suggestions.

2. ● Listen carefully to what your client says when you are building rapport at the start of your relationship. Pay attention to clues that reveal their ideas and interests.

I have previously written about silence in two different publications (Turner, 2019, 2020). This chapter deals with the practice of coaching and mentoring drawing on my experience of teaching art at university level and as a practitioner spanning the past 14 years. Many coaching practitioners find the topic of the use of silence as one of the most challenging skill-sets to become accomplished in, as it is often very different to the origins of their previous substantive roles of managers and leaders within organizations.

My previous two articles (one peer-reviewed journal article and the other a chapter in a coaching textbook) increased my understanding of this obvious but poorly understood part of the coaching discourse. As I suggested earlier, silence was a topic poorly covered, despite its importance, than the skills of questioning and listening (see, for example, Stanier, 2016; Hill, 2004; Whitmore, 2010). Starr (2016) only briefly focused on silence and highlighted ways in which utilizing silence well would give rise to more space for thinking (both for the coach and their client), providing greater liminal space for in-session reflection and calm oases of time (that is the (often) isolated segments of silence in a busy working day). These controlled silences, in themselves, facilitate time for contemplation and reflection. A further search of relevant literature has unearthed some more thoughts about silence. Neenan (2009) deals with the perceived awkwardness of silence, as experienced by individuals in managerial or organizational settings, used in the service of a more direct, ‘question and answer’ dyad. Rupert and Buschner (1989) had identified silence (along with praise and pre-instruction) as a skill more commonly found in coaching as opposed to teaching. In addition, the Emerald Insight and PsycArticles databases for English language peer-reviewed articles showed 16 results which linked coaching with the use of silence and in none of those (apart from a short article by Rankin (2008) and a brief mention as a sub-topic within communication skills for coaches (Gilley et al., 2010)) was the topic of silence the main part of the authors’ focus or direction of thought.

Many of the creative techniques covered in more detail in this section of the book depend to a lesser or greater degree on the ability of the coach to utilize silence (often in combination with active listening (Kubota et al., 2004)) during the coaching session itself.

This chapter is the first in the third part of this book which highlights in more detail key interventions in this creative field of executive coaching. This is based on many real-time workshops, coaching experiences and theoretical ideas as well as other related academic research undertaken with colleagues from 2008 to the present time. Only recently (January 2023) I worked with a client and walked along a river path and over two bridges in a South Wales City. He noticed the flow of the river and compared it to his own journey at work. The next day he reflected on the spring while going back to his office and challenges he faced differently. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in both England and Cymru/Wales who have provided support, encouragement and ideas. Gareth Edwards, Harriet Shortt, Neil Sutherland, Catherine Latham, Ian McGregor-Brown and Pam Heneberry have played their part in my learning and appreciation of creative techniques.

Much of what is written in this chapter is partially based on my practical experience of using outdoor walking as a form of coaching. In addition, this chapter looks at the theory and practice of coaching, taking into account the use of walking. Although the recent pandemic and post-pandemic world (2020–2023) has made walking and coaching much more challenging (although I have used the technology of ‘Face-time’ to successfully walk and coach), it has not paled my enthusiasm for coaching in the outdoors by way of walking. I will also explore the theory surrounding the concepts of walking in adult learning and the traditional role it has played in human development.

In particular, this chapter looks at the contribution, both directly and indirectly, walking has made to the design of executive coaching and development

of individual leadership and personal skills based on concepts underlining coaching theory.

Walking stimulates focus and alertness in natural environments as participants move through the path of psychogeography (Bassett, 2004, Self, 2007, Bridger, 2010).

This text engages with the debates on the influence of NGOs on transnational and internationalized politics, which were particularly intense and controversial in the 1990s and 2000s. In the wake of the current revival of national authoritarianism and polarization of social conflicts in many contexts today, the questions raised during that period have been somehow pushed aside. Nevertheless, the effects generated by processes of NGOization remain an important issue for forms of organizing, especially for the transformative agendas of social movements. And they continue to be fundamental issues for a critical theory of the state.

In the 1990s the broad activism and visibility of feminist and environmental NGOs, in particular on the UN policy stage, was associated with intense political contestation. The references ranged from an idealization of the transformative power of ‘global governance’ to a radical critique of the appropriation and dilution of political struggles. The background to my engagement with these questions is in particular my research on what became known as the Cairo Consensus of 1994. This refers to the agreement between an influential section of feminist women's health NGOs and the representatives of a multilateral network of population policy agencies. The Cairo Consensus led to the Cairo Programme of Action, which on the one hand established important feminist concepts such as sexual and reproductive health and rights on the stage of multilateral politics. On the other hand, however, it closely interlinked and framed these concepts within the project of an antinatalist policy designed to lower birth rates in the Global South. That NGOs simultaneously advanced feminist reforms and supported a continuity of demographic crisis narratives is thus illuminating in understanding the flexible persistence of processes of demographization.

The main focus of this text is to approach the question of NGOization in general—with special reference to the Marxist theoretical frameworks discussed by the German left when the debate on NGOization was intense. However, it goes beyond these frameworks from a gender theoretical and anticolonial perspective. The text is written for teaching in political science and therefore introduces the fundamental concepts of state theory it refers to.

The phenomenon of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) has become an integral part of international politics. But how can this phenomenon be made accessible to political science?

In this chapter, I present a conceptual proposal for the systematic theorization of the concept of demographization, and also propose to reconstruct an underlying Malthusian matrix. Unraveling the complex processes of how demographic rationalities are shaping government agendas requires the integration of various important dimensions of reproductive racism and of population as an intrinsically hierarchical concept. In general, the concept of demographization gives us a way of reflecting the reifying effects of population statistics as an apology for the status quo, providing the basis for blaming those groups affected by social crises for being the quantitative manifestation or even cause of those crises. The concept thus provides a systemic approach to how apparently neutral and quantitative abstract demographic crisis narratives are inseparably entangled with hierarchical racist and classist strategies of de/valuation. Furthermore, it makes it possible to approach the intrinsic methodological nationalism of policies based on demographic knowledge production. And, when taking into account how gendered policies directed to individual reproductive bodies are entangled with racist and class-selective policies addressing population(s), it offers important insights into how to develop a state-theoretical and structural approach to the intersectionality of reproductive policies. For this purpose, the Foucauldian concept of biopolitical poles helps us to understand reproductive relations as the hinge between body and population policies. However, in the text I will also explore the limits of Foucault's approach to population by favoring an intersectional approach, emphasizing racist and classist selectivities and the genealogy of the Malthusian matrix. The chapter is based on my research on the demographization of German family and migration politics in the 2000s and 2010s, and takes these developments as its main exemplifying reference. It therefore focuses on the demographization of established government policies and only touches on the current dangerous upswing of right-wing racist and nationalist population agendas in passing. Moreover, the chapter therefore concentrates on demographization within a selectively pronatalist agenda. However, in the last section the concept is applied to transnational antinatalist policies toward the Global South.

One aspect of creativity in executive coaching is the way in which creative ideas develop, often through trial and error, into a wide range of viable coach–client interactions, which forms the core of this book. Initially I observed this aspect while learning through my doctoral research using the lens of phenomenology (for more details, see Chapter 3), which has since been supplemented through my teaching experience of ILM Levels 5 and 7 between 2015 and 2023. In addition, as I still have ongoing clients for both mentoring and coaching, I have been gaining practical experience with clients who benefit from a flexible and experiential engagement ‘in action’.

As has already been discussed in the preface, I have been influenced strongly by many authors, writers and researchers from a broad range of schools and disciplines. The specificity of my coaching practices, the use of meditating objects of one form or another, has been inspired by four writers and philosophers, and I want to dedicate this chapter to the exploration of the use of mediating objects (sometimes also called mediating artefacts) to set the groundwork for the rest of this book – that is, coaching practices rooted in creativity. The use of objects used for mediating also provides individuals with ‘cognitive hooks’ that help to recall and remember, as opposed to the often-bland blancmange of a more conventional conversation (Nyikos, 1985). Indeed, there are also elements here of Sprevak's work on extending cognition (Sprevak, 2010). The four elements of this theory stand for the ways in which humans extend, embed, embody and enact elements of their environment in the ‘service’ of their cognition.

There have been numerous attempts to understand elements of creativity in humans’ behaviour; however, the following four writers and philosophers have been instrumental in shaping my understanding of the role of creativity in coaching practice:

1. The Dutch philosopher Johannes Huizinger, writing in the early nineteenth century, highlighted the use of play in human activities, not just in children as a form of learning, but as a latent capacity in adults (Martin, 2016). This latency could be tapped during coaching sessions using creativity.

The ideas in this book have been developed over the past 13 years after my original qualification as a Level 7 coach and mentor (through the ILM Level 7 Coaching and Mentoring Diploma) through a mixture of teaching, developing practice and regular practice with new clients. At the time of my original engagement with coaching development (mainly working with executive leaders) I became curious about the ways in which coaching and mentoring could be developed beyond the usual models and theoretical approaches. This approach has been described in that past decade through the work of David Clutterbuck (and others) as moving towards maturity as a coach. However, it was only when I undertook further studies, this time at doctoral level (a part-time Doctorate of Business Administration, 2008–2014) that I began to consider three other things: firstly the strong link between coaching and mentoring and leadership, secondly the ways in which adults learn and thirdly the ways in which creativity emerges as an important factor on the impact and success of coaching on an individual.

During this journey of learning and awareness, there have been many high points with topics having more traction than others, and this book is not intended as being an end point in any way. Nor are the chapter headings supposed to describe every facet of my evolving thoughts about how a coach or mentor can provide the best possible support for an individual's development. This remains an intuitive journey which has largely been informed by aspects of the ideas held within the framework of phenomenology. Indeed, continuing on this journey has involved thinking about facilitative practice, the anxieties and uncertainties of practice in the moment, creating news ways of thinking about the shape of coaching session, the rational for a coaching programme, links between theory and practice and ultimately my own practice.

Of course, this means that there is no end to the creative ways in which the executive coach can apply these themes and ideas in the service of their client. In particular, the recent pandemic has been a catalyst in thinking about how this pairing of two individuals can achieve so much in the development of the client in terms of that person's career, life and ways of thinking and behaving.

During the early part of the 2010s I was involved in extensive research into the development of leadership in managers. I undertook much of this work with my colleagues Pam Heneberry and Sally Crompton (from the Professional Development Centre Limited), both ILM Level 7 qualified coaches, and we all took a very creative way of designing a series of development programmes (for both leadership development and coaching prowess) during which we collected data from the interactions and reflections of individuals who were undertaking the course. Coaching of delegates was a crucial part of the co-learning, which presented us with the initial challenges of creativity in coaching. This chapter will outline many of the key elements of adult learning we discovered or confirmed during this past decade of research and the factors that affect an individual's development. Several key themes emerged in the course of this work, which are crucial to successful executive coaching in British managerial (in this case private companies) settings. These themes included the care and feeling of emotions, the acknowledgement, protection and facilitation of adequate spaces for development and learning, the use of mediating objects (see Chapter 2) and regular and meaningful reflections.

One set of themes, we found, were often clustered around the internal lives of people: the ways in which humans can identify and highlight the assumptions we can all make about emotions, individuality and, also (and this has strong links to Action Learning), how to produce strong bridges to action. The bridges between these developmental themes seemed to lay in the person's emotional reaction to provide and discover artefacts, their own individual interpretations of the meanings of these objects and the underlying assumptions about, perhaps, naturally occurring artefacts and their significance, importance or legitimacy. In a similar way, coaching practice also needs improved approaches to an individual's development, while outlining both a contribution to and a development of coaching theory and practice. In attempting to provide more relevant coaching interventions, a theoretical understanding of the ways in which humans engage with each other is more important than a strict adherence to coaching models.

We have already learnt that adequate development in human beings (certainly in a Western context) cannot take place remotely from their work context or, for that matter, from their own lives outside the work setting (Weick, 1976; Cousin, 2006; McKergow, 2009; European Coaching and Mentoring Council 2020).