Live-Action Coaching: From Off the Pitch to On the Pitch
With Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong
Episode 28 of the Teams Transformed Podcast
About Teams Transformed
Teams Transformed is the podcast for courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of teams. Hosted by TCS Founder and Senior Faculty Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong, listen to explore transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence, diving into not just the tools, but the art of team coaching itself.
About this episode
In this episode of Teams Transformed, Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong explore live action coaching and what happens when team coaching moves from the coaching environment into the team’s real workplace. Working with the leadership team of ACME Corporation, they examine how live action coaching creates an opportunity to see whether the learning developed through previous team coaching sessions actually transfers into the team’s everyday work.
Rather than taking the team away from its usual environment, live action coaching brings the coaches into a real team meeting, with permission to observe the team’s process and intervene lightly when something relevant to their learning emerges. The aim is not to take over the meeting or disrupt the task, but to help the team develop greater awareness of how it is working together while it is actually working together. In this sense, live action coaching helps move learning “from off the pitch to on the pitch.”
The episode follows Georgina and Allard as they debrief a particularly rich and unexpected live action coaching session with ACME’s leadership team. The session was focused on a significant potential acquisition, but the context was immediately complicated by the unexpected absence of John, the CEO. Rather than cancelling, the coaches recognised an opportunity to observe how the team functioned without its leader and prepared themselves to remain open to whatever might emerge.
As the meeting unfolded, Georgina and Allard noticed a striking contrast: the team described the acquisition as highly important, yet the energy in the room felt flat. Team members were listening, asking questions, and adding information, but there was little visible challenge or disagreement. The coaches recognised a familiar pattern of maintaining harmony while potentially holding back divergent views.
They then used a “fishbowl” intervention, pausing the meeting to reflect together on what they were noticing. Rather than focusing only on what was not working, they explored both what was well developed and what appeared less developed in the team. Listening and questioning were identified as strengths because they helped bring voices into the room and create contact between team members. At the same time, the absence of clear opposition or alternative perspectives suggested that something important was missing.
The coaches then designed a simple active experiment around assertiveness. Each team member was invited to assess privately how assertive they had been and commit to increasing that level by one notch. The intention was not to push people towards aggression, but to create more space for people to voice their own perspectives while remaining available to the needs of others.
The first experiment did not produce the expected shift. The energy remained flat, and the team recognised that they were still not fully leaning into the conversation. Through further reflection, the team identified courage and confidentiality as important conditions for speaking more openly. When they ran the experiment again, the difference was dramatic. One team member openly expressed strong opposition to the acquisition, despite feeling significant anxiety about challenging what appeared to be the prevailing ambition of the group.
This moment revealed something important about the team’s dynamics. Team members discovered that they could express opposing views respectfully and that there were perspectives they had not previously known about. They also recognised that it was easier for some people to be honest when John, the CEO, was not in the room, raising questions about the influence of perceived disapproval and the role of psychological safety and confidentiality within the team.
The session also surfaced another emerging area of work: the team was not yet completely clear about its role in the acquisition process. With a separate acquisitions team already involved, questions remained about how much the executive team should endorse, challenge, or actively contribute to the process. What initially appeared to be a conversation about an acquisition therefore opened up a deeper inquiry into the team’s role, authority, and contribution.
Throughout the episode, Georgina and Allard demonstrate that live action coaching is fundamentally emergent. Coaches cannot know in advance exactly what they will encounter in a real team meeting. Their role is to remain attentive to process and dynamics, use themselves as instruments of awareness, offer observations, and create appropriately scaled experiments that allow the team to experience something different.
The episode closes by placing live action coaching within the wider team coaching journey. After time spent developing a learning agenda and working through developmental themes in coaching sessions, live action coaching provides an opportunity to see whether that learning is transferring into real-life situations. The coaches observe primarily at the level of process and dynamics, using what they notice to identify what is well developed, what is less developed, and what experiments might help the team explore new ways of working.
Key Themes Explored in this episode
Live Action Coaching Brings Learning Into the Real Workplace
Live action coaching takes developmental work from dedicated coaching sessions and brings it into the team’s normal place of work. By observing the team in an authentic meeting, coaches can explore how much of the team’s learning is actually transferring into everyday practice.
The Contract Remains Developmental
Unlike a conventional team meeting, the coaches enter with permission to intervene and share observations. The contract remains light and developmental, allowing the team to focus on its real work while also creating space to notice and experiment with its process.
Emergence Requires a Capacity for Not Knowing
The unexpected absence of the CEO immediately changed the conditions of the session. Rather than treating this as a problem to solve, the coaches used it as an opportunity to become more attentive to what might emerge. Georgina describes the place of not knowing as an openness to discovering what is about to be discovered.
Observe the Whole System
The leadership team does not exist in isolation. Feedback from the board revealed how the team was perceived by the wider system and highlighted issues around information sharing, involvement, trust, and competence. The episode demonstrates the importance of occasionally broadening the coaching lens beyond the team itself.
Notice What Is Well Developed
The coaches deliberately look at both sides of the picture: what is working and what is less developed. Listening and asking questions were recognised as strengths within the team, creating a foundation from which further development could take place.
Surfacing Disagreement Can Create New Possibilities
The team had developed strong habits of listening, questioning, and maintaining harmony, but these habits also appeared to limit the expression of opposing views. The live action intervention helped make this pattern visible and created an opportunity to experiment with more assertive behaviour.
Active Experiments Create Different Lived Experiences
Rather than telling the team how it should behave differently, the coaches created a simple experiment that allowed team members to experience a different way of interacting. The purpose was to interrupt a limiting pattern and discover what might become possible.
Small Experiments Can Lead to Significant Shifts
The first attempt at the assertiveness experiment did not create a major change. Instead of seeing this as failure, the coaches used the experience to raise awareness and make another adjustment. The second experiment resulted in much greater honesty and the expression of a previously unspoken perspective.
Psychological Safety and Confidentiality Matter
The team discovered that confidentiality was an important condition for speaking openly. The absence of the CEO also revealed that some team members had been holding back because they did not want to risk his disapproval. This created an important new area for the team’s development.
Presence and Use of Self Shape the Intervention
Georgina and Allard reflect on how they deliberately shifted their presence throughout the meeting: initially stepping back and observing, then becoming more visible when they created the fishbowl conversation. Their own awareness, sensing, and ability to decide when and how to intervene were central to the process.
The Work Reveals the Next Piece of Work
The original brief could not have predicted everything that emerged during the engagement. The live action session revealed new questions about the team’s role in the acquisition process, creating a new unit of developmental work for the team.
Team Coaching Is a Cycle of Experience
Live action coaching is not necessarily an endpoint. The session opened into further one-to-one conversations and a final review that could mark either the end of a programme or the end of one phase and the beginning of another cycle of experience.
Key Takeaways
🌱 Live action coaching brings team learning from the coaching environment into the real workplace.
🎯 The coach works with a developmental contract, observing the team’s real work and intervening lightly with permission.
👀 Coaches pay attention to process and dynamics, not just the content of the meeting.
🧩 What is well developed in a team can provide a resource for working with what is less developed.
🗣️ Healthy team functioning requires space for divergent opinions and respectful disagreement.
🧪 Active experiments allow teams to experience different ways of interacting rather than simply talking about them.
💡 Experiments do not need guaranteed outcomes; they create opportunities for awareness and discovery.
🤝 Psychological safety and confidentiality can be essential conditions for honest team conversations.
🧠 Presence, use of self, and the ability to stay with not knowing are central to emergent coaching.
🔄 Each intervention can reveal the next piece of work, allowing the team coaching journey to continue evolving.
Why listen?
This episode offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at live action coaching and what happens when team coaching enters the reality of the workplace. Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong take listeners inside a real team meeting, sharing what they noticed, how they decided when to intervene, and how a simple experiment opened up a much deeper conversation about disagreement, courage, confidentiality, leadership, and team dynamics.
For team coaches, the episode provides a practical illustration of working emergently: noticing what is happening in the moment, resisting the urge to prescribe solutions, and using carefully crafted experiments to help a team experience something different. For leaders and team members, it offers a valuable perspective on what may be happening beneath the surface of meetings where people appear to be listening and collaborating, but where important perspectives remain unspoken.
Most importantly, the conversation demonstrates how a little intervention can sometimes create significant movement. By creating the conditions for the team to notice its own patterns and experiment with new behaviours, the coaches helped the team have a conversation it might otherwise never have had.
Whether you are a team coach, organisational leader, facilitator, or simply curious about how teams develop, this episode invites you to consider what happens when learning is taken “on the pitch”, into the real conversations, tensions, decisions, and relationships where team transformation actually needs to happen.
And perhaps the biggest invitation is to remain curious: What might become possible if we stopped trying to predict what a team needs and became more attentive to what is emerging right in front of us?
About your hosts
Georgina Woudstra is the Founder and Senior Faculty of Team Coaching Studio, an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) with over 20 years of experience. Georgina is recognised globally as one of the leading lights in team coaching and was among the first coaches to receive ICF's Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.
Allard De Jong is a seasoned leadership development expert with two decades of experience solving organisational 'people problems' and accelerating leadership development. He brings a unique perspective on transformative inquiry and divergent thinking to team coaching practice.
Never miss an episode!
Follow the Podcast: Available on all spotify,audible, apple podcasts and all major podcasting platforms
Watch on YouTube: For full video recordings of episodes and additional content
Stay Updated:Sign up to the Team Coaching Studio newsletter: a monthly roundup including all our recently launched podcasts
Teams Transformed is brought to you by Team Coaching Studio - dedicated to advancing the field of team coaching through world-class education, certification, practice, connection and community.