Fountain coaches’ formal training in rigorous programs and their experience designing and delivering leadership development activities provide significant, ongoing benefits to our clients.  Our coaching mindset is influenced by two frameworks: constructive-developmental psychology, as researched and interpreted by authors ranging from Susanne Cook-Greuter to Robert Kegan; and the Jungian perspective of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers’ popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

One Fountain coach says: “MBTI first piqued my curiosity about understanding interpersonal differences a full decade before I became a coach.  I have moved past the phases of MBTI skeptic and of MBTI ‘cult follower’ to a more nuanced and rich appreciation for the model’s explanatory power and potential to generate new insights and new options for clients, without boxing them into a falsely narrow view of their future options.”

Combining fluency in MBTI with the framework of adult development theory, through lenses such as Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s “Immunity to Change” or Ron Heifetz’s adaptive challenges/adaptive leadership, enables Fountain’s coaches to meet clients where they are now and support them in stretching sustainably beyond their comfort zones, when that is their stated goal.

Other influences on Fountain’s work:

• Jennifer Garvey Berger’s concept of “psychological spaciousness” in designing leadership development programs or conducting client interactions
• William Bridges’ model of navigating transitions
• Bill Plotkin’s invocation to reconnect with wild natural environments as a source of wisdom and human development
• Dan Roam’s exhortation to use simple images to solve complex problems, and Lee Lefever’s elegantly simple model of the art of explanation