Most development briefs begin with a person-sized hypothesis.
A leader needs to “improve their influencing.”
A team “doesn’t collaborate well.”
Someone is “too resistant” or “too in the weeds.”
There’s often a grain of truth in these assessments, but they’re narrow. They assume the difficulty lives solely inside an individual.
When the messy truth is that any situation is a product of the overlap between who that person is, the role they’re carrying, and the system they’re operating in.
We use the PRO (Person, Role, Organisation) approach to frame this perspective.
- The person: their history, drivers, defences, confidence, and emotion.
- The role: its mandate, decision rights, success criteria, and boundaries.
- The organisation: structure, culture, incentives, pace, and unspoken anxieties.
Change lands where Person, Role and Organisation are considered together.
Shift any single piece in isolation and the others will pull it back to baseline. The organisational lens must include culture and climate – how power moves, what’s speakable, what’s rewarded – and the wider context that shapes behaviour – market cycles, regulatory noise, investor expectations.
Attend to these alongside the individual and the role, and you create reinforcing conditions; ignore them, and you’re optimising locally while the system restores the status quo.
Focusing on a single slice is like trying to paint an elephant through a keyhole: you get no sense of the whole beast.
Scoping development through PRO
Use these questions to anchor your approach in the conditions of person-in-role-in-system.
Person
- Where do the person’s goals and the role’s goals align or diverge?
- Map strengths and gaps against the role’s demands. If a gap matters, how will we design around it (team composition, deputies, process, tooling) so the role is still fully covered?
- What are their valencies (natural pulls/attractions) and how are these reinforced or challenged by the role and system? (See our piece on valency here.)
- How do their thinking/behaviour/emotion patterns show up against the remit – where do they enable the work, and where do they constrain it?
Role
- Have ownership, accountability, authority and remit been explicitly defined, agreed, and taken up?
- Do role outcomes ladder cleanly: individual → team → organisation? Can we point to specific deliverables that move the enterprise goal?
- Where the role touches others, are boundaries and handoffs clear (who decides, who does, who’s consulted, who’s informed)? Where are the chronic friction points, and what would remove them?
Organisation
- What undercurrents and unspoken anxieties/desires are live (growth, control, reputation, speed)? How do they help or hinder people in-role and in-team?
- How does power actually move here (who can block/green-light; which forums matter; where are the shadow coalitions)?
- What do incentives, KPIs and meeting formats currently reward (reporting, speed, compliance, cross-functional delivery)? What behaviour do they bias in practice?
- Which external pressures (owners, market, regulators) are shaping choices right now, and how are they translated into the day-to-day?
Two brief illustrations
Team “collaboration issues”
A leadership team in a global entertainment business was described as inwardly competitive and slow to align.
The initial temptation was to work on trust and psychological safety, but looking at the overlaps told a different story.
Roles were designed with individual accountability and no shared mandate; KPOs rewarded functional wins; meetings optimised for reporting rather than decisions.
Once decision rights were clarified, shared targets introduced, and the meeting rhythm rebuilt for making choices rather than giving updates, the interpersonal work started to matter because it had somewhere to land.
“Resistance to change” in individual coaching
A senior leader was labelled as ‘obstructive’ during a transformation.
In practice, their role was carrying a double-bind: be the sceptical conscience of the organisation and also deliver the change at pace. The scepticism was needed, but it was punished in reality.
Naming that symbolic function, re-contracting expectations, and agreeing where challenge belonged (which forums, with what consequences) shifted the behaviour more than any exhortation to “be more open”. Coaching then focused on stance and influence inside a clarified role.
If you step back and look at the person, their role, and the organisation as a single, moving system, things start to make sense.
What felt like resistance turns out to be a design issue. What looked like a skill gap is often a signal from the wider context. Development that sticks needs both lenses – the human and the systemic. Once they’re in focus together, effort travels further and change holds its shape.
