Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers is the clearest explanation available for why executive coaching often does not produce the behaviour change that both coach and coachee worked genuinely hard to produce. The answer, as Goldsmith argues, is environmental. And most coaching architectures do not address it.
The environment is not waiting patiently outside the coaching room while the work is done. It is actively shaping behaviour every moment the leader is in it.
Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers, published in 2015, addresses a question that the executive coaching field had been systematically avoiding for decades: if coaching-produced insight and skills are real and genuine, why does the behaviour change they produce so often fail to persist in the organisational environments in which leaders actually work? The answer that Goldsmith provides, drawing on decades of coaching practice and the specific architecture of the Stakeholder Centred Coaching methodology, is both precise and unsettling. The problem, in his account, is not the quality of the coaching or the sincerity of the coachee’s intention. The problem is the ENVIRONMENT, and most coaching architectures do not address it.
Triggers is not primarily a book about coaching technique. It is a book about the relationship between the external environment and the internal commitments that coaching is designed to produce, and why that relationship so consistently undermines those commitments in the absence of specific environmental design. Goldsmith’s central claim is that we dramatically and consistently overestimate the power of our internal intentions to govern our behaviour in the face of environmental pressure, and underestimate the degree to which the environment, through its triggers, shapes our behaviour independently of what we have decided we want to do. This is not a modest claim. If it is correct, and the research base Goldsmith draws on suggests strongly that it is, it has significant implications for how coaching engagements should be designed, what they should address, and how their outcomes should be evaluated.
The Central Argument
Goldsmith’s argument about environmental triggers draws on the same body of research that Robert Cialdini’s Influence and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow have made accessible to general audiences: the finding, replicated across decades of social psychology research, that human behaviour is far more contingent on situational factors than we recognise or acknowledge. We attribute our behaviour, and others’ behaviour, primarily to stable internal dispositions, what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, when in fact the specific environmental context in which behaviour occurs is at least as powerful a determinant.
For coaching practitioners, the implication is specific and confronting. The executive coaching engagement that produces a leader with genuine self-awareness, clear developmental commitments, and a sophisticated understanding of their own patterns, and then returns that leader to an organisational environment that has not changed, is sending a revised internal programme into an unreconstructed external operating system. THE TRIGGERS THAT SHAPED THE ORIGINAL BEHAVIOUR PATTERNS ARE ALL STILL THERE. The meeting format that activates the dominance pattern. The peer relationship that triggers the defensiveness. The high-pressure client context that reliably produces the poor listening that the leader has been coached to interrupt. The coaching has equipped the leader to respond differently. The environment has not been equipped to invite a different response.
Goldsmith illustrates this through a specific and immediately recognisable example: the leader who has been coached to listen more actively comes home at the end of a difficult day, still carrying the emotional residue of the day’s demands, and is a worse listener than they were before the coaching because they are attempting to apply a skill that requires cognitive resources they do not currently have available. The trigger, being asked a question when cognitively depleted and emotionally activated, overrides the coaching. Not because the coaching was ineffective. Because the environment’s claim on the leader’s behaviour was not addressed as part of the developmental work.
“Goldsmith’s core insight is also the most uncomfortable one for coaching practitioners to absorb: the environment that the coaching is designed to change the leader’s behaviour within is also the environment that is most reliably undoing the change. This is not a peripheral problem. It is the central challenge of sustained behaviour change.”
RK, Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHRAIWATT
Goldsmith’s practical response to the environmental trigger problem is AIWATT: Am I Willing, At This Time, to Make the Investment Required to Make a Positive Difference on This Topic? This is not an elegant acronym, and Goldsmith is refreshingly honest about its ungainliness. Its power is not in its elegance. It is in the specific function it performs: it introduces a deliberate moment of choice between the environmental trigger and the behavioural response, in which the leader has the opportunity to choose whether to engage with the trigger productively or to disengage from it consciously.
The “at this time” element of AIWATT is particularly important and often underemphasised in commentary on the framework. Goldsmith is not asking whether the leader is, in general, willing to work on the topic that the trigger has activated. He is asking whether they are willing to do so now, in this specific moment, with the cognitive and emotional resources they currently have available. This is a more honest question than “am I committed to change?”, because the leader may be committed to change in principle but genuinely depleted in this specific moment in ways that make productive engagement with the trigger impossible. AIWATT gives the leader permission to disengage consciously and explicitly from a trigger that they cannot manage productively in the current moment, while retaining the commitment to manage it in a later, better-resourced moment. This is not avoidance. It is intelligent self-management, and it is precisely the kind of tool that the coaching room can provide but the environment without coaching support cannot.
The Six Types of Triggers
Goldsmith’s taxonomy of triggers is one of the book’s most practically useful contributions. The six types are defined along three axes: whether a trigger is encouraging or discouraging, whether it is productive or unproductive, and whether it is direct or indirect.
ENCOURAGING TRIGGERS are those that move a leader toward the behaviour they are trying to develop. The colleague who consistently models the listening behaviour the leader is trying to practise is an encouraging trigger. The meeting format that explicitly invites reflection before response is an encouraging trigger. DISCOURAGING TRIGGERS move the leader away from their developmental intention: the high-pressure environment that activates the stress response, the peer who consistently brings out the competitive rather than collaborative response, the accumulated cognitive load of a long week that depletes the deliberate processing resources needed for the new behaviour.
PRODUCTIVE TRIGGERS produce behaviour that is broadly functional, even if it does not serve the specific developmental goal. UNPRODUCTIVE TRIGGERS produce behaviour that is damaging to the leader’s professional relationships or effectiveness. The combination of discouraging and unproductive is the most common category of environmental challenge in the coaching literature: the specific contexts that predictably produce the behaviours that coaching is trying to change.
DIRECT TRIGGERS are immediately visible and proximate, the specific person, event, or demand that activates the response. INDIRECT TRIGGERS are more systemic and harder to identify: the accumulated stress of a particular working pattern, the cultural norm that makes a certain type of behaviour feel normal even when it conflicts with the leader’s developmental commitments, the organisational reward structure that sends different signals from the coaching goals. It is the indirect triggers that most frequently escape the attention of both coaches and coachees, and it is the indirect triggers that most reliably produce the environmental degradation of coaching-produced change over time.
The Connection to Stakeholder-Centred Coaching
Triggers is, in a specific sense, the theoretical companion to the practical methodology of Stakeholder Centred Coaching. The SCC methodology addresses the environmental dimension of behaviour change through its systematic stakeholder engagement process: by enrolling the leader’s key stakeholders as partners in the development, the methodology deliberately restructures the social environment in which the leader operates, making the new behaviour more visible, more encouraged, and more consistently invited than it would be in an unchanged relational environment.
What Triggers provides is the theoretical account of WHY this environmental restructuring is necessary: not merely as a motivation strategy or a social accountability mechanism, but as a response to the fundamental reality that the environment is a co-author of leadership behaviour, not merely a context for it. The SCC stakeholder process converts discouraging environmental triggers into encouraging ones by changing the social meaning of the new behaviour within the specific relationships where it matters most. The colleague who previously expected the leader to dominate in meetings becomes, through the feedforward process, a specifically engaged partner in recognising and naming the changed behaviour when they observe it. This shifts the relational trigger from expecting the old pattern to watching for the new one, and that shift has consequences for how the new behaviour is received, which in turn has consequences for whether it is sustained.
“Triggers explains why the coaching room cannot be the only place where behaviour change is designed to happen. The environment is not waiting patiently outside while the coaching does its work. It is actively shaping behaviour every moment the leader is in it.”
RK, Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHRBook Reference
Goldsmith, M. and Reiter, M. (2015). Triggers: Creating Behaviour That Lasts, Becoming the Person You Want to Be. Crown Business. The environmental influence research that underpins the book draws extensively on Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice Hall, which articulates the concept of reciprocal determinism: the mutual shaping relationship between personal factors, behaviour, and environmental conditions. The AIWATT framework is a practical operationalisation of the cognitive behavioural principle of deliberate reappraisal, reviewed in Gross, J. (2002). “Emotion Regulation: Affective, Cognitive, and Social Consequences,” Psychophysiology, 39(3).
Reading This in Practice
ProventusHR incorporates the Triggers framework explicitly into its coaching engagement design. Every engagement includes a structured environmental mapping phase, in which the coach and coachee identify the specific triggers, defined by Goldsmith’s six-type taxonomy, that are most likely to challenge the developmental commitments the coaching is designed to produce. This is not a supplementary exercise. It is a core element of the engagement architecture, because an engagement that does not address the leader’s environmental triggers has addressed only one dimension of the behavioural change challenge.
For organisations commissioning coaching, the practical implication of Triggers is specific: coaching investment is not sufficient unless it is accompanied by some degree of environmental design. This does not require wholesale organisational change. It requires specific and targeted interventions: changes to meeting formats, team communication norms, the way feedback is structured and delivered, and the way the coachee’s key relationships are enrolled as partners in the developmental process. These design elements are what distinguish a coaching engagement that produces enduring change from one that produces excellent intentions and partial transfer.
About the Author
Founder Director, ProventusHR · MGSCC Master Coach · NDA Alumnus
Founder of ProventusHR and principal architect of ExperienceLearning and REEL|Life. 25+ years across leadership advisory, executive coaching, and experiential design across 14 industries. 9x Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Award winner (2022 to 2025).
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