Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers, published in 2015, begins with an observation that is simultaneously obvious and consistently ignored in how organisations design leadership development: the environment is the most powerful determinant of how people actually behave, and the environment is almost entirely absent from how most organisations think about developing the behaviours they want. Leaders are developed in training rooms, in coaching conversations, in leadership programmes designed to build capability and expand perspective. They are then returned to the environment that was producing their current behaviour, where the specific triggers that activated the patterns the development was trying to change continue to operate as if the development had not occurred. The development fails not because it was inadequate but because it was building inside a frame while the frame remained unchanged.
The central insight of the book is the concept of the trigger: any stimulus that reshapes our thoughts and actions. Triggers are not simply provocations. They are the environmental stimuli, both positive and negative, that activate the specific cognitive, emotional, and behavioural patterns that determine how we actually operate, as distinct from how we intend to operate, in real conditions. The trigger is the difference between the leadership behaviour we exhibit in the training room, where the environmental stimuli support the desired behaviour, and the leadership behaviour we exhibit in the difficult meeting with the difficult stakeholder under time pressure, where the environmental stimuli activate the automatic patterns that the development was designed to replace.
What Goldsmith adds to the familiar observation that behaviour is context-dependent is a specific and practical account of what to do about it: how to design the specific environmental and behavioural structures that support the desired behaviour in the real conditions where it needs to operate, rather than leaving its production to the willpower of the individual in an environment that is actively working against it.
The specific character of triggers that matter most for leadership development
Goldsmith’s taxonomy of triggers is both more precise and more useful than the general observation that environment shapes behaviour. He distinguishes between direct triggers and indirect triggers, between expected and unexpected triggers, and between triggers that activate desired behaviours and those that activate undesired ones. For leadership development purposes, the most consequential category is what he calls the depleting trigger: the environmental stimulus that reduces the cognitive and emotional resources available for deliberate, values-consistent behaviour and activates instead the automatic patterns that those resources would otherwise allow the person to override.
The depleting trigger is the specific mechanism that explains one of the most consistent and most frustrating features of leadership development outcomes: the leader who behaves consistently with their developed values in low-pressure, high-resource conditions and reverts to the prior patterns in high-pressure, low-resource conditions. This is not hypocrisy or insufficient commitment to the development goals. It is the predictable outcome of the interaction between depleted cognitive and emotional resources and the automatic patterns that require those resources to override.
Sleep deprivation is a depleting trigger. So is hunger, sustained stress, the emotional aftermath of a difficult interaction, the cognitive load of processing multiple complex situations simultaneously, and the specific form of social pressure that comes from managing relationships with difficult or demanding stakeholders while trying to maintain performance standards. All of these reduce the resources available for the deliberate, effortful behaviour change that development asks of leaders. And they are not occasional exceptions in senior leadership. They are the routine conditions of senior leadership, which means the conditions that most reliably produce regression to prior patterns are also the conditions that define most of the working day at senior levels.
The active question tool and why it works
The most original and most practically important contribution of Triggers to the coaching and leadership development practice is the active question tool. This is a simple but unusually powerful daily accountability mechanism that Goldsmith has refined across years of coaching application and that the research he cites in the book supports as more effective than most other behavioural change accountability mechanisms available.
The mechanism is this: at the end of each day, the leader answers a set of questions about whether they did their best to make progress on their specific development goals. The specific formulation is critical: not “did you make progress on your goal?” but “did you do your best to make progress on your goal?” The passive form of the question asks for an outcome that is partly outside the leader’s control. The active form asks for a genuine assessment of whether the leader brought their best effort to the goal, which is entirely within their control and which produces a more honest and more motivating daily assessment.
The active question works for several specific reasons that the research on behaviour change supports. It creates a daily micro-accountability structure that is considerably more frequent than the typical coaching session and that addresses the specific challenge of trigger-activated regression by providing daily evidence of whether the environmental stimuli are producing the desired behaviour or the prior pattern. It is self-administered, which means it is available in the actual conditions of the leader’s working day rather than only in the coaching room. And it is specifically oriented toward effort rather than outcome, which is both more honest about what the leader actually controls and more motivating, because effort is something the leader can genuinely produce regardless of whether the outcome it generates meets the standard they are working toward.
Designing the environment rather than only developing the person
The broader implication of Goldsmith’s trigger analysis for how organisations think about leadership development is significant and has not been adequately integrated into most development design. If the environment is a primary determinant of behaviour, and if the development of the person without the modification of the environment reliably produces behaviours that regress when the environment reasserts its influence, then the most complete and most effective leadership development is design that attends to both: the development of the person and the modification of the specific environmental triggers that are most powerfully working against the desired behaviour change.
This means identifying, as part of the coaching engagement rather than as an afterthought to it, the specific environmental features of the leader’s working context that are most reliably activating the patterns the development is trying to change. It means designing specific environmental modifications, changes in how the leader structures their day, manages their schedule, organises their relationships, and creates the specific conditions that support desired behaviour, rather than leaving the entire burden of behaviour change on the leader’s individual willpower in an unchanged environment.
It means treating the leader’s organisation, their team, and their senior relationships as part of the development intervention rather than as the backdrop against which the development is conducted. The coach who engages the leader in designing specific changes to the environmental triggers that are working against their development goals is doing more genuinely effective development work than the coach who focuses exclusively on the leader’s interior development in an environment whose role in producing the current behaviour is left unexamined.
The organisations that understand this most clearly are those that design development programmes explicitly with environmental modification as a component: the identification of the specific organisational conditions that are triggering undesired leadership behaviours, followed by the deliberate modification of those conditions as part of the development intervention. This is demanding to design and requires a more sophisticated partnership between the coaching provision and the organisational systems that most coaching providers are structured to deliver. It is also considerably more likely to produce the durable behavioural change that organisations are investing in development to achieve.
The specific application to leadership development programme design
The triggers framework has specific and underutilised implications for how leadership development programmes are designed. Most programmes are designed as if the development they produce will transfer automatically to the working environment when the programme is complete. The triggers research suggests this assumption is systematically optimistic: the environmental stimuli that were producing the behaviours the programme was designed to change will continue to operate when the participant returns to their working context, and without deliberate attention to those stimuli as part of the programme design, the development that occurs in the programme environment will be substantially attenuated by the environmental triggers that the working context maintains. Programmes that address this through explicit trigger mapping, helping participants identify the specific environmental stimuli that most reliably activate their prior patterns and designing specific environmental modifications as part of the development plan, produce more durable transfer than programmes that treat the working environment as a neutral backdrop against which the developed behaviours will operate. The addition of this environmental dimension to programme design does not require substantial additional resource. It requires the specific attention to the context of development, as well as to the development itself, that Goldsmith’s framework makes analytically available.
The leader who returns from a development programme to an unchanged environment has one foot in the future and one in the past. The environment will usually win. Development that does not attend to the environment is incomplete by design and incomplete in outcome.