Five Insights from the 2026 ICF Coaching Futures Report with Magdalena Nowicka Mook
Explore the 2026 ICF Coaching Futures Report: Expanding Access in Coaching with thought leader and ICF CEO, Magadalena Nowicka Mook. She reflects on how access impacts coaching through a futures thinking lens.
In a world defined by accelerating technological change, global complexity, and profound uncertainty, leadership is charged with anticipating and shaping what comes next. How does the leader of a global organization navigate such unprecedented levels of change in speed, scale, and scope?
Magdalena Nowicka Mook, the CEO of ICF, shares five insights from the 2026 ICF Coaching Futures Report: Expanding Access in Coaching. Each insight speaks to a strategic commitment to futures thinking as a core leadership practice, reflecting ICF’s role and its responsibility to help shape the profession’s future.
Insight 1: Futures Thinking Is an Obligation and Responsibility
Futures thinking is not about predicting outcomes. It is about cultivating foresight, readiness, and strategic courage. A future-ready organization takes stock of the present to imagine how global drivers of change and potential disruptions could affect the future.
Our first report does not attempt to predict the future. Instead, the 2026 ICF Coaching Futures Report features signals and trends that most probably will shape the world and the future of coaching. Futures thinking is a responsibility of any organization and its leadership to anticipate opportunities or obstacles and help navigate them now. Be ready!
The ICF Coaching Futures Report is a strategic capability, designed to develop the global coaching ecosystem, guide dialogue on future viability, and identify practices to sustain the profession. By launching the ICF Coaching Futures Report, ICF is integrating futures thinking into the profession to evaluate how different futures scenarios might unfold within the global coaching ecosystem.
By looking into the future through the lens of coaching, this new product can equip the coaching field to be prepared to adapt and respond with greater clarity.”
Insight 2: Expanding Access in Coaching Is a Defining Priority for the Profession’s Next Decade
The coaching field is making strides toward greater inclusion in both the practice of coaching and coach training. For Magda, access is central to coaching’s purpose, legitimacy, and future impact.
The very vision of ICF calls for coaching to be integral to social transformation. Coaching should be a service available to anyone who wants to use it, and coach training should be available to everyone wishing to pursue a coaching career.
Ensuring access requires more than good intentions. The path toward access — ensuring everyone who wants coaching can access it logistically and practically — demands culturally responsive training approaches, affordability, digital inclusion, cultural relevance, and expanded pathways for underrepresented communities to both access coaching and become coaches.
ICF’s duty is to apply coaching practices as a part of the solution to social problems, and that requires greater access.”
If coaching is to play a meaningful role in addressing the challenges and opportunities facing societies, then access must be treated as a strategic imperative.
Insight 3: In a Challenging World, Coaching Designs Inclusive Paths Forward
By imagining plausible possibilities, future-ready coaches and leaders can focus on practical actions and lessen disruption for their organizations and communities. Futures thinking positions coaching as a possible stabilizing force in times of systemic disruption.
Futures thinking again comes to play here. We live in BANI — brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible — times, and while we cannot predict the future, we can certainly prepare for different scenarios. Coaching, in fact, helps people and organizations find greater clarity, design the way forward, calm fears, and increase excitement about opportunities. Our role is to help coaches collaborate with others, using the skills and knowledge to support such a process.”
Insight 4: Coaches Can Gain New Skillsets to Become “Future-Ready”
The future of coaching will be shaped by coaches willing to evolve their skills, mindsets, and professional identities. Future-ready coaches will continually expand their capacity for learning, adaptability, and relevance in any future that may emerge.
Remain curious about innovative solutions and use them for your own benefit. Be able to share the ‘good’ of the changes we are facing. Be mindful of potential problems. Be agile. Continue learning new skills, novel approaches, and new insights. Always listen and always leverage clients’ wisdom. Partner with empathy and firmness.”
This distinction matters. The value of futures thinking lies not in certainty, but in awareness. By noticing emerging signals, the profession can increase its capacity to respond with intention.
Insight 5: Signals of the Future Spark Awareness and Invite Shared Reflection
One of the most effective tools coaches can employ in becoming future-ready is to work within and build a strong support network. Magda emphasizes the power of collaboration in shaping the future of coaching:
Join communities (like ICF) to learn more and be in good company of people who may have related questions and observations. In a rapidly changing world, a professional community is a source of resilience, learning, and shared sensemaking.”
The call to inspire the coaching community to look ahead is one of collaboration and curiosity. Futures thinking — with its emphasis on inquiry and reflection — invites our readers to ask their own questions about the future of coaching access.”
The ICF Coaching Futures Report is meant to introduce new topics for our stakeholders, to spark awareness of the reality that is and the future that might be. This is not a definitive manual of what to do or not do. It is an invitation for all our readers to reflect upon and develop their own questions around this topic.”
Stewarding the Future of the Profession — Together
Ultimately, the 2026 ICF Coaching Futures Report is an opportunity to think differently, ask better questions, and participate actively in shaping what comes next. Reflecting on the impact of the very first ICF Coaching Futures Report, Magda invites the reader to respond:
We are extremely excited about this first report, and a huge thank you goes to our Boards, ICF Thought Leadership Institute writers and staff, countless volunteers, and thought leaders who made it happen. Most importantly: Tell us what you think! Tell us if the report is helpful and how we can improve with the next one.”
