Designing effective and safe digital coaching interventions: A Contextual Behavioural Science perspective

With increasing evolution and innovation within the technology and artificial intelligence (AI) space, coaching practice and research are increasingly moving into the digital realm. Scalable and remotely delivered digital coaching interventions may offer support to those who would not be able to access it otherwise. Technology can also provide support at the time when an individual needs it most. An important question is how coaching interventions can be effectively and safely adapted to digital formats. To build effective digital coaching interventions, we need to harness and activate the underlying change mechanisms that lead to improvements in coaching outcomes. To ensure digital coaching interventions are safe, we also need to explore the ethical considerations of developing digital coaching interventions. This paper argues that we can design effective and safe digital coaching interventions using theoretically informed and evidence-based approaches. The paper outlines how to approach this using an example from Contextual Behavioural Science (CBS). The paper highlights research that informs best practice for designing effective digital coaching interventions and outlines how processes of change underpinning Acceptance and Commitment Coaching (ACC) can be used to develop coaching interventions within technology. ACC is a process-based coaching approach developed using CBS which aims to maximise an individual’s personal and professional potential by increasing their psychological flexibility to improve both health and goal-related outcomes. The paper also summarises some key ethical considerations for designing safe digital coaching interventions, framing this within the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) ethical pillars of competence, integrity, respect and responsibility. The paper offers thoughts on future endeavours in this space and encourages other coaching psychology researchers to expand on the theoretical underpinnings of digital coaching in a similar way.