David B. Drake, PhD. | Founder and Executive Director
The Centre for Narrative Coaching is founded by Dr David Drake. Originator of the field of narrative coaching, David is the creator of Narrative Design Labs, a program that integrates personal development with design thinking to equip practitioners to bring their work to the world in new ways.
David is a keen observer of human behavior, an avid gardener, and a master craftsman in working with narrative material. He is currently living in Sydney, Australia with his family on a three-year sabbatical, in part to continue his work with PricewaterhouseCoopers leading a multi-year coaching and culture change project.
Prior to founding the Center in 2006, David spent fifteen years consulting on change projects, management and leadership development programs, and coaching initiatives in over fifty organizations. As part of this work, he was engaged by four organizations for multi-year projects to help them to develop coaching-based cultures and service delivery systems. He has also developed extensive training resources on coaching skills in the workplace and taught his coaching skills program to over 5,000 leaders, managers and professionals to help them shift the way business gets done. David also speaks regularly on the future of coaching, change and leadership using a narrative frame.
David’s doctorate is in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University in California. His primary research interest is the role of stories in understanding and shaping identity, development and change. He has also studied and taught Jungian psychology, grief work, spiritual formation, and rites of passage as a foundation for his work. Renowned for his breakthrough work in narrative pattern recognition, David works as a participatory anthropologist to advise leaders and their organizations who want to embark on significant change.
David has taught advanced graduate and professional courses on narrative/coaching skills and management/leadership for six universities in the U.S. and Australia. He has written over 30 articles, papers and chapters on narratives, evidence, and coaching, and he is active in the international coaching community as a researcher, writer and presenter.
He is the chief editor for “The Philosophy and Practice of Coaching: Insights and Issues for a New Era” published by Jossey-Bass in 2008 (www.practiceofcoaching.com), and he is nearing completion of his next book, an introduction to narrative coaching. He also serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring (UK), the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (US), and Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice (US)—where he is an Associate Editor.
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