Question 1

What is ORSC?

Accepted Answer

ORSC stands for Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching. It is a coaching framework that treats the relationship — not the individual — as the unit of intervention. Co-created by Marita Fridjhon and Faith Fuller and taught principally through CRR Global, the model holds that every relationship system (a team, a partnership, a family, an organisation, even the inner system of voices within a single person) has its own intelligence and personality, distinct from the individuals comprising it. The coach works with the system itself rather than aggregating individual coaching engagements. ORSC was the first systems coaching program to be accredited by the International Coaching Federation.

Question 2

Who created ORSC and when?

Accepted Answer

ORSC was co-created by Marita Fridjhon and Faith Fuller. Fridjhon brings a background in clinical social work, family systems therapy, organisational consulting, and alternative dispute resolution. Fuller brings a clinical psychologist's foundation, with decades of work with organisations and couples in team-building and conflict resolution. The two were introduced by Joanna Macy in 2000 and began collaborating on what would become ORSC. The first Fundamentals course ran in June 2002 in San Rafael, California, hosted by the Coaches Training Institute (CTI). In 2007, Fridjhon and Fuller transitioned the work into their own organisation, the Center for Right Relationship, renamed CRR Global in 2010.

Question 3

What is the Third Entity?

Accepted Answer

The Third Entity is ORSC's central construct. It refers to the relationship system itself, regarded as a distinct entity beyond the individuals comprising it — a team's character, a couple's dynamic, an organisation's culture. In ORSC practice, the coach can address questions to the Third Entity, listen for its responses through the voices in the room, and work with what it reveals. This is the structural break with one-on-one coaching paradigms: the system is not the aggregate of its members but a distinct intelligence with its own emerging direction, which the coach can engage with directly.

Question 4

What is Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI)?

Accepted Answer

Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI) is a third tier of intelligence that builds on Daniel Goleman's models of Emotional Intelligence (relationship with oneself) and Social Intelligence (relationship with others). RSI is awareness of and skill with the wisdom of the system itself — the capacity to recognise what the system is signalling, what voices are missing, where polarities and tensions live, and how to coach the system to access its own intelligence. RSI is taught as a transferable capacity that practitioners can apply across coaching, leadership, and consulting contexts, not only inside the formal ORSC curriculum.

Question 5

Is ORSC ICF-accredited?

Accepted Answer

ORSC is the first systems coaching program to be accredited by the International Coaching Federation. The full ORSC Certification is an ICF Accredited Level 2 Program (formerly ACTP), which is a complete coaching credentialing pathway. The five-course ORSC series produces approximately 84 CCE credits, and ORSC Certification adds approximately 96.5 more, for a total of around 180.5 CCEs. ORSC also satisfies the 60 hours of team coach training required for ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC). Relationship-systems thinking has more recently been embedded in the ICF's team coaching competencies.

Question 6

What is the ORSC training pathway?

Accepted Answer

The full ORSC training pathway consists of five core courses — Fundamentals, Intelligence, Geography, Path, and Systems Integration — followed by the mastery-level ORSC Certification programme. The five-course series can be completed in approximately 18–24 months depending on cohort scheduling, after which practitioners can elect to enter ORSC Certification, a substantial additional commitment that produces the ORSCC (ORSC Certified Coach) credential. The full pathway is multi-year and intellectually demanding. Many practitioners enter the field through the Fundamentals course and complete additional courses over time as their practice develops.

Question 7

When is ORSC most useful?

Accepted Answer

ORSC has its strongest fit in team and leadership coaching, where the question is how the system itself behaves rather than how each member behaves separately. Couples, partnership, and family-business coaching is a second strong fit, where the same systems logic applies at smaller scale. The framework also has substantial application in organisational and culture change, conflict resolution and mediation, and inner-systems work where the multiple voices within a single person can be coached as a system. The breadth of contexts reflects the framework's portability: the same skillset adapts to systems of widely different sizes.

Question 8

How is ORSC different from individual coaching frameworks?

Accepted Answer

Most coaching frameworks treat the individual as the unit of intervention. ORSC treats the relationship as the unit, which fundamentally changes what is workable. Team dynamics, partnership patterns, organisational culture become directly addressable as systems with their own intelligence, rather than as the aggregate of individual coaching engagements. ORSC is also unusual in its therapeutic and clinical depth — both founders bring clinical training (social work, psychology, family systems therapy), giving the framework a capacity to handle conflict, toxicity, and emotional intensity that purely business-coaching frames often cannot match. The framework's claim is that some systemic patterns simply cannot be reached through individual coaching.

Question 9

What philosophical and psychological lineages inform ORSC?

Accepted Answer

The principal influences are Arnold and Amy Mindell's Process-Oriented Psychology and Metaskills work — the Mindells were active mentors to both Fridjhon and Fuller, and their treatment of rank, signals, polarities, and dreaming levels is visible throughout ORSC. Modern systems thinking (Bateson, Senge), family systems therapy (Bowen, Whitaker, Satir), Daniel Goleman's emotional and social intelligence research, and John and Julie Gottman's relationship science all contribute. The Co-Active coaching tradition (CTI), under whose banner ORSC was first taught in 2002, contributed the coaching frame and presence-based facilitation style. Buddhist contemplative practice and Joanna Macy's eco-philosophy also inform the worldview.

Question 10

Where can I learn ORSC?

Accepted Answer

CRR Global is the principal institution, with offices in California and partner organisations across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The five-course ORSC series runs continuously across these regions, followed by ORSC Certification. Notable regional partners include CRR UK (United Kingdom, Ireland, Scandinavia) and the Competence Training Institute (Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and other European countries). Foundational reading includes Creating Intelligent Teams (Fridjhon and Anne Rød), Relationship Matters (Faith Fuller), and the broader CRR Global library co-authored with Anne Rød and Frank Uit de Weerd. Many ICF-accredited team coaching programs also draw on ORSC concepts even where they are not exclusively ORSC.

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Questions about Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC)