Ten integrated developmental instruments for coaches, psychologists and organisational practitioners — grounded in six theoretical traditions, designed to work beyond personality and behaviour.
The most important data in any leadership or coaching engagement is qualitative, contextual, and often invisible — not because it is hidden, but because most tools are not built to surface it.
When a senior leader discovers that a significant portion of their relational energy goes into reading whether the people above them are satisfied — and that this has been true since long before they became a leader — that is data. When a coach sees that someone's Adult function contracts under emotional pressure in ways that produce a certainty that looks like leadership but isn't — that is data. When a team sees, collectively, how each person's schema shapes what they can and cannot bring into the room — that is data.
Numbers can carry these insights, but they do not generate them. The insight comes from the framework through which the profile is interpreted, and from the quality of the conversation that follows. The Inner Authority Suite provides the framework.
"The profile is a starting point for a conversation, not a conclusion about a person."
The suite draws on six bodies of thought that together shift the question from what kind of person is this? to how is this person organising themselves in relation to authority, role, anxiety, and relationship?
No single tradition produces this picture alone. The combination is the framework. Each tradition contributes something the others cannot.
TA gives us the live phenomenology — what is happening in this person, in this room, now. Systems psychodynamics gives us the organisational context that produces and maintains those patterns. Attachment theory gives us the developmental history through which the patterns were formed. Schema theory gives us the specific constructional framework — the twelve belief patterns in the RAP and RSP are schemas in Young's sense: cognitive-relational templates formed through early relational experience, identifiable by their present-day structure, and amenable to change through facilitated reflection. Relational analysis holds all of this within an intersubjective frame — the reminder that what the profile shows is always shaped by the relationship in which it is being interpreted. Culture theory adds the final dimension: the recognition that what looks like an individual's difficulty with communication or authority is often a mismatch between their formation and the cultural field of the system they now inhabit — a gap that Schein and Meyer's work makes visible and nameable.
Together they produce a picture of authority, self-expression, and relational organisation that no single tradition reaches. That is not theoretical eclecticism. Each tradition contributes something the others cannot, and the combination is what the Inner Authority Suite was built to hold.
Maps six ego state functions in leadership contexts — how you hold authority, care, standards, energy, and self-censorship under pressure. The foundational instrument in the suite. Grounded in Transactional Analysis and systems psychodynamic practice.
Maps twelve belief patterns shaping how you exercise leadership authority — the convictions, formed through experience, that govern how you relate to others, to power, and to your own role under pressure. Constructed on a schema theory framework.
The 360 companion to the IAP. Invite colleagues to describe how they experience you — generating a composite picture of how your ego state patterns land from the outside. Responses are anonymous. The gap between self-report and relational report is often the most useful data.
Ten open questions that surface what may be operating in your shadow — what you project onto others, what you have given up to function in your current role, and what the system needs from you that conflicts with who you actually are. Qualitative written report. Facilitated contexts only.
A reflective instrument completed before a leadership development session or coaching engagement. Participants examine the internal model of leadership they carry, sort their values, and name the shadow of how they lead. Generates a personalised report to bring into the room.
The same six ego state architecture as the IAP — reframed for personal life, close relationships, care, conflict, and self-expression. Designed for use in therapy, coaching, and personal development contexts by qualified practitioners.
Twelve belief patterns shaping how people organise themselves in intimate relationships — around dependency, openness, adequacy, emotional containment, standards, the need to be needed, and the expectation of difficulty. Schema theory grounds the construction; attachment theory grounds the developmental account.
Most communication difficulties in organisations are problems of mismatch — between how a person naturally communicates and how their organisation actually operates. The CFP maps seven dimensions of communication across two axes: how the individual is formed, and how their current organisation functions. The gap between the two profiles is where friction, misread signals, and exhaustion most often live.
Developed by Hough Associates and grounded in culture theory — drawing on the work of Edgar Schein and Erin Meyer's Culture Map — the CFP makes visible what is usually invisible: that communication difficulties are rarely skill problems. They are cultural field problems.
The Inner Authority Suite was developed by Hough Associates — a systems psychodynamic practice founded by Trevor Hough, Clinical Psychologist and Organisation Development Consultant, working across leadership development, executive coaching, and organisational change.
The practice works primarily with senior leaders and leadership teams in financial services and complex organisations, and with coaches, therapists, and OD practitioners who want access to a psychodynamically rigorous framework for development work.
houghassociates.co.za ↗The instruments are not self-interpreting. Each profile is designed to be worked with in a facilitated conversation by someone who understands the theoretical framework it draws on. The interpretations open questions — they do not deliver conclusions.
What follows describes how three distinct practitioner groups are using the suite and how it maps onto work they are already doing. If you are a coach, OD consultant, or therapist and want to understand whether the suite fits your practice, this is written for you.
If you work in the Tavistock or group relations tradition, the IAP and RAP will feel like home. The ego state framework and the schema constructs map directly onto what you are already observing in leadership teams — the split between role-as-given and role-as-taken-up, the systemic production of anxiety, the patterns that persist regardless of who holds the role.
The suite gives you a structured instrument where previously you were working purely from observation and consultation. It makes the below-surface legible to clients who need more than a here-and-now interpretation to carry learning back into the organisation.
The IAP and RAP together produce a picture of a leader that most 360-degree instruments cannot reach: not just how they are perceived, but how they are psychologically organised — what is driving the patterns that show up under pressure. The gap between what the IAP shows and what the 360 Mirror shows is often where the most important coaching work begins.
The suite is not a coaching framework. It is data for a coaching conversation — the kind of data that shifts what gets said in the room, because it names what both coach and client could feel but not quite see.
The PAP and RSP were developed in response to demand from practitioners working in personal and therapeutic contexts. The ego state and schema constructs are the same as the leadership instruments — reframed entirely for personal life, close relationships, care, and self-expression.
Practitioners familiar with attachment theory and relational psychoanalytic thinking will find the constructs immediately recognisable. The instruments do not use clinical language; they use phenomenological language that clients can sit with and return to without a therapist present to interpret.
The Inner Authority Suite is not a psychometric instrument in the conventional sense. It has not been subjected to large-scale validation studies. It does not produce normative scores. It cannot tell you whether someone is fit for a role.
It produces a structured map of psychological patterns — designed to generate insight in a facilitated context. The quality of that insight depends on the quality of the framework through which the profile is held, and the quality of the conversation that follows.
This is not a limitation. It is the design principle. The instruments are built around the premise that the most useful data is not a score but a question — and that the right question, asked at the right moment, moves things that a score never could.
Most psychometric instruments bury their ethical positioning in small print. The Inner Authority Suite treats it as a design principle. The decisions about what the instruments should not be used for were made before any item was written — and they shape the instrument at every level, from the items themselves to the interpretations to the reporting format.
These are not disclaimers. They are the conditions under which the suite does what it is designed to do.
All instruments are available now through the Inner Authority Suite practitioner portal. Registered psychologists and registered psychotherapists may begin using the suite within their professional practice immediately. OD consultants, executive coaches, and other practitioners are invited to register and discuss whether the suite fits their theoretical orientation and practice context.
Register as a practitioner →