Clarity under
pressure — for the
people building
under the most of it.
Coaching for founders and leadership teams, grounded in systems thinking, organizational learning, and a doctoral research program on how people sustain adaptive capacity under threat.
Naina Sahni is an executive coach and PhD researcher. She coaches founders and founding teams at high-growth Indian technology companies, and her doctoral work develops original theory on how individuals and systems hold clarity, judgment, and learning capacity under sustained pressure.
She spent the better part of two decades inside India's hyper-growth ecosystem — starting at Zomato in 2011, growing through content, chief-of-staff work, and leading Feeding India, the company's hunger-relief initiative — before turning that experience into both a coaching practice and a research program.
The coaching is the field. The research is the lens. Each keeps the other honest.
What I kept noticing wasn't a strategy problem. What degraded under pressure was something earlier and more physical — the quality of attention in the room, the range of hypotheses a team could still hold.
Current and recent engagements
Not advice-giving.
The work is different.
Start a conversationFounders and founding teams at high-growth companies.
Typically people carrying decisions whose consequences compound, inside organizations moving faster than their structures can comfortably hold.
Helping leaders hold their thinking together when the pressure won't let up.
Widening the range of what a team can still consider. Keeping hard decisions open long enough to be made well. Building conditions where a group keeps learning instead of narrowing.
Systems thinking
The work draws on systems thinking, organizational learning, and somatic and contemplative practice in equal measure.
Somatic practice
Attention to the body's regulation as a real input to the mind's range — not as metaphor, but as mechanism.
Organizational learning
Drawing on Argyris and Schön, Weick, Edmondson — and the question of what lets teams keep learning under load.
Two constructs.
Kept deliberately separate.
Active doctoral research, not finished or validated instruments. The integration is the live frontier of the work.
Adaptive Regulatory Shelf Life
How long can a system sustain high-cost adaptation?
A construct describing how long an individual or a group can sustain high-cost adaptive regulation under threat before something starts to degrade — perceptual bandwidth, the capacity to learn, ethical steadiness, or the coherence of the system itself.
Grace-Based Learning Architectures
How institutions can be designed so learning is renewed.
A construct concerned with how institutions can be designed so that learning is renewed rather than extracted — so people have the room to err, recover, and grow without the system quietly spending down their capacity.
The work
behind
the work.
Credentials and affiliations. Verify before publishing — these are drawn from prior context.
Trained in the systems-thinking lineage of Peter Senge, including as a Master Practitioner at the MIT Center for Systems Awareness.
Ideas in
public form.
TEDxMGMU
A talk on the ideas at the core of this work. Title and link to be confirmed once live.
Beyond The Surface
Systems Thinking for Everyday Life — co-hosted with Gunjan. Confirm it's live and link it.
Shift Happens
Reimagining Capitalism Through Mobility — co-authored. Publication status to be confirmed.
Invite Naina to speak at your event or conference.
For coaching,
speaking, or
research collaboration.
For coaching enquiries, speaking, or research collaboration — get in touch.