Over 40 years ago, I was walking down the street with my son — he was five or six at the time — doing what we always did: talking about life (and baseball). Out of nowhere, he stopped, looked up at me, and said, "Dad, not every moment is a coaching moment."
I laughed. Then I told him he was wrong…
Because, in fact, every moment is a coaching moment. I've spent more than 30 years as an executive coach and leadership development consultant, and that idea has only gotten truer with time. It carries two big implications for anyone leading people:
Leaders need coaching for the moments that actually matter — not weeks after the fact, but when a hard conversation, a tough decision, or a tricky bit of feedback is happening right now.
Leaders themselves need to know how to coach the people around them, in a real and substantive way, in those same moments.
This is the reason Riven exists.
The Two Questions I Could Never Fully Answer
For most of my career, two questions sat front and center in my work as a coach:
How do I give leaders support and coaching when they actually need it — not on a six-month cycle, but at 9:30 at night when they're replaying a hard conversation with their boss, or the morning of a presentation when nobody's around to talk it through?
And how do I make that kind of support available to every leader in an organization, not just the ones senior enough to have a coaching budget?
Traditional executive coaching works and can be impactful — I've built a career on it — but it has real limits. It's scheduled weeks in advance. It's expensive enough that most companies can only afford it for their most senior people. And the insights from a great session can be long forgotten by the time a leader actually needs them.
I wanted to solve that. So for the last 18 months, I've worked with my partners at Intuist to build Riven — an AI leadership coach designed to answer both of those questions at once.
What is Riven?
Riven is an AI-powered leadership coach trained on my 30-plus years of leadership development and executive coaching experience, and anchored to your organization's own values, competencies, and frameworks. It's available to every leader in your company, 24/7, with no scheduling and no waiting.
Riven doesn't give generic, agreeable AI advice. It does what a good coach does: it asks strong, thoughtful questions, pushes back on potential solutions, leads with empathy, and helps leaders find their own clarity — whether they're working through a live problem, an emerging opportunity, or a longer-term development goal. From there, Riven helps them identify priorities, weigh potential solutions, and land on a concrete next action.
Riven also remembers past conversations, building on them over time — tracking themes, surfacing patterns, holding the leaders accountable and connecting today's in-the-moment coaching back to a leader's larger development plan.
Where Leaders Use Riven
Preparing for a tough feedback conversation with a direct report, peer, or boss
Navigating conflict or team dynamics
Processing a difficult interaction right after it happens
Working through a development plan, developing concrete actions and problem solving the gaps in it
Making sense of a performance review or a 360 report
Drafting emails, scripts, and talking points for a hard conversation
Riven Doesn't Replace Coaching. It Multiplies It.
Because every moment really is a coaching moment, leaders deserve a way to get coached in the moments that matter — not just the ones on the calendar. What Riven does is provide important touchpoints — the 9:30 p.m. moments, the walk-to-the-meeting moments, the moments that used to go uncoached simply because no human coaching could be everywhere, all the time.
See Riven for Yourself
If you're responsible for developing leaders at any level of your organization — not just the top of it — explore the Don't Be a Knee-Jerk website to see Riven in more depth, or reach out directly to Mitchell Nash at mitchell@dontbeakneejerk.com.
Every moment is a coaching moment. Now every leader can actually get one.