The Future of Agile Coaching
The objective of this white paper is to test our hypothesis:
“Agile coaches need a greater focus on personal agility and dynamic teaming to successfully scale agile beyond IT and across our business”.
This initiative started as a conversation about the future of the agile coach in this new era of business agility. However, we quickly realised we had quite different agile experience and coaching styles that we would need to reconcile before we could have a meaningful debate.
A significant risk from past experience was that our debate would amplify our differences and divide us. We set an explicit goal to respect our differences through the use of inclusive language. This has encouraged us to walk in each other's shoes and find the positive in our different perspectives so we could safely debate the likely future of agile coaching.
Inclusive Language helped us discover that our differences had more to do with our coaching journey and experience than our personalities or thinking. We started to use:
1st Generation and 2nd Generation Coach to describe our different journeys and found it explained the transition of the coaching role over the last 20 years
Ways of Working and Ways of Thinking to recognise agile as multi-faceted with many useful agile practice patterns, given context by the agile values and principles
1st Generation Coaches (1st Gen) often pioneer agile ways of working within the IT area of an organisation. Their role is typically that of a mentor and trainer with success measured in traditional project delivery terms. Agile adoption is normally constrained by traditional IT project governance expectations and a heavy emphasis on agile frameworks and practices.
2nd Generation Coaches (2nd Gen) on the other hand are often working in organisations that are already agile aware. The people being coached are not necessarily part of an IT agile team and often looking for autonomy to personalise agile to their context. This encourages a different style of coaching with a greater emphasis on agile values and principles.
Ways of Working (WoW) guide how we do our work. WoW is typically based on patterns of agile practices that have been refined in many similar contexts. Under the guidance of an experienced coach, they can be a good starting point for teams with little agile experience and popular agile frameworks use explicit combinations of practices to drive success.
Ways of Thinking (WoT) influence how we approach our work. WoT leverages the intent behind the agile values and principles to encourage more effective WoW. Under the influence of an experienced agile coach, WoT encourages more self organisation, buy-in, collaboration and innovation. The resulting self selection of agile practices attempts to be context-specific and is often independent of an agile framework.
Examples of 1st Gen and 2nd Gen Agile Coaches
We have found the themes and examples in the table below to be a useful tool in helping us understand the evolution of agile coaching. It is not intended as a judgment that one is better than the other. It is simply our reality, what we have seen and experienced. Both approaches are useful depending on our context. We used these examples to imagine a possible future and create our hypothesis of the evolving role of the agile coach over the next 10 years.
The hypothesis is based on the assumption that "agile aware" organisations will:
continue to leverage existing investments in 1st generation agile IT team coaching
and begin to seek 2nd generation personal agility coaching to enable agile to scale beyond IT and across their business
Call to action: It’s now time to test and validate this hypothesis, so we want your feedback. Does our hypothesis resonate with you?
“Agile coaches need a greater focus on personal agility and dynamic teaming to successfully scale agile beyond IT and across our business”.
We welcome your comments.
