Let the Horse Tell You Where It Wants to Go

Working as a coach, one becomes deeply familiar with the wisdom of the saying that you can drag a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.  Sure, there are times when your clients eagerly ask you for help and then energetically work at applying it, but usually there is at least some level of fighting the change.  If only you could align your efforts with what the horse already wanted to do—heck, you wouldn’t be able to stop it if you tried.

It’s this idea that underpins a very simple coaching pattern that I’ve found successful in a wide variety of circumstances.  First, have a frank conversation with the client about what they are trying to achieve.  Then, hold them accountable to themselves for achieving it.

This helps for a number of reasons:

1. Clarity of purpose.  We humans rush into stuff without stopping to clarify why, so this always helps. In addition to helping the client focus, this helps you pinpoint the goal of your coaching.
2. Ownership.  By asking them what they hope to achieve, you are centering them in the work.  They are the ones who hope to get there; it’s not your pet project.  This helps avoid the common trap of clients sitting back passively while coaches take on too much ownership of the work.
3. Course Correction.  When the client strays (during or after your involvement with them), the clearly stated goal gives them a beacon against which to adjust.
4. Permission to Coach.  Because you are holding them accountable to what they themselves said they wanted to achieve, you can exert a lot more force using a wider array of tactics.  Think for a second about the difference between holding them accountable to their own words and trying to get them to do what you think is the right thing to do.  Do you feel instinctively how this reduces the fear of overstepping?  

I’ve used this pattern in a wide variety of contexts at varying time scales: fixing broken rituals (from sprint ceremonies to weekly leadership meetings); helping teams stay the course toward the product outcomes they care about; helping individuals break out of the trap of complaining endlessly without taking action; etc. Note: in the case of sprint ceremonies or other elements of agile frameworks, this has the added bonus of helping clients connect to the principles behind the practices, so that they avoid a going-through-the-motions approach.

Part of the beauty of it is that it is so simple, so don’t feel like you need some special instructions to do this.  No fancy words, just: “What do you hope to achieve through this?” Ask follow-ups, exert your curiosity in listening to their answer, have courage to pull threads that seem odd, and exercise the patience to keep digging until it’s crystal clear to all involved.  Then, be relentless in ensuring that they stay focused on that goal and creative in figuring out ways to help them get there.

Is getting the skills of agile coaching worth it?

This is one in a series of posts accompanying a recent discussion I had with Lyssa Adkins on her podcast, “The 5&5 with Lyssa Adkins”. Our theme was the present and future of Agile Coaching. In each of the five mini-episodes, we discussed one question. Because the format is time-limited and off-the-cuff, I wanted to offer some expanded and clarified thoughts here.

In Episode 3 of this series, after acknowledging the marked downturn in demand for agile coaching, Lyssa and I discussed the question “Is getting the skills of agile coaching worth it?”

I mentioned one coaching skill (empathetic listening) that is applicable in many other professional (and personal) roles. Lyssa went on to mention a few more of these, but I thought it might be worth spelling out a more complete list of the greatest hits. It’s hard to think of a leadership role that wouldn’t benefit from these strengths. These are things coaches know how to do and know how to teach others to do:

• help people collaborate
• navigate conflict
• make choices when it’s hard
• make progress in the face of uncertainty
• work through their own anxiety about changes
• stay open to learning (growth mindset)
• drive focus on meaningful outcomes rather than empty productivity
• develop products that fit the market
• organizational design and group dynamics
• systems thinking
• strategic thinking
• adapt known solutions to local context
• maintain awareness of organizational health at a non-transactional level
• articulate compelling narratives
• listen empathetically
• communicate authentically
• create safe spaces enabling all voices to be heard
• lead through influence
• facilitate workshops/discussions
• grow other people through teaching and mentoring

The only other note from this episode relates to my comment about agile ideas kicking around my head while chopping potatoes at a soup kitchen. I know that listeners are just dying to know what this was about. The one I had in mind related to batch size (quarter a bunch of potatoes then slice them, or fully quarter and slice each potato before moving to the next?), but I also was thinking about the way that work was flowing through a bunch of us when we were putting together meals assembly-line style, each with tasks that had inherently different lengths and variability. Yes, I’m a super nerd.

Stay tuned for Episode 3 and companion notes to go with it!

Why has the market rejected agile coaching?

This is one in a series of posts accompanying a recent discussion I had with Lyssa Adkins on her podcast, “The 5&5 with Lyssa Adkins”. Our theme was the present and future of Agile Coaching. In each of the five mini-episodes, we discussed one question. Because the format is time-limited and off-the-cuff, I wanted to offer some expanded and clarified thoughts here.

In Episode 2 of this series, Lyssa and I discussed the question “Why has the market rejected agile coaching?” Some miscellaneous additional thoughts and clarifications:

I talked about the view of coaching as overhead, and compared it to flossing and exercising. We humans are terrible at sticking to boring habits with a long-term ROI. I see this tendency plaguing organizations at many levels, in addition to the divestment from coaching and other organizational development functions that Lyssa and I covered. This tendency to cut perceived overhead also reminded me of a bias I wrote about years ago in The Teddy Bear and Shark. Namely, a mistaken view of agile values and principles as just touchy-feely luxury, despite the fact that they also offer a great path to mercenary efficiency.

Lyssa talked about orgs saying they are done with coaching. I’ve even heard people perplexingly mention being in a “post-Agile” world. I think this may owe something to the mistaken view of transformation as a simple process that one finishes and then leaves behind. Growth and the need to support organizational health continues after that transformational moment. It also resonates with my experience that non-coach colleagues think that my entire role as Agile Coach is to teach people how to do Scrum. If only it were that easy!

Lyssa also mentioned people not seeing ROI. For me, this goes back to the flossing/exercise argument. I agree that it is extremely difficult to measure the impact of coaching in an objectively quantifiable way. However, I also know that qualitative feedback from coaching clients reflects very strong return. In fact, I was experimenting before leaving Spotify with a new form of collecting quantitative “wrappers” around qualitative feedback after engagements with coaching clients. Though I no longer have access to the detailed data, one number I clearly remember: 100% of clients rated the coaching as very valuable. I encourage those of you coaching to adopt a similar model (I need to write a post about this to share it!) to put the messy qualitative data into a neater quantitative frame for easier sharing.

Lyssa and I both spoke about the pain of seeing agile implementations that bear little resemblance to our sense of what good agile practice should look like. I mentioned the danger of coaches like me seeming as though I am explaining away complaints with a dismissive “you’re doing it wrong”. We coaches should definitely avoid that ugly trap! Unfortunately, it is very, very common for people to talk about agile practices that are counter to agile values and principles and–bottom-line–seem deeply ineffective in helping people achieve what they want. I am not surprised when people say they hate agile given what some of what they have experienced. To take this to a positive place, I encourage people to take responsibility for their own practices. If an agile practice is not working for you, address it! First, ask yourself what you and your team believe it is intended to achieve. Then, work with each other, research options, and get advice from experts on how to tweak your practices to better achieve that end. Repeat and improve. Don’t adopt agile practices mindlessly, but also don’t reject them “Green Eggs and Ham” style; try to engage them in good faith. But do something; sitting back and carping about how agile sucks is not helping you or anyone else. Trust that coaches and others around you are trying to help you, know how to use that help, and be honest about where it is and isn’t actually helpful.

Lyssa opened a couple of slightly bigger cans of worms in mentioning the uncertainty and complexity of the world and the incidence of fear-based decision-making. The world has always been tricky, but it does seem right now that everything is faster and more chaotic than ever, with pressures and anxieties screaming from every angle. Lyssa added, “That’s where agilists thrive.” It’s a great point. When I speak to people unfamiliar with agile about what I do, I tend to lead with the point about the inherent unpredictability of the world. We humans don’t like that. We like to know, to have control, to be able to see a straight line from the present to a happy future. I’ll argue with Lyssa’s point that I thrive in such settings (uncertainty makes my anxiety spike 😜), but I will fully agree that my profession as agilist has helped me build skills for embracing and negotiating that uncertainty. We need people working that way, and we need people teaching each other how to work that way. This is what I really loved about Lyssa’s point in the context of the future of agile coaching. The world needs us!

Finally, I cited a number of layoffs: around 450,000 over the last two years. To be more precise: as of this posting, layoffs.fyi counts 479,307 people laid off in the industry from 2022-2024. Not exact, but close! And gut-wrenching to think of all those people dealing with such a difficult life experience.

Stay tuned for Episode 3 and companion notes to go with it!

What has the market rejected (related to Agile Coaching)?

This is one in a series of posts accompanying a recent discussion I had with Lyssa Adkins on her podcast, “The 5&5 with Lyssa Adkins”. Our theme was the present and future of Agile Coaching. In each of the five mini-episodes, we discussed one question. Because the format is time-limited and off-the-cuff, I wanted to offer some expanded and clarified thoughts here.

In Episode 1 of this series, after acknowledging the marked downturn in demand for agile coaching, Lyssa and I discussed the question “What has the market rejected?” Some miscellaneous additional thoughts and clarifications:

I cited a decline in demand for on-staff coaches. For clarification: I do not mean that no one is hiring full-time, on-staff coaches. There are definitely opportunities here! However, most postings seem to be in transformation roles. What has nearly disappeared is demand for staff coaches who continue to nurture growth and health of an organization that is already working in an agile way. Many companies have not only stopped hiring for this function, but have cut it entirely. (We talk a bit more about why this might be happening in episode two.) Note: I understand from friends in Europe and from job postings from around the world that this sort of on-staff, ongoing coaching role is still in demand in non-US markets, so if you fancy relocating, you might have more luck!

I also mentioned that people were shying away from large, programmatic, cookie-cutter transformations. In one way this is flat-out wrong: there is still a massive market for large-scale transformations. Indeed, I am joining such a transformation in about a month! What I meant by my answer was that, there seems to be a growing awareness that just adopting a bunch of practices off the shelf is not going to magically make everything better.  Many still fall into this trap, but I sense more understanding than a few years back that, for example, just copying the so-called “Spotify way” is not going to yield success.  Even in the cases of massive transformations, at least some people are working towad achieving the impacts that matter, rather than just duplicating a blueprint. This is good: it was always a myth to think you could copy and paste.  It’s also good in that it means a step away from the mistaken view of agile transformation as something easy and quick to undertake. I alluded to this at the end of the episode when I suggested a step away from “agile just as buzzword without a meaningful change”.  Unfortunately, while a shift away from cookie-cutter and/or overly simplistic adoption is good, there is a risk that many people will instead conclude that “agile doesn’t work”.

Lyssa raises a great point in the episode about the way various roles are treated.  She cites the common example of people in a Scrum Master role being made to feel less than, and the related elevation of Agile Coach over such roles.  There is of course room for specialization and division of labor. For example, it is often not economically feasible to have a full-time, dedicated Scrum Master on each team (or even shared across two teams).  Further, while team members can come up to speed on many aspects of the Scrum Master role without taking away from their  other contributions to the team, there are some parts of the role that require lots more time and on occasion more experience.  A great model is to have the team member Scrum Master divide that work with an Agile Coach.  The Agile Coach may mentor the Scrum Master as well, but there is little value in diminishing the importance of that Scrum Master.  Similarly, an organization might choose to have a team of coaches working at various levels and with different specialties.  While it is useful to divvy the work up amongst various coaching roles, there is little value in deriding a team-level coach as “just a delivery coach”.  Any coach worth their salt is lifting a hell of a lot more weight than that.

Stay tuned for Episode 2 and companion notes to go with it!

Your Audience is Really Many Audiences

Many years ago, I was directing a play.  During an early rehearsal, two actors were doing great work with a scene, but I wanted to pull their interpretation into a slightly different place.  I gave them some direction, and they tried again.  It felt off, so we had another go, but my direction seemed to be pushing things in weird ways I hadn’t wanted.  As I continued working with them, I started realizing that I couldn’t give a single direction to the two of them about the scene.  They were each in different places, so while a direction might work for one actor, it might steer the other wrong.  As a result, I started giving them certain directions separately.

That experience then reminded me of a moment where I was on the other side of the dynamic.  In acting school years before, a teacher told my class that we had to work harder on preparing our material.  Painfully keen on being the good student, I took it to heart.  And when he repeated this to the class, I went even further.  Weeks later, in private, he told me to relax and stop working so hard.  “Don’t do any homework,” he told me.  I started to protest, “But you told us–” He interrupted, “Sure, most of the other people in the class need to work more than they do.  But you have a different problem: you want to be the ‘good student’, so you work things too hard.  You are going to kill any spontaneity.  Ease off.”

Seeing this pattern from both sides taught me to watch for it in a couple of different ways.

On the receiving end of coaching/reading/instruction, I ask “Is this particular message applicable to me?” It’s hard to know, and if you aren’t careful, you might just dismiss all guidance and end up wearing a tinfoil hat! So try to find what applies before dismissing it. One approach is to take the perspective of peers who also received the message. Is it more or less applicable to them? Where do you fit in the population hearing this message? And you could of course just ask, though I recommend doing that privately.

On the giving end, whenever speaking to a group, it is critical to recognize that what you say might be the right direction for most of the group, but inapplicable–or flat-out counterproductive–for others. Each person is in a different place, and their own experience and worldview colors what you say in as many different ways as there are people listening.

There’s no easy answer, and you can’t just switch to only communicating one-on-one. The important thing is to stay aware of the pattern and consider it for a beat when your spidey sense tells you you’re in it.

Reclaiming “Agile Coach”

In the 12-13 years since I first heard the term “Agile Coach”, it has evolved a bunch. Like any title, its details have varied, but as a relatively new role, the variation has been particularly great in stance (coach, mentor, facilitator, trainer, change agent, practitioner, etc.) and scope (individual, team, organization, product, engineering, etc.) Newer, more specialized role definitions have emerged, but none seems to have fully stuck.

There has also been a lot of anger vented at agile coaches. Some has been focused on accusations of profiteering by consultants. Some seems like collateral damage due to hatred of agile practices themselves. Still other criticism is more subtle, disparaging agile coaches as just delivery coaches who can’t connect their work to anything outside team-level execution. And sure, some agile coaches are terrible, just like some of the electricians I’ve hired have been terrible. But then again, I don’t go around saying “electricians are useless”. 

Regardless of the specific criticisms, though, what has always struck me is how few of the critics seem to actually understand the role. The most striking example I can think of was a well-known thought leader from whom I’ve gained many insights saying (to my face, no less!), “I don’t know what an agile coach is, but I think they should be expunged.” The juxtaposition of confessed ignorance and hateful language was quite stunning!

Alongside these other trends and currents, it seems that the role is now much less popular, with fewer open postings for the role than I remember in the past. Perhaps the best illustration of this: as I write this, I am unemployed, laid off by the company that arguably did more than any other to popularize the term “Agile Coach”, and which has now removed the function entirely.

Thinking about all this, as I celebrate my tenth anniversary of working as an agile coach, I want to take the term back. I want to shift the conversation from the negative to the positive. Rather than wasting our time focused on what’s wrong with some agile coaches, wouldn’t it be better to contribute to a discussion of the ideal that agile coaches should be striving for? To that end, this is the definition that I have lived by, and that I’ve seen other world-class agile coaches embody:

As an agile coach, I help people and groups build the capacity they need in order to achieve their desired impacts, while rooted in the values and principles expressed by the Agile Manifesto.

Breaking this down:

• I help people and groups…
  The techniques I use and their intended targets range in focus from individuals and teams up to entire companies. My clients have included entry-level developers, product managers, engineering managers, and senior leaders up to the CEO. This is primarily in software development, but I have also worked with groups in legal, sales, design, and political organizing.
  
• …build the capacity they need…
  Clients come to me because they are stuck trying to achieve something. Rather than simply helping them overcome the challenge, I find ways to help them while also developing their muscles so they can better handle the challenge on their own in the future.
  
• …in order to achieve their desired impacts…
  This seems obvious, but it is worth stressing, given how frequently people fall into the trap of doing stuff without actually making progress toward the reason they were doing that stuff in the first place.
  
• …while rooted in the values and principles expressed by the Agile Manifesto.
  The key point is that the “Agile” in “Agile Coach” doesn’t primarily describe what I coach my clients to do; it describes the foundational beliefs that shape how I coach them. Specifically, it means that I stay connected to the basic truths about humans working together in unpredictable environments that are reflected in the Agile Manifesto.

This definition doesn’t limit me to teaching Scrum, or helping teams navigate conflict, or facilitating cross-functional design workshops, or coaching product managers on developing strategy, or helping leaders design organizations to meet their needs, or working to shape cultural forces that connect it all. Neither does it say I will do all of these at any given time. Rather, it orients my energy toward the bottom line: what the client is really trying to accomplish and how they need to grow in order to get there, without losing my grip on what my experience of helping people develop products has shown me to be true.

It’s been deeply fulfilling work, and I hope that I have the privilege of doing it again. I’m curious to see where things will stand in another ten years.