Why Agile Coaching Matters

If you’re like most of the aspiring agile coaches I work with, very little in your education or experience has properly prepared you for being an agile coach. You may wonder “What is my role in a self-organized team?” or “How do I help the team yet stay hands-off?” Many novice coaches respond by going too far to either extreme. To figure out how to coach from the center, providing just the right touch, you must first understand a few things about the world you coach in and the people you coach.

The problems we face today often don’t stand up to the machine model many of us have used in the past. With the machine model, we believe that we can take any complex problem, break it down into its component parts, create each component more or less separately, and then bring them all back together in one final integration effort. This is how I ended up with programs running 19 simultaneous work streams to turn out one product. I know very few problems my teams face (today or yesterday) that lend themselves to this model. Instead, the problems they’re asked to grapple with are slippery and have never been solved to people’s satisfaction before. At the same time, the world feels far more uncertain than anyone can remember, and the latest change rocks us before we have even settled down from the last change. This is the world we work in.