Agile requires a lot of skills. Agile Coaching demands even more.

Each individual coach has specific talents, capabilities and passions. Similarly, superheroes have their special powers, areas of strength and weaknesses.

Sure the Thing can break down a door, but Mr. Fantastic can slip his arm under and open it without damage or noise. Of course, if “It’s clobberin’ time!” then maybe the Thing is the right superhero for that situation.

Superheroes work in challenging environments and often succeed by working with a team that has complementary talents. The same is true for Agile coaches – we can achieve more in a team with other coaches.

In this post, I want to touch on the skills needed for Agile coaching and how this relates to learning and working in coaching teams.

Skills needed for Agile

The Agile Skills Project is the best reference that I know of. It breaks Agile skills into 7 competence areas: Business Value, Collaboration, Confidence, Product, Self Improvement, Supportive Culture, Technical Excellence. Each competence area has lots of definition (see MindMap). Phew! There’s a lot to know.

I just finished my self-assessment (see below) and probably the biggest challenge for me is around how to rate myself around areas for which I am an expert, however, not currently practising (in last 30 days). So if you want to be strict, just shrink the figure – shape won’t change much.

Overall, I am not 100% happy with this model. On the other hand there is not better.

Agile Skills for Coaches

Agile coaches are a mix of consultant, trainer, and coach. I do not know of a list of skills, so I’ll take a stab at it below. The astute reader will be aware that each of these is a profession in its own right.

Consultant

• Systems Thinking
• Root cause analysis
• Client relationship management
• Consultative Selling
• Organizational Change Management
• Navigating politics

Trainer

• Participatory training – including Agile Games, Training from the back of the room
• Speaking skills
• Presentation software such as PowerPoint. Including graphics/photos/diagrams
• Lesson and content preparation

Coach

• Listening
• Effective Questions
• Giving feedback
• Group collaboration

• Retrospectives
• Personality models such as Myers Briggs
• Psychology models such as NLP (NeuroLingusticProgramming)

To quote Socrates – “The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.”

Every Agile coach will have some areas of skills that they have capability and vast areas with limited skills. This is why it is best to work in teams. As well, all the usual reasons for pairing apply here too.

Coaching Circle – the Fantastic Four

Gerry Kirk created a coaching circle for some of us in Ontario to meet online weekly to share ideas, provide support, debug situations and learn together. Other participants are Declan Whelan and Jason Little (photo from Agile Coach Camp Waterloo). For me the sessions have highlighted that we come from different backgrounds and have different skills and interests. When working together, it is these very differences that add value and allow the sum to be much greater than the parts.

Gerry ran an open space workshop on this at Scrum Gathering in Orlando if you would like to learn more - Agile Coaching Circles aka How to avoid feeling isolated and unsupported as a coach [Open Space]

Post Script: Selena Delesie and Susan Davis recently joined the coaching circle. Bye bye, Fantastic Four. Hello, X-Men.

Pair Coaching and Coaching Teams

In 2009, I had the fortune of pair-training with Yves Hanouille at Agile Tour Toronto. He introduced me to the concept of PairCoaching for which I am very grateful as it has profoundly influenced how I work. (For example, I had two pair-authored sessions at Agile 2010).

Earlier this year, I was on a coaching team with Alistair McKinnell and Jason Little. I learned a lot see different skills sets in action. Alistair is a world-class technical architect, consummate consultant and above all test-infected. Although he can do much more than this, he is a great technical coach -someone to sit with developers and testers to get in the trenches and show people how to do quality work. Although Jason knows some technical practices and has worked with Agile Management, he worked with team process (Scrum, Kanban) as well as team dynamics. Me? I love getting people to work together. On this engagement, I worked mostly at the team level and the organizational/inter-departmental level. We did a lot of pairing and the quality of our work was way higher.

I know some XP Coaches who think that all Agile coaches need to be developers in order to assist the team in technical practices. For me, it is more important that all relevant skills are manifested in a coaching team and not in a given coach.

So be a superhero and work in a coaching team. If you are a coach, work this in to your engagement model. If you are a client, ask for this and join the team as internal coach – you are welcome for sure.

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For me organizational change is a hot topic since I keep running into it when adopting Agile practices.

Schneider Model for understanding Culture

Israel introduced the Schneider model for understanding company culture. The idea is to use survey questions to categorize the dominant culture into one of four categories (see below).

Many companies we work with are a control culture while Agile is all about Collaboration and Cultivation and (sadly) to a lesser extent about Competence.

You Can’t Change Culture

“Culture is singularly persistent” – Drucker. It is estimated that it can take 10 years for the culture to change in a large company.

Consider the chart in the middle of the diagram below. If we want to be successful in adopting Agile (or anything else) it is essential to focus on harmony with the existing culture. Pushing for different culture will lead to conflict.

Agile adoption leads to conflict

This is an observation rather than a pejorative. With the best intentions Agile will accidentally lead to conflict within the organization. The example given was of different cultural biases within different departments.

For example, Competence in Engineering and Control in Operations. In addition to differing departmental objectives, us vs. them thinking will also create tension. Israel talked about the Outmodel that describes perceptual bias that we create when we have limited information about a situation. The idea being that by design of our organization, there will be conflict between the groups and Agile adoption only makes this worse by perturbing the system.

One idea proposed by Israel is to create a boundary object between different groups. In the case of Development (Engineering) and Operations, one could use Technical debt as a way of measuring the quality of the code to satisfy ops that the code was production worthy. So a  boundary object that has a quantitative measure is very helpful. IMHO, there is much more than this required to ensure that code is production-worthy, but that’s another story.

What I learned about myself

In one exercise we broke into the four groups to explore the different cultures. I went to Control because I have struggled with a few organizations with this culture. What I discovered is that I personally have strong control tendencies. I also discovered that control can save a lot of time by decisive action. The trick is knowing when to apply it. I experimented with my workshop later in the conference and was happy to see that very strong direction around group logistics and exercise structure can make a session more coherent and valuable.

And now for something completely different

Clarke Ching shared a great 6 min animated video on organizational change by Eli Goldratt. It is related so, I’ll throw it in here…

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Constellation – Understanding each other through motion

I love this exercise. It provides the team members as well as the coach important information about everyone on the team. It is called constellation since everyone arranges themselves around an object on the floor (in our case a roll of tape) depending how they feel about a statement such as “I like getting results”.  People align their bodies with the statement: standing beside the object signifies strong agreement while standing far away to signifies strong disagreement. It is very powerful since people are engaging their whole bodies. To learn more, there is a full write-up on Lyssa’s blog.

Timeline – sharing our pasts

In timeline, each participant draws a timeline of their life with peaks, valleys and major life events. In turn, each person describes their timeline to the team. Team members listen and note skills or talents (on sticky notes) that stand out. These are then posted at the bottom of the timeline and reviewed as a team. This approach is about figuring out who the person is and what special perspectives they bring to move the project forward. When we did this, it helped the demo subject feel more positive about their talents. Nice.

Marketplace – sharing our talents

In marketplace we pretend we are a vendor in an open-air market place and decide what wares we have to sell. What are our special skills and talents that pertain to this project? We even get to create a banner to attract people. Under the table are things that are true for us, but may not directly relate to the project. The debrief is the same as timeline. Usually a coach will use one or the other (in the training session half of us did marketplace and half did timeline).

Below is my marketplace as an Agile coach.

(This is part of a series on DeepAgile 2010 Games Weekend).

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What I learned about retrospectives

• Change the format on a regular basis. One attendee switches things up every retrospective.
• You can get great results by focussing on more of what works. This is inspired by appreciative inquiry. We are so used to looking at what the problem is, that looking at success can have a powerful shift.
• Another was to have each person write a personal commitment story card for something to do in the next iteration. They signed the card and someone else agreed to pair with them on it to provide support. The cards were posted beside the scrum board as a reminder. They were reviewed at the start of the following retrospective.
• Liked-Lacked-LongedFor was also suggested as a powerful way to connect with people’s deeper selves.

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The game teaches people skills and resources to be effective coaches by practicing with peers. In the game, people take turns in one of 3 roles: Client (with a problem), Coach, and Observer.

Solve real problems

In the role of Client/Dorothy, you get to be yourself and bring up a problem that you want to work on. Over several iterations, new perspectives help you access the resources you already have. So a cool side-effect of this game is that you get fresh insights into whatever problem you want to work on.

Coach practices questions

The coach gets to practice listening and asking questions. We discovered that listening is something we need to practice since we are so used to jumping in with our expert opinion and solutions.

We also get practice with different types of questions (image by Portia Tung):

Observer provides depth

The observer roles gives you a chance to step back from the situation and really notice what is going on. Portia’s picture captures the simplicity of the task:

I was reminded that observation is a very helpful debugging technique. It is also less than easy – especially if you are like most of us and out of practice.

As the observer, I was able to get much deeper insights.

Go play this game

I am going to play this game again for myself and to help those I am coaching. The complete game instructions and presentation is available for download, so give it a go! I’m sure you will get value out of it. Even better, get Portia to come play with you so you can see some of the finer points.

(This is part of a series on DeepAgile 2010 Games Weekend).

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The purpose of the whole talk is to trash Management by Objectives. See my related blog noting the damaging effects: SMART goals may not be that smart. As an alternative, Mary shares 4 effective models for organizational change.

I have heard a lot recently about the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It uses the metaphor of the Rider and the Elephant. I like it a lot since it lines up well with my NLP tools and understanding of the unconscious mind. Anyway the change model is very clear:

1. Direct the rider – provide clear direction and objectives.
2. Motivate the Elephant – appeal to emotions to provide energy for change.
3. Shape the path – create a supportive environment that will keep things on track.

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother is a second approach for driving change. Check out the above description in the mind map. It reminds me of the A3 technique that I have been using for the last year with great success. I’ll blog on my experiments later.

Strategy and Deming’s systems analysis + PDCA + People were the two final models to round out organizational change approaches that involve people rather than measure them. Caveat: SMART is OK for projects; not people.

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Below, I have a few notes that just scratch the surface.

A big take-away for me is that every day and every meeting I need to:

1. Learn
2. Make a difference
3. Have fun

Another concept is Clean State Fridays where everyone goes home without emotional baggage so they can start fresh on the following Monday.

He also reminded me that we play a dance with courage and grace to achieve great outcomes.

Strongly suggest you check out the full presentation or find a way to see him in person.

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What I want to share here is some general thoughts on what is required to be a Certified Scrum Trainer that I noted during the open space session. This is only an excerpt on how to succeed – the full session notes are here.

(Part 4 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

Caveat: There is a Scrum Alliance Improvement Committee working out the new process so this is an informal look at some considerations.

See mindmap below.

It is important to get connected so that people know who you are. If you are considering co-training, find people you like. (N.B. There was some discussion of dropping Co-training requirements so you’ll have to stay tuned on this.)

What you teach when you are CST is your business, however, the evaluation process is based on you wearing your scrum hat. Not your Agile hat. Not your XP hat. Not your PMI hat. Does this mean I need to show a flock of self-organizing geese? Is it OK to share the Agile manifesto? I still don’t know the answer to these questions.

As a CST you will need to develop a curriculum with learning objectives, exercises, etc. There is no official training material that you can use as a baseline – every CST is expected to author training material.

It is important that you contribute to the Scrum Community. This can take the form of organizing a local user group, a conference. Public speaking and publishing articles and blogs is relevant as well.

The big thing I got out of this session is that no one is going to hand you the CST designation because you know Scrum and have run training sessions. Becoming a CST requires excellence and hard work.

You may also want to check out Tobias’s blog posts: So you want to be a CST?, Becoming a CST and Scrum gathering day zero for an informal perspective.

See also my post on becoming a CSC.

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The values and agile project life cycle slides were not show; instead, Gerry did a live diagram construction (see photo below). This approach worked well and we got lot’s of great questions.

One of the questions was about Agile contracting.  There is a good presentation I commented on in a recent post.

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Ideas from Other Fields

Making Change Happen – Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens has a visually pleasing presentation – Making Change Happen – that summarizes organizational adoption challenges and includes key ideas from one of my favourite books – Fearless Change. The diagram at the left illustrates that there are often factions in an organization pulling in different directions with different agendas – not just your favourite (Scrum or Agile). Check this out if you are involved in organizational change.

Social Objects in Software Development – Dave Harvey

Scrum talks about self-organizing teams. How do you get there? One idea is that we need to think about social networks. These form around social objects, so this is a good place to start. Social objects reinforce our identity and sustain our tribal identity. Consider the photo showing other dimensions of people’s lives. Not only can networks form around this, but it also primes our behaviour to think about others as … people. The presentation is done in zen style and I would totally love to hear Dave in person.

Self-Organizing & Subtle Control: Friends or Enemies? – Mike Cohn

Mike talked about self-organization not happening in a vacuum. It is management’s responsibility to guide the evolution of behaviours (rather than specify what how everyone needs work). He then went on to talk about Containers, Differences and Exchanges as a way of making indirect changes to a team. There is also a discussion of Philip Anderson’s 7 levers for influencing team evolution. Worth checking out if you are interested in coaching teams.

Stories from Scrum in Practice

Agile at Telefonica R&D Gemma_Hornos & Monica Izquierd

Although the presentation is about large scale enterprise adoption of Scrum, there are lots of interesting bits of information that apply in general. One example is image is about styles of growth of Scrum within an organization – I really like the viral/mosquito! Lot’s of other great visuals as well.

Practical Roadmap to Great Scrum – Jeff Sutherland

Jeff shares some of his key understandings of doing Scrum well. Want to double productivity? –> Focus on DONE. Want to double again? –> Focus on READY. Self-organization is identified as the 3rd way to double performance. The presentation also talks about large scale adoption and CMMI. Lot’s of good bits of info packed in here.

10 Contract Forms For Your Next Agile Project – Peter Stevens

Peter has a great analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different types of contracts from both the vendor and the supplier perspectives. Phased development (see photo at left) is one that balances the interests of bother parties and encourages cooperative behaviours. If you need to set up a contract, check out this presentation.

Kicking Scrumbut – Rowan Bunning

Rowan takes a fun and informative look at some common failure modes that organization exhibit when adopting partial Scrum (AKA Scrumbut). Of course all the failure modes are matched with advice on what to do to resolve the problem. Even if you are an experienced coach or Scrum practitioner, you will be sure enjoy and learn from a different perspective.

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