Human-Centric Agility Coaching

This is the final article in a series based on my research into the lived experience of agile coaches and introduces the agility coaching model I created in the conclusions to my research. 

If you find the model useful, please take it and use it in any way you see fit - it's published under Creative Commons so as long as you name me as the source, we're good.

Updated 28 Feb 2021 to the most recent version of the model. The original rectangular model can be found later in this article. The model will continue to iterate!

You can download the PDF here

Whether you find it useful or not, I'd love to hear your feedback. Please comment here in the article thread - or if you prefer, you're welcome to message me direct.

In this article, I'll say why I think this model is useful, explain the columns and rows, and discuss how you might use it. After that (for those interested in such things) I'll set out and discuss the underlying theory. And I'll also highlight what my research suggests are shortcomings in the agile coach education, development and support currently available.

There is a video of me talking about my research and introducing the model here on YouTube (recorded for the AgilePub Meetup - thanks to Timofey Yevgrashyn).

Why do we need another model?

There are already some great models for agile coaching - in particular the Agile Coaching Competency Framework created by Lyssa Adkins and the collaboratively constructed Agile Coaching Growth Wheel - so why come up with something new?

In my research, I found that there are two paradoxes encountered by agile coaches that are rarely faced by generalist professional coaches. I've called these the expert paradox and the ideology paradox, and I don't think our current agile coaching models help us to navigate them.

My model aims to address these paradoxes and at the same time to introduce a new dimension to the way we think about coaching that pays attention to who the people we coach are, not just what they do and what they know.

The model also goes some way to address the shortcomings I see in existing agile coach education, development and support by recognising that the "coaching" part of an agile coach's job is team coaching rather than individual coaching, and that there's a long developmental journey beyond getting a knowledge-based agile coach badge. I've included a brief section at the end of this article sharing my views of these shortcomings, and you can read more in this article What does an agile coach REALLY do?

1. The expert paradox

Clients hire agile coaches in large part because of their expertise in agile, yet coaching orthodoxy suggests that domain expertise is of low value. The result of this paradox is that agile coaches experience discomfort and resist employing their expertise.

How do we reconcile this tension? How can I both tell you "this is the way" and support you in finding your own way?

This was the subject of my first article in this series, Our clients don't need experts - but they do need expertise.

2. The ideology paradox

Agile adoption requires a radical change in organisational culture, which is accelerated, supported and sustained by positioning agile as an ideology. However, the new agile ideology is resistant to challenge in the same way as the pre-agile ideology, undermining the ability of the individuals, organisations and the wider agile community to continue to change and adapt. The result of this paradox is that the central value statement of the Agile Manifesto to “respond to change” is in the long run inhibited, reintroducing the fragility that agile was intended to counter. 

I wrote about ideology in my second article in this series, We need to talk about... the cult of Agile.

Exploiting (not resolving) the paradoxes

The new model incorporates these paradoxes into its structure, providing a theoretical explanation of when and how they arise as well as a practical approach to navigating them.

Our existing models of agile coaching take account of the different things coaches do, and some measure of their competence. The new model invites in addition curiosity about the "developmental stage" of the coach, the individuals and teams they're working with, and the organisation - and how knowing this might allow coaching to have more positive impact.

Later in this article, I'll get into the theory behind the model, but for now, let's take a look at how it works.

A brief summary of the model

(Feb 2021: The rest of this article is based on the original rectangular version of the model, shown below. It does not fully align to the newest version of the model at the top of the page. I'll be doing a complete rewrite in the near future.)

The model is organised into four columns, representing four developmental stages. The theory is that individuals, teams and organisations move from left to right as we develop - we can't start in the middle and we can't skip stages. Each column describes a broad mindset, so to move from column to column requires a significant shift in how we see the world and ourselves.

Importantly, as we move to the right we continue to have access to the mindsets and ways of working we've passed through. If my personal developmental stage is "achiever", I still have access to the "expert" mindset so can choose to operate from there when it's useful (but with additional "achiever" self-awareness).

There are then seven rows, which describe different aspects of the developmental stages.

Each column is headed by a simple Metaphor for what's happening at a team level. 

• In machine, we might be using agile practices, but there's still a mechanistic assumption that if we get the processes right, we'll get good outcomes. 
• In family, we recognise the role of power, desire and relationship in teams, and we start to explore patterns in ourselves and others. 
• In living system we explore feedback loops and team patterns, and look for ways our team system interacts with the wider organisational system. 
• Finally, in wonderland, we treat everything that's going on as a prompt for curiosity and experimentation - we see all our rules and patterns as inventions of the system which can be challenged and updated.

Team Coaching Type refers to the kind of coaching we're likely to be doing with a team. While a professional coaching engagement tends to focus on one of the four coaching types (skills, performance, development and transformation) agile coaching often requires us to move rapidly from one type to another. This difference between professional coaching and agile coaching is the source of the expert paradox.

Developmental stage is concerned with individuals, including the coach. As a coach, an awareness of our own developmental stage helps to define our own learning needs and recognise the challenges we may have working with teams at the same or higher levels. Recognising the developmental stage of team members, leaders and key stakeholders helps us to identify where they're likely to be most comfortable, and where to find their "learning edge".

Organisational stage invites an assessment of what's going on in the organisation as a whole (although it can be helpful to consider organisational stage at team level too). Where individuals are at a different developmental stage to the team or organisation of which they're a part, this is a potential limiting factor to progress.

What's Going On? indicates what we might expect to see playing out in teams operating at different developmental stages. Remember that each stage includes everything in the columns to its left as well.

Agile Coaching Competency Framework suggests which of the segments of Lyssa Adkins classic model are most likely to be active when working within any given column. For an agile coach, moving around the Framework is often not just about switching activity, but about switching mindset and inviting the team to do the same.  

Agile Context tells us what the team is most likely to be concerned with based on their current stage, from agile events and metrics at the left to engaging curiosity to evolve and integrate agility with whatever else they know and find useful at the right.

Finally, Ideological Orientation explains the likely role of agile ideology in each stage. In "machine", Agile may be granted cult-like status, using this ideological power to erase whatever came before. In "wonderland", value conflicts will be treated as a source of useful new information about the organisation's context and purpose and meaning-making will become a critical part of team reflection.

How to use the model (first thoughts)

If you'd like to try using the model in your own work, here's an approach you may find helpful. Whatever you try, please let me know how you get on.

1. Assess current developmental and organisational stage

In most cases, a rough and ready assessment is sufficient. Your intention is to gather information to inform your coaching interventions, rather than to label people. If you feel that a more structured approach would be helpful, you might want to investigate more formal assessment tools such as the Leadership Agility 360.

You will want to consider developmental/organisational stage for at least yourself, your team as a whole and the wider organisation. Knowing the developmental stage of key individuals such as scrum masters and those in leadership positions will also be helpful.

You should expect roughly half of the the people you work with to be at "expert", another 40% to be at "achiever" and 5% each in "catalyst" and "co-creator". Similarly, most organisations and teams will be "orange" or "green".

2. Explore patterns & gaps

Map out the individuals, the team, the organisation and yourself (assuming you're the coach). What do you notice? Are there any gaps of two stages or more? Where are the majority of team members? How does their agile process maturity (however you measure that) compare to their general developmental stage. To what extent do your assessed developmental stages match the behaviours you've observed within the team?

3. Identify comfort zones and learning edges

Working in the column matching an individual's stage will be most comfortable, while working one column to the right will be at their "learning edge". As teams are likely to include members at different developmental stages, work that's in one person's comfort zone will be out of another's. Working more than one column to the right is unlikely to be fruitful.

Similarly, working to the right of the organisation or team developmental stage may create additional tensions. In general, working at the "learning edge" is best done in short bursts, taking care to create a safe space for the team to work through the discomfort they are likely to experience, including ample time for reflection.

4. Design interventions to take account of developmental stages

Once you understand the stage landscape, you can tailor your interventions to match. For example, when working with a team new to agile which is made up of "experts", teaching Scrum as a process along with the basics of collaboration will be in their comfort zone. A team of "catalysts" with no agile background are likely to find such an approach dull and limiting, and will probably already have a well-developed values culture. A systems approach to introducing flow and adaptation while paying attention to outcomes and evidence is more likely to capture their attention, with the "basics" of agile practices and terminology embedded in a broader conversation.

5. Attend to the human needs of the team

For most organisations and teams, agility subverts unwritten rules of business that have been woven into organisational structures, practices and stories, which can be disconcerting.

When working with a mixed team of "experts" and "achievers", it's likely that team collaboration will be fragile and need explicit attention, with the coach modelling and coaching skills for conflict resolution and clean feedback.

A team of "achievers" in an "orange" organisation are likely to become frustrated by the challenges of interfacing their new agile practices with their "stuck-in-their-ways" colleagues outside the agility bubble. Mentoring them to build their collaborative and communication muscles, and to bring curiosity rather than contempt to these conflicts will be important.

6. Track, reflect, review

Use the model to track what's happening in the team, with individuals and with the wider organisation. Pay attention to the gap between what you desire for the team and what they're ready to take on. Look for anomalies where the centre of gravity of different rows are out of step with one another. Consider how you can take advantage of the natural learning rhythms of agility cycles, and retrospectives in particular, to show people what lies to the right of where they are just now.

7. Designing and continually reviewing desired outcomes and boundaries

[added 21-Sep-2020]

From my observations and conversations, contracting - one of the key elements of one-to-one coaching - is often misunderstood and/or poorly executed by agile coaches.

One reason for this may be that the term "contracting" (like another problem word, "supervision") has been drawn from the world of counselling and therapy into a business environment where it's easily confused with very different activities

What we're talking about is not the formal legal agreement setting out commercial terms, but the continuous negotiation of goals and boundaries which define the purpose and scope of our coaching work. There's a nice summary here.

One of the many good conversations I've had with colleagues about this model was with Dragan Jojic, who suggested that the model might play a helpful role in this aspect of contracting.  

Each of the aspects of agile coaching I've touched upon above in sections 3-6 should be included in contracting conversations. We should decide with our clients what the scope of our work is and where to draw boundaries - and the language of the model may be useful here in ensuring both take appropriate consideration of starting points and emerging movement.

Note too that contracting is multi-levelled - we make nested (and not always fully aligned) agreements with the contract sponsor, client management, team leaders and team members. Everyone should have a say in the evolution of the coaching container.

The theory behind the model

Developmental stage theory has a long history in developmental psychology, dating back to the work of Clare Graves. Within the agility community, Don Beck and Chris Cowan's Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilbur's Integral Theory and Frederic Laloux's Teal Organistaions (all closely aligned) have been particularly influential.

This popularity does not make these theories "true", and all of them have attracted valid criticism from within and outside academia. For example, the article Bursting The Bubble: Teal Ain't Real takes aim at Laloux in a even-handed way, and I share some of its scepticism. And argument will continue to rage for some time to come about whether or not the concept of developmental stages in individuals has a biological basis or not.

For that reason, I invite you to think of my Developmental Stage Coaching Model not as describing something "real", but as a useful and actionable framework for thinking about how mindset diversity impacts on how we approach our role as coaches.

So, with the health warning out of the way, let's take a closer look under the hood of the model.

Why developmental stages?

The central idea of using a developmental stage model for this framework comes from Peter Hawkins & Nick Smith (2013), who identified the four Coaching Types in the model and associated them with developmental stages (although they were mainly concerned with one-to-one coaching and assumed that most coaching engagements would involve just one of the four types).

In agile coaching, of course, we tend to move between the Coaching Types and it's clear from my research that this movement can cause discomfort; the coaches I interviewed recognised they were being hired largely for their agile expertise, but felt they added most value when coaching performance, development and transformation. This is what I've called the expert paradox, and my initial hope was that using a developmental stage framework might help to make sense of this paradox and navigate the challenges it presents.

As I continued to review existing research, I came across an recent academic article based on research at Pivotal Labs (Wagner et al 2018) which looked at the role of ideology in agile transformation and concluded that the need to support a change of values and beliefs was made easier by positioning agile as an ideology. This also resonated with the experience of my interviewees, who expressed growing discomfort at the feeling that they were called upon not just as coaches, but as evangelists within a cult-like agile movement.

The fact that agile is an approach to work that invites curiosity, flexibility and collaboration AND an that adopting agile is made easier by positioning it as an inflexible, infallible ideology is what I've called the ideology paradox.

Incorporating ideology into the model completed its outline skeleton, aligning the expert developmental stage with a more rigid ideological viewpoint, and the co-creator stage with a container for multiple perspectives and competing but co-existing value systems.

The benefit of this picture is that it positions agile frameworks and ideology as staging posts on a journey, rather than end goals. It offers an explanation for why these are the most "comfortable" spots for most organisations and teams, and suggests that there isn't a single "agile mindset", but a series of possible mindset evolutions.

Putting meat on the bones

I drew on existing theories and frameworks to populate the rest of the model, favouring recent research with an explicit team coaching and/or organisational agility context where possible.

Working from the top down once again:

Metaphors have been used to describe organisations since eight archetypes were proposed by Gareth Morgan (1986). The metaphors used in this model, along with the What's Going On commentary, come from the work of Joanne James (2015), one of the few researchers explicitly focusing on team coaching, as opposed to one-to-one coaching. Her first three metaphors (which are the same as those used by Laloux - see below) are augmented by "Wonderland", suggested by McCabe (2008).

There are plenty of Developmental Stage labels to choose from too, using similar but non-identical terminology. I've chosen those from Leadership Agility by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs (2007) because they were based explicitly on research on agility in workplaces. My suggestions above about the proportion of people you might expect to find in each category are based on the proportions found by Joiner and Josephs in their research with managers.

The Organisational Stages (orange, green and teal) come from Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux (2014). He suggests that there will be a stage beyond teal, but doesn't attempt to name it and I've not proposed one for this model. My working assumption is that "teal" will suffice to describe both the third and fourth columns. There's a good summary of all the colours and metaphors used by Laloux here.

I've taken the liberty of allocating the Agile Coaching Competency Framework (Adkins, 2017) segments across the four stages, seeking to apply the general logic of the framework. 

I added the Agile Context row to suggest what the team is most likely to be concerned with based on their current developmental stage.

• In machine, they'll be focused on agile events and metrics, the process elements of agility.
• In family, they'll be more concerned with building collaboration and trust, and managing (or avoiding) conflict.
• In living system, they'll be thinking about their team and the wider organisation as a complex dynamic system and will be developing a more nuanced approach to adaptation, recognising that the "system" isn't just a set of processes, but includes all the human beings in the system along with their emotions and patterns of behaviour.
• And in wonderland, they'll no longer be thinking of agile as a "thing", but will be engaging curiosity to evolve and integrate agility with whatever else they know and find useful.

As explained above, Team Coaching Type is an expansion of the individual coaching types of Hawkins and Smith, and here refers to the kind of coaching you're likely to be doing with this team. In translating to a team environment, I'm anticipating that:

• Skills coaching will be focused on agile practices, events and basic communication and collaboration skills and behaviours.  
• Performance coaching will involve supporting the team to notice and share the patterns they spot in themselves, others and the whole team. Unspoken rules will be uncovered and interrogated.
• Development coaching will shift the focus of the team from business outcomes onto value and meaning, getting curious about any dissonance between the values of individuals within the team, or between the team and the wider organisation.
• Transformation coaching will support the team in turning their curiosity into transformation.

Finally, Ideological Orientation explains the likely role of agile ideology in each stage. Building on the work of Wagner et al (2018), I'm proposing that:

• In machine, the catchphrase is "Trust me, this stuff works". Agile will be granted cult-like status, using this ideological power to erase whatever came before. Team members will be encouraged to believe that agile is "better", without necessarily being too concerned about providing evidence.
• In family, there is a shift in ideological focus from agile as a driver of team effectiveness to agile as a driver of team well-being. Well functioning teams will report improved morale and engagement.
• In living system, business outcomes and team well-being are integrated through the search for value and meaning. Value conflicts will arise and be negotiated.
• In wonderland, value conflicts will be treated as a source of useful new information about the organisation's context and purpose. Meaning-making will become a critical part of team reflection.

Final thoughts

The research on which my model is based was undertaken for the dissertation of my masters degree in coaching. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here.

The version of the model in this article is a first iteration. If people find it useful and/or interesting, I intend to revise it in the light of whatever feedback I get from others and from my own work in organisations.

Please get in touch if you'd like to chat about anything touched on in this article.

Gaps in agile coach education, development and support

I wrote about the shortcomings indicated by my research (and reflected in my experience) in the third article in this series (What does an agile coach REALLY do?) but I've only touched on them briefly in this article, as addressing them requires systemic interventions rather than a new coaching model.

For completeness, I'll summarise them here.

First, the "coaching" part of our existing agile coach education is largely based on one-to-one professional coaching, rather than the distinct discipline of team coaching.

Second, agile coaching is (largely) marketed as something you can "learn" over the course a five day training programme, with little prior experience required other than some experience of working with agile approaches. Far too little emphasis is placed on the need for continuing professional development, especially over the first few hundred hours of coaching practice.

Third, we lack a code of ethics for agile coaching, although the Agile Alliance has recently started a collaborative piece of work in this area (led by Craig Smith and Shane Hastie), which I'm proud to be a part of. The ethics codes of the International Coaching Federation and other international coaching bodies providing usable starting points - but the specific challenges of agile coaching (such as the paradoxes I talk about in this article) need addressing explicitly.

Finally, the concept of ongoing supervision, which is deeply embedded in psychotherapy and counselling and at least encouraged within professional coaching, is almost absent within agile coaching practice. Supervision is the regular discipline of exploring our agile coaching practice with appropriately experienced colleagues to allow us to uncover and examine our assumptions and blind-spots and ensure we're acting ethically and in the best interests of our clients. (As noted above, "supervision" doesn't feel like the right word for the agile coaching context - I tend to talk about "reflective practice", "reflective enquiry" or "reflective dialogue".)

Considerations for future iterations

I've received some really helpful feedback on the model since publishing this article, and as a result have created a new iteration of the model, which you can see below.

The new oval shape is a response to the fair challenge that the original rectangular structure was too hierarchical. With the ovals, developmental movement no longer involves travelling from left to right across the model, but pulling focus back to include a broader view of what's happening. This makes more explicit that the model adopts Ken Wilber's idea that we "transcend and include" earlier stages as we develop.

I'm also grateful to Bill Joiner (co-author of Leadership Agility) for his reflections on the alignment between his Developmental Stage model and Spiral Dynamics, on which Laloux's Organisational Stages are based. The revised model accommodates his thoughts on the most appropriate mapping by adding an additional stage; the new model has five rings, where the original had four columns.

I've given the metaphor "game" to the new stage, positioning it between "machine" and "family" and aligning it to "achiever" in Joiner's model. In the game stage, teams become aware of the way that unspoken rules are constantly created, amended and enforced, and how they impact the work of the team. Competition and alliances are common in this stage, and while the team develops a greater concern for their collective outcomes (rather than outputs), the lack of transparency about the rules of the game presents a barrier to further development.

Latest version: 27 February 2021

I'm presenting at Agility Today 2021 tomorrow, and have created a further iteration of the model, simplifying by showing only the first three stages (thanks for that idea, Bill Joiner), and grouping the wedges so that what we might be noticing appears at the top and what we might be doing appears at the bottom.

This model is now shown at the top of the article.

Comments welcome as always!

References

For the model

1. James, J. (2015). Team Coaching: What is going on when I am coaching the team? PhD Thesis, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/32578/1/james.joanne_prof.doct.pdf

2. Hawkins, P. (2014). Leadership team coaching : developing collective transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page.

3. Joiner, B. & Josephs, S. (2007). Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

4. Laloux, F. (2014). Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness. Brussels: Nelson Parker.

5. Adkins, L. (2017). Agile Coaching Competency Framework. https://agilecoachinginstitute.com/agile-coaching-resources/

For the rest of the article

Carter S., Jones, R., Lambert M., Louie, S., Ratan, R., Reynolds, T., Rubin, A., Shirazee, K., Summers, W. (2018) Agile Coaching Growth Wheel. https://whatisagilecoaching.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Agile-Coaching-Growth-Wheel-Guidance-2_1-MASTER.pdf

Hawkins, P., & Smith, N. (2013). Coaching, mentoring and organizational consultancy : supervision, skills and development. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

McCabe, D. (2016). ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’: Organizations as Wonderland – a metaphorical alternative to the rational model. Human Relations, 69(4), 945-973.

Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. London: Sage.

Wagner, E. L., Newell, S., Ramiller, N., & Enders, J. (2018). From public ideology to socio-material reproduction of agile principles: The case of pivotal labs. Information and Organization, 28(4), 192-210.