Agile Coaching is Context Sensitive Knowledge Sharing and Story Telling
The title of this post is my shortest definition of Agile Coaching. Now I know the world is changing, so the role of Agile Coach is bound to morph, be called different things, and the capabilities and skills of what has been an Agile Coach will start to show up in — and be expected out of — different roles. But if you have any role that is designed to be the process advocate and person who helps coach, mentor, teach, and train individuals, teams, or teams of teams how to be a better version of themselves, then I think this definition applies to you. I’m going to keep on calling this role Agile Coach for simplicity (and out of hopefulness that the world isn’t done with us!)
And please, as Bob Galen has hopefully pounded into all of our heads by now, don’t just show up and ask pedantic questions. The role of Agile Coach needs to bring an opinion too. You are also a consultant in addition to being a guide and a mentor. But look for the opening. An Agile Coach should find the right moments to roll up their sleeves and get involved. Express an opinion during a refinement session. Actually share what you think with the Product Owner as they work through difficult decisions.
But most importantly, share your opinion based on the full relevance of the context of that team or individual.
Coaching in Context
It is perhaps intuitive to most, but an Agile Coach needs to always be plugged into the context of the team. This is a nontrivial and multifaceted thing. First of all, we need to “meet the team where they are”. Coaching and advice in general is most certainly not one size fits all. The experience level and context of where on the team is on their agile learning journey is crucial. A more mature team will need a different stance from their agile coach than a team just starting to learn how to be agile.
Context also includes the type of solution the team is working on and the type of customers being served. Do we have internal or external end users? How often are we delivering value? Do we have regular conversations with stakeholders? There are of course many questions we run through in our heads as agile coaches in order to intuitively assess the context of our teams.
The result of this context setting is that the agile coach can choose the right knowledge to share or which are the right questions to ask the team in order to nudge them in the right direction based on where they are and what they need. The knowledge we share is fine tuned to the context we’ve ascertained, whether we share it through some kind of direct teaching and consulting, or if it is indirect through asking powerful questions to help the team make discoveries on their own.
Story Telling
One of the more powerful techniques agile coaches use is to provide context sensitive stories of other experiences the coach has encountered in order to illuminate something the team needs to hear. And while story telling itself is a challenging skill to master, it is the precise appreciation for what the team needs to hear in context that can amplify the effectiveness of this technique. This of course requires a few different things. First, the ability to assess the context as mentioned above. And just as importantly is the breadth of experience in the coach themselves to be able to recollect and retell a story on demand that matches the context they are trying to teach. This breadth and depth is most famously called being “paint dripped shaped” by Kent Beck.
Most coaches have another special quality that enhances their ability to tell great stories. I simply call it creativity. While it’s more powerful to tell fully truthful stories matching the context and need of the team you’re working with, there is also a degree of embellishment that can be used affectatiously to increase the impact. And while it may seem disingenuous to stretch the truth in your story telling, I think most coaches will tell you that the stories they tell are almost always based on truths and facts but in order to help cater the story to a specific need, a little bit of exaggeration or augmentation to their stories can make them much more powerful.
If you are an agile coach, or wearing the hat of one, I implore you to simply pause before you ask a question, tell a story, or share some knowledge with your teams. Have you fully assessed the context? And what’s the right technique to share that with the team?
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.
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