Why is the world of agile changing?
And what should we do now?
You heard about the Capital One agile layoffs and dozens of other stories since throughout 2023. Then the Scrum Alliance and Business Agility Institute published “Skills in the New World of Work” in Nov 2023. It has become very clear that the world of agile, and yes of agile coaching itself, has drastically changed overnight.
In this post, I will summarize why this is happening AND what I think you and I should do about it. Agile is not dead; it is not going away.
As Evan Leybourn of the BAI says, “Agile has won. It has been commoditized. It’s become a standard. It’s what people and organizations are expecting.”
— “In-Demand Leadership Skills for 2024” Re-Learning Leadership Podcast by Agile Leadership Journey with Pete Behrens
Agile is now pervasive enough that it is virtually everywhere and companies are reacting (or overreacting). And we all need to think about what’s next. The world still needs our help. I think it just needs to look different. Yes, some of us will find the elusive full time gig or longterm contract paying over $200K. But this is becoming increasingly rare.
What’s Changed?
In the very insightful article by Anthony Mersino, “Should We Fire All The Agile Coaches?”, there is a great summary of the situation. Here’s the big take-aways:
Cost-Cutting: Obvious, perhaps. But there are financial pressures with inflation concerns (or corporate greed), competitive fears, and even election year challenges. It’s easy to let go the Scrum Masters and Coaches who “don’t do the real work”, in a manager’s eyes.
Agile Saturation: Agile is everywhere, not just in technology departments. Companies are not in the early days of their transformations anymore and agile is evolving into a skill everyone should have (in their minds), not in dedicated roles.
Temporary Notion of Coaching: Coaches should be working themselves out of a job as individuals, teams, and companies improve.
Coaching Quality: An explosion in popularity, when times were good, led to a surplus of agile coaches. Certifications may help get a foot in the door, but they are not enough to actually be excellent and world class at your job.
Cost/Benefit Analysis: Enough organizations have spent millions on their transformations without seeing the ROI of their investment in agile. Denial of their shortcomings leads to questioning whether agile works at all. And installing agile without considering the real changes required leads nowhere.
What Should We Do Now?
First of all, I think it needs to be said, we should not panic. You do not need to abandon your career as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or Agilist of any kind. But we do need to think about it differently. Some suggest broadening your skills, which can certainly make you more valuable. Become a “technologist who is a Scrum Master” or a “manager with agile coaching skills”. Keep in mind, this also may not require you to actually learn new skills, but to be smarter about how you position yourself and your existing capabilities. Know that organizations are looking for agile to be “baked in” to the people they hire. You should broaden the scope of the types of roles you are searching for as well, because you might be surprised. I like to find companies that mention agile skills on job boards, then go and scour all of their open postings to see where else I might be able to apply.
What else can you do? I quite like simple changes like the one Chris Stone has made, re-positioning himself:
“I’ve pivoted my own title to ‘The Continuous Improvement Coach’ because it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, continuous improvement will always be relevant.”
And while I’m a huge fan of being a continuous learner, I know many people have rushed out to get as many certifications as they can to better compete in this more challenging landscape. I’m sure this will work for some. It is not easy to get some of these, it takes a lot of time, and it’s definitely not cheap.
How can you be more deliberate in your approach to learning and growing? And how do you know how good of an agile coach you really are? I appreciate Bob Galen’s comments here:
I think a fundamental contributor is that we (the agile community, consultants, coaches, etc.) have not explained what agile coaching is, what it is not, and what “good” looks like.
Bob Galen, author of “Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching”
Bob’s book does a great job of updating the definition of an agile coach, building upon what Rachel Davies wrote in Agile Coaching in 2009 and what Lyssa Adkins wrote in Coaching Agile Teams in 2010. In his book, Bob points out the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel is an excellent source to turn to in order to self-assess where you are in your depth and breadth of experience as an agile coach.
So, in summary, don’t panic. Consider your breadth of skills to better market yourself and direct your own learning and skill improvement to fill in your gaps, using something like the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel to self-assess your strengths and weaknesses.
But, then, what should a fully self-aware, re-centered, pivoted “Badass coach” or “Continuous Improvement coach” :) do to match the needs of our rapidly evolving industry?
How to Meet the Industry Where It Is
Like it or not, even if we can adapt ourselves, update our mindset on how we present ourselves and improve our skills, the world has shifted. It begs the question “What do they need now?” I think there is still a huge need for the following four things:
Leaders. Both middle managers and senior executives need to evolve too. It’s reasonable to think not every manager has acquired the necessary skills to step into the shoes of the agile coaches and Scrum Master that may have been let go recently. Can you offer coaching or education to leaders?
Product. Many of the failed agile transformations demonstrated that they attempted to apply agile on top of their existing org structure without shifting their focus to one that is product-led or value-stream led. The focus on Product Management principles still feels behind compared to where agile has evolved. Can you offer Product coaching? OKR education? How to establish an inspirational vision and how to create the space that allows for innovation?
Agile Basics. There is a trend to return to the basics at many organizations. Maybe companies tried to scale too soon. Maybe they never trained people adequately for the transition. Maybe they hired based on certs and not experience. Whatever the reason, and I would argue (and die on this hill) that the fundamentals of the Agile Mindset will never not be important. Can you offer practical agile basics education and coaching?
Teams. Whether it’s because of the fallout of removing agile coaches and Scrum Masters too soon, or that well-formed teams were never established properly in the first place, it’s clear to me that helping companies with this crucial building block is still vitally needed. Can you offer a broad spectrum of Agile Mindset based coaching for teams?
What is in common with all these crucial needs in our evolving agile landscape? They are Agile Mindset based.
How Do You Measure The Mindset?
To me, this is the most important fundamental question to ask. Fine, you think you’re agile. Excellent, you have what looks like well-formed teams that understand their product vision, their customers, and why they exist. Now how agile are you? And where do you most need help improving?
These last two questions are impossible if you don’t have a good way to assess your own level of agile maturity. I’m not talking about whether you adhere to Scrum or some other framework well. I’m asking the hard question. Are you actually being agile?
And before you hand wave that question away with your confirmation bias that you’ve done x or y already… really think about it. How do you really know? When you get an annual review, there’s a very specific set of behaviors and responsibilities that you are judged on as an individual and compared to your peers with the same title. (It’s not fair and I’m not a huge fan of forced rankings and annual anythings… but that’s another story).
But what about teams?
How do you really assess whether your agile team is applying all of the various aspects of the Agile Mindset? Do you include Design Thinking, eXtreme Programming, Lean Thinking, Systems Thinking, DevOps, and all the various mindsets and cultures with their respective values and principles when you do that? If not, what are you missing? What crucial aspects of being agile are you not even measuring? What opportunities to improve are you missing? And if your teams aren’t improving certain critical parts of being agile, how can your organization build upon that to achieve a higher level of agile success?
I believe “being agile” starts with teams and is rooted in the Agile Mindset.
If you need help grasping a short but inclusive definition of what the Agile Mindset means to most agilists, I’d suggest you start with this blog post, “What Is The Agile Mindset?” In it, I argue that the Agile Mindset is a combination of the following cultures and mindsets that should be embraced by every team and pervade every company: an Iterative Thinking Mindset, Product Culture, Customer Centricity, a Culture of Learning, an Experimental Mindset, a Culture of Continuous Improvement, and a Culture of Psychological Safety.
How I Can Help You
As an Agile Coach, I too am pivoting and experimenting with some new ideas to try to meet the industry where it is. What I’ve done is design a new service offering for other Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters. Consider it another tool you might use to augment your own services to your employer or clients. At its core, it is an Agile Mindset Assessment, using the simple but inclusive definition above. If you think it would help your teams to measure how well you are being agile, this will do exactly that. And in turn, it will help you as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach decide, based on your own team’s self-assessment, where you can help them most and even know where to start.
I’m making myself available to describe this assessment tool if you’re interested. There is no cost for this conversation. Schedule me.
And if you’d like to join the waitlist, I’m currently inviting a small number of people who are interested to participate. Sign up here.
An Assessment With a Book
There are many agile assessment tools in the world. You might consider the fairly complex and thorough tools from Agility Health Radar or Path To Agility. They each have their strengths and come with add-on services and options worth considering. I also really like the Domains of Business Agility by the Business Agility Institute for a higher level perspective of “the capabilities and behaviors for the next generation of organizations”. If your organization is bought in, then I highly recommend conducting a full Business Agility Profile through the BAI to see just how agile your whole company is.
But like I said, I set out to build something simple, designed for an individual team, the building block of agility. There are 24 topics, mindset based concepts and principles, that your team will recognize. I provide very specific examples of the different team behaviors inside each of those topics to help your team recognize in themselves whether they are at a low, medium, or high level of maturity in each topic.
In the spirit of meeting teams where they are, I’ve also been working on a book to complement this agile maturity assessment service. Imagine if you had an agile coach well-versed in each of the 24 concepts, the book explains exactly what an agile coach would do to help your team improve themselves in that topic. The book is organized into 24 chapters, aligned to the assessment topics, that guide a team in what they need to understand about the concept, what behaviors teams tend to exhibit when they’re doing it well, and what third party content is available to help them experience and improve in that area. It’s like an “agile coach in a box”!
Fractional Agile Coaching
I don’t plan to make a ton of money from offering an assessment tool and a book. I mean, I honestly hope it will be well received and helps agile teams all over the world. But, as you might’ve guessed, this is how I’m changing to meet the changing needs of the agile world. This is how I intend to evolve the way I offer my own consulting and coaching services. Should you use my assessment and read the corresponding chapter in my book but still feel like you need additional help, I would love to be the place you turn to for that help. By using my tool and offering “fractional agile coaching” services, your company can hire an agile coach like me to come in with a very specific context over a shorter timeframe to help a given team or teams improve specific skills and behaviors in order to be more agile.
And if you’re an Agile Coach thinking this might be something you’d like to be able to offer to your clients as well, let me know. I’d love to explore a partnership to see if we can collaborate together.
If you enjoyed this, please clap and share. It means a lot to know my work on this blog is read and used by agilists out there in the world.
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 practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
How well is your team “being agile”? Our self-assessment tool focuses on 24 topics of modern ways of working including the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement in teams of any kind. Learn more at MakeTeamsAwesome.com
The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
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