Building a coaching culture: From doing Agile to being Agile
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at Agile Japan ’21 The focus for the conference was “The heart of Agile”, inspired by Alistair Cockburn’s model.
My talk was on Building a coaching culture: from doing Agile to being Agile. The intention was to communicate that Agile is not really something we do, but something we learn to become.
Some of the key points I focused on were:
Symptoms of Agile dysfunction
There is sometimes a perception that it is hard to successfully implement Agile and see desired results.
I believe this is rooted in a number of “anti-patterns” or what I labelled “symptoms of Agile dysfunction” in my presentation. Here are some examples, but there are probably many others.
Form over function — This is the case when companies hire consultants, go through training and certification etc. but lose focus on the results.
Control over trust — This tends to happen when the company fundamentally believes in Agile, but feel uncomfortable when this impacts executive planning and budgeting. Such companies apply a layer of control rooted in conventional planning, which leads to conflicting metrics between product teams and management.
