Agile Coaching is Dead!

Ben Maynard (00:00)
Today is not a day for pulling punches. Is any day a day for pulling punches? I hear you asked, well no. But today in particular, because agile coaching is dead. And the worst part, you probably helped to kill it. This isn't just another rant about how agile the framework industrial complex killed the good in agile. Or at least, you know, ways to limit its evolution beyond what it initially was set out to be. Leaving everyone confused as to what the hell agile is actually good for. No.

Now this is a nudge, a wake-up call. If you're a senior leader thinking about hiring for agile roles or wondering what the future of agile roles should be in your organization. Or if you're a product of agile coach trying to make a difference, then listen up. Because what we've called coaching in the agile coaching world has drifted so far from what our organizations actually have needed that I think it's actually become irrelevant. Welcome.

to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies, and stories from world-class thought leaders and practitioners. Why, I hear you ask. Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard, and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade

to bridge the gap between agility and product. It's a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. ⁓

or coaching in the past, it's very clear that it's a pull. The teams and individuals need to pull coaching to solve problems that they witness. And too often, all that's happened is that the coaching support has been pushed. And when you're pushed to help a team, and they don't know what problems they have to solve, and they can't figure out what problems they need to solve that they actually need help with, then what else is there for an agile coach to do? Other than solve the problems which perhaps don't

really need solving. And we've all seen it. Teams drowning in Kanban boards, sprint burn down charts initiated by Scrum Master or an agile coach, which a team don't care about and never update. Endless arguments over story points actually being an ⁓ estimate of effort and not complexity around them. The way that things are funded, the way that goals are set, the horizons that things are planned on are not aligned to what we're trying to achieve. Leaders are too

Far removed from the operational reality of the decisions that they make because rightfully they spend their time fighting fires or dealing with demands from their bosses or stakeholders that are seemingly impossible to achieve without unsavory trade-offs and all the time being hammered for having to perform and do more and more to proceed in your career. What we have is then, and it's lovely irony, that the never-sort-of-natural coaches still polishing the sprint rituals

But obviously execs burn out and the products are on fire. So it's only a matter of time before leaders begin to see through the cracks in the Agile Vernier. They see plenty of money going out and only ceremonies coming in. No outcomes. No impact. But cracks are good. As Leonard Cohen once said, there's a crack. There's a crack in everything. And that's how the light gets in. And that light is the truth. The Agile Vernier may have cracked.

and there is some light coming through and what we need to do is move towards that light because that light is what we need to focus on now because Agile Coaching as we know it is dead and that light may give us some clues as to where we need to go next what is that light at the of the tunnel and this is a light which in this instance I think we should all be moving towards

I think a lot of the reason why agile coaching has died or is dying or is in this state where it needs to evolve is because we experienced death by framework. General Eric Shinseki put it really perfectly in my opinion. If you don't change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. And when you look at most of the core agile frameworks and approaches, they didn't really change. Apart from safe, obviously safe change caused every semi-profitable whim that they could possibly find.

So the moment agile coaching became synonymous with these frameworks, with Scrum, with SAFE, with Kanban, and even to an extent with, know, go very much close to my own heart less. I mean, it was the beginning of the end. It was at this point that many of the large consultancies saw a great opportunity to make a pretty penny. I remember lots of agile coaches and lots of really successful leaders when they were embracing agile in the early days.

They were successful not by following a framework, but by being sensible about the values and the principles and finding a way to do them in context. Most of them didn't use a framework, but the large consultancies, you can't sell and scale expertise in that respect. You can't scale and sell that type of thinking. Sort of your large consultancy saw was a great opportunity to make a pretty penny and discovered that due to limited understanding of Agile and those frameworks,

It was reasonably easy for them to convince people to sign up for dotted line, which was in reality PowerPoint driven installations of Agile. They can create a playbook. They can have partners go in and sell the playbooks and they get lots of junior people into coach the teams. And towards the peak of the Agile bubble, ⁓ a lot of the time that

A of the people that are working with these teams and coaching them had rarely ever worked on a team similar to the ones they were there to support, let alone spent weeks or months of reading on coaching, like the initial tranche of Agile coaches did over a decade ago. So instead of solving real problems, they thought they were signing a contract where everyone was signing with Deaf Lawrence, Deaf Lawrence for Agile and Agile coaching in the form of contracts from McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, and dare I say at times, even people like ThoughtWorks, to name but a few.

All of the junior agile coaches that I mentioned before, they may have the best of intentions, I'm kind of sure of that. But we focused on whether the standup was done right and what questions we should ask and celebrating the fact we no longer have to ask those three questions. And never focused on whether we shipped anything useful or even spending the time to learn really what useful even meant in the client context. We lost the plot. The obsession with frameworks has created a generation of agile coaches, very fluent in JIRA hygiene.

but unable to make an impactful, meaningful impact on business value. So when I think back and I think how the hell do we get here? I can remember when Agile Coaching started, if not the exact moment it started, I'm not saying I was there. I was there when someone first ever said Agile Coaching. I can at least remember when it began to be something of a career progression from Scrum Master, when people really started to talk about it. And that was 16 years ago, the first book I recall that raised awareness of Agile Coaching, which was the aptly named

Agile Coaching by Liz Sedgier and Rachel Davies. This was then followed up by Lisa Adkins, better known book, Coaching Agile Teams. And what I recall in either of these books is any kind of bad intention. It was all grounded in decent professional coaching and facilitation, motivations and skills. And for many of us, provided a really worthy challenge to us, agile practitioners and adopters and product professionals for how we could better help the teams and organizations we were in.

But then something happened. Two things I would say. One, people realized that agile had had an impact in some organizations based upon case studies they were reading and being made available. The second thing that happened is that people were making money and getting new clients and making really good money from publishing favorable case studies. Particularly on agile. Soon every leader had to be asking, how do we get some of this agile? Agile sounds great. Surely we need some agile.

Bosses were being duped by the case studies, by the big fancy decks, by the publications and the publicity around Agile. So how do we get Agile? Christ, everyone had to be talking about how they got a bit of Agile. Then with this, certification bodies were then very quick to tell everyone who would listen that they could answer this question. All that was required to understand and solve this Agile thing and to get a bit of Agile for yourself were just a 10 to 2 day course.

Sometimes maybe even an exam, heaven forbid. So then the calls for Make Me Agile were answered. First by individual coaches, who I would probably say had a decent level of quality. They'd done the reading, they'd done the research, they'd come up through products and tech organizations and really they set the context. But then as it began to build up head of steam, these initial coaches started turning into people who were just basically saying, sure, I'll show you how to use Scrum.

And then later, large consultancy saying, sure, I'll show you how you can use Safe. We got all the people that you need. But then margins began to get squeezed by the scale of agile company and people being turned off safe and agile generally. And a lot of a jargon that came with it. So at this point, people started to consider the Spotify model was way better and much more modern. I who doesn't want to be like Spotify? The great thing about the Spotify model was that for, you know,

For many organizations, there was no stress. You didn't have to get some fancy certification to teach it. You could basically make a money. was sure you wanted it. You would kind take this white paper by Hamrick Nyberg, then cue lots of people saying, well, well, the spot for model was never actually a model. Yeah, okay. Absolutely. Didn't stop every consultancy trying to copy it, though, did it? Make playbooks for it and sell it. And all this was incredibly popular.

And what happened then, individual coaches slowly got swallowed up by larger firms. I say larger firms, if you're a one person organization, then fantastic. But then there people clubbed together. There's organizations in 10, 20, 30 consultants and coaches going up to the thousands. And they swallowed up all the good people and all the not so good people. And when you're swallowed up by those large organizations, the one thing I've really given the opportunity to ask is what obstacles are really hindering you getting the business outcomes that you need.

The people that are brought in, those junior people, are never given access to the people that the partners sold to. No one knows the business outcomes. No one knows the obstacles really. It's set up for failure. They wander yourself in problems that don't need to be solved. Instead, people are forced to start every engagement with some kind of discovery phase, which is what a lot of the big organizations, big consultancies want people to do, which really, from what I've seen, is ultimately just to find and replace afternoon in PowerPoint, top data template.

That kind of looked like it was designed for the client, but it was really dull to do. You know, the irony of all of this was that agile was supposed to be about adapting to context. But agile coaching ended up becoming the most cookie cutter thing in the building. So as senior leaders, what should you really be asking? If anything to do with agile, if you're a CTO, CPO or a transformation lead or any senior person and anything I'm saying here is making sense to you, then why not join the ranks of what I see really canny leaders doing and stop asking for agile?

Stop worrying about velocity and burn downs and just ignore agile certificates. Don't ask for agile. Don't even ask for outcomes. Ask for outcomes and the impact people think those outcomes will have. What's the business impact of them? Outcomes over outputs is a tried and tested saying, but to the point where it's become a little overused and for many, just a knee jerk reaction. It's a thing to say. So take a few minutes out of your day.

And go to Google, type in the Kellogg Change Guide to give yourself a solid and unfluffy language to help you and your people begin to clearly tie their work to the impact your business needs. Also, don't hire for certifications, hire for ability. Hire for the ability to quickly build commercial empathy. Every organization needs a good mix of skills. The right mix of skills, beliefs, and values, and knowledge.

But getting that mix right is only possible if within that mix there's a good dose of accurate commercial empathy or at least the ability to build it and couple that with a clear performance ethic that relates to having a successful organization and business so that people know that by creating this accurate empathetic understanding for the business, for the needs, that by understanding what performance means and not putting up with mediocre crap.

lame half-arsed performance being really clear about what performance means in a really unfluffy way. That's where we need to get to. Coaches, if you listen to this, give the industry a helping hand. Make sure you've got a real, no bullshit answers to these questions. What measurable business outcomes to impact have you helped to shape? And with whom did you shape them? Think about what tangible business impact have you had? Did those outcomes have?

And did they get the organization closer to its goal? How will people know if your work is making a difference? Think about that. Be really clear. Think about the way it's making a difference, even if it's only tenuous. But think about your answer to above them. Think of elevating yourself. Because when you're in an interview situation, when you're going for that next gig, having answers to these, which aren't just statements such as, I was improving team maturity.

If you don't dig deep and take a look in the mirror, then no one's going to really care. Everyone says that. If you said making more predictable delivery, ask yourself why that matters. Because without a business goal, all of the coaching is just theatre. Now in my time, I've seen many, many great coaches, agile coaches, product coaches. And when I think about what they actually do, you know, I think what they're not doing is acting as therapists. And what do mean by that?

If someone said something along the lines of, once upon a time, you're not a therapist, you're not running retrospectives like you are. Be accountable for outcomes and impact, not ceremonies. The good coaches out there aren't just acting as therapists and running ceremonies. They're winning trust and respect, not because they've read crucial conversations or memorised a canvas, but because they've shown consistently that they'll tell the truth, that they stay curious, and they give a damn when it counts.

They help people find non-obvious solutions to problems they thought were baked into the system. But that actually can change. They don't let people default to that's just how we do things around here. They dig, they listen, they're curious, they reflect and they help everyone make connections that were previously unseen and unthought of. And they do all of this without being dicks about it. And with minimal ego. No agile cosplay and no need for credit.

Just impact. And then the important thing is with all of this is that they care really deeply, not just about the team in front of them, but about the businesses those teams belong to. These coaches don't hide behind jargon. They show up in the tension. They speak up and it's easy to stay silent. They help leaders see what's really slowing them down, even when that means pointing their finger at sacred cows, legacy decisions, or the leaders themselves. Why? Because they care. They truly care. They care about your business.

They care about the leaders. They haven't run it down to pitching themselves as product coaches or executive coaches after being motivated by reading the latest Marky Marty Kagan book in the hope to stay relevant. They haven't hung on to 1990s approaches that failed to move with the times. Why? Why did they do none of that? Why are they great coaches? Because they care.

Yes, they care about organisations, but they also care about their own progression because they know that their jobs are to make themselves obsolete. Because they know great coaches don't build dependency, they build capability. They leave behind people who can think for themselves, systems that run smoother and more effectively because of it, and a trail of people who are getting promoted or advancing their careers, teams that are doing better, and organisations that are quicker, learn quicker.

than they ever thought previously possible. A good coach has achieved what is possible, not what's probable. And if you are a coach and listen to this, then this is an opportunity for you to look at this fork in the road. Many of us have a choice at some point in our agile coaching careers to keep up the zombie agile ceremony by ceremony and just keep telling everyone it's about shaping real outcomes, not outputs. Or really reflect and figure out what are your weaknesses. What and what I have spoken about today has really pissed you off.

Because if I turn the mirror on yourself, how are you going to improve? So ask yourself, do you really get why the agile bubble burst? And can you see your part in it? Do you have any real world hands on product management and development experience? Or is it all just book based? Do you have the skills to be seen as a respected and influential person in the areas that you would like to be supporting others in? And the courage to

to read and to challenge yourself and to coach senior leaders? Or are you just going for the facilitation motions? Are you just sticking to the same old behaviors and not helping organizations change their systemic behaviors and get closer to where they want leaders to be? These questions are not supposed to be easy to answer. They're supposed to be challenging. I'm not asking them to be mean. The honest truth is that these are the questions that I've asked myself a lot over the last 10 or 15 years.

and they've helped me and my clients make some really big impacts. So consider them a gift, albeit not one maybe you'd choose to give to a family member, but a gift all the same. So where next? Where next with Agile coaching or coaching in these in software delivery, software technology-prone companies overall? Agile coaching, as we know it, may be dead, dying, or a shadow of what it was or what it could have been, but that doesn't mean it's over. The next bubble shouldn't be a bubble.

because bubbles aren't sustainable, although history has shown us that for some people it's a great way to make quite a bit of money. If you can do that, more power to you. What comes next must be different. It needs to be based on real business experience, acumen and entrepreneurial spirit. It needs to not be about people figuring out how to make money from training and delivering certifications. These are quick wins and not the wins we need.

It needs to more about people like you. You leaders and coaches undergoing hard-fought and consistent learning in context. It's about applying those new ideas and principles in the context. It is about less method and more meaning. So everyone just consider like are you helping your people do something they couldn't do without you? Not guiding them, not empowering them, that overused term. Actually making something happen that matters to the business.

Whether you're leader or a coach, it doesn't matter. Are you helping that make that happen? must be one thing you can do today to do that. If you are a leader, look at your investment. What would you bet on your current coaches solving your biggest operational constraints? Because if not, why are they there? The next generation of coaching won't come dressed in frameworks or facilitation tricks and hacks. It will come from people who can influence hard problems across silos without needing applause. Now that sounds like the kind of work you're serious about.

then join me. Join me on Substite, join me on LinkedIn, have the conversation, get engaged. I want to hear you being serious about it because things need to change. So connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message, talk. You know my name is Ben Maynard. I'm the host of the Prodigy podcast. And what I'm here to do is to focus on from this point on, like no fluff and no theater, just work that matters.

So until next week, this has been the Product Agility Podcast. And I'm your host, May.