Here’s how our Systemic Agile Coaching course helped Nathan Turney, an Agile Coach at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Systemic Agile Coaching (ICP-ENT), accredited by ICAgile, is our top-tier implementation of ICAgile’s Agility in the Enterprise based on our coaching expertise.
Laura: It was great to have you in the first cohort of our Systemic Agile Coaching course. What was your impression of the course?
Nathan: The Systemic Agile Coaching course was an absolutely fantastic course and one that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. Your teaching style and content was fantastic throughout and kept us all engaged.
My favourite part of the course was the interactive sessions across all of it that really prompted us as a cohort to really get to grips with the coursework and what we were here to learn! The group made this really easy as everyone wanted to participate and help wherever possible. This was fantastic and an added bonus!
Laura: Thank you so much, that means a lot to me. What specific areas of the course did you find most helpful?
Nathan: I particularly found the sections around Organisational Culture and Alignment especially the section on Engaging Leadership in Conversation about Culture and also Developing an Agile Team Culture the most insightful as it is these very areas that I see needing most attention in my organisation. You presented both of these areas in both deep and insightful ways that really aided in shoring up my understanding of how to approach both of these within my organisation.
Laura: So you were able to look at what needs to change in the organisation around the team, in addition to the team. What has been the impact on your work at DWP?
Nathan: Since finishing the course I have been able to hold better conversations and facilitate better sessions with both my agile teams and senior leadership across several areas of our business. I have used CID-CLEAR as an iterative approach and also McKinsey’s 7S and have found them great tools in their own right to help get some really great outcomes.
Laura: Wow, that’s a super testimonial! I’m so pleased the course is having a positive impact. Thank you for the great feedback.
Do you want to find out more about Systemic Agile Coaching, accredited by ICAgile, and how Future Focus can make a positive impact in your organisation? Contact us.
Doug Bromley, Technical Product Owner at 6B Digital, attended our Agile Fundamentals course in November. He chose to do his Lessons Learned Log, the final work for the course, as a mind map. And what a mind map it is! We loved it so much, we asked him if we could share it with all of you. Thanks Doug!
Our Agile Fundamentals course, accredited by ICAgile, helps you experience the Agile mindset and principles that underpin all of the frameworks. You’ll learn how to use and combine Scrum, Kanban, Agile Project Management, Continuous Integration, and Lean Startup. Fix problems with late releases, lacklustre development teams, and plans that are destined for failure.
Want to create sustainable change in your organisation that goes beyond the team? Find out in our one-of-a-kind Systemic Agile Coaching, accredited by ICAgile, and earn your Agility in the Enterprise (ICP-ENT) certificate.
On successful completion of our Systemic Agile Coaching course, you’ll receive the ICP-ENT certificate from ICAgile.
Have a question? Get in touch and we’ll reply within one business day.
Focusing your change efforts on the team is not enough. Business agility requires a change of leadership style, organisation structure, culture, and Lean principles at the enterprise level. In this course, accredited by ICAgile and delivered by Laura Re Turner, you’ll learn coaching skills to support the transformation of agile leaders, teams, and business stakeholders.
Build your Agile toolkit to create true business agility with Lean, business process improvement, and customer-centric measures of agility such as OKRs. We will examine two popular Agile scaling frameworks to learn how to approach scaled Agile in a sustainable way.
Ready to get started? Contact us. We’ll respond within one business day.
It was a pleasure to present a session today at the ICF Romania’s annual conference. Thank you to the terrific coaches who asked some great questions. I promised to publish my answers here, in addition to the discussion we had during the conference.
I prefer a wider definition of Agile development. I prefer ‘business agility’ because we know that a team gets only so far with Agile development before stakeholders in the organisation become blockers. At least this is often the team’s perception. Maybe business stakeholders’ mindset hasn’t changed. Maybe they aren’t familiar with the new approaches, or bought into the new frameworks and tools.
Knowledge is capital. Peter Drucker, the management guru, called the new skills “knowledge work” which differentiates a company in the marketplace. A business needs the skills and learning capacity to adapt to change from both internal and external sources.
So agility is needed, not just Agile. This is why I use the Six Lenses of Systemic Team Coaching, created by Peter Hawkins with the Academy of Executive Coaching.
Q&A
Is it a structured program that needs to start from 1-6 or you can work on different levels based on the need? You’ll agree the aims and structure of the coaching engagement based on pain points (a tactical focus) or as part of a transformation programme. The Six Lenses is, to me, an observation tool that I use to ensure that coaching interventions are created from different perspectives. So it’s a model for seeing, not for contracting or commissioning.
If you are in a team coaching setting (for a specific team related aspect) do you bring your observations about lenses 4, 5 and 6 into the team discussion? if yes, how? I ask how other stakeholders – naming one or two specifically – might view the situation. Any tools in your toolkit for helping someone see the situation from another’s perspective are relevant. And you don’t need to be working with the team to help people see from other perspectives, but this obviously comes up with teams all the time. “It’s not us, it’s them” is the kind of thing I hear. The agile team doesn’t understand the business perspective, and business stakeholders don’t often understand agile team practices. I’m generalising, but it comes up often.
How do you get the client from the one to one coaching, which you said that it’s generally the way of start working with them, to the team coaching…. and also how do you generally structure your interventions? (talking now about the hybrid way of working and interacting) I don’t guide the client (the organisation) through each of the Lenses, I spent time working with and observing the client and putting together a picture for myself of where communication seems to be stalled, or people working at cross-purposes. Working with technology organisations, as we so often are asked to do when we’re working as an Agile Coach, we’re working with people who like data. I tend to agree that data is important – and there’s plenty of it on the team’s Kanban board as feedback which is quite tangible and relates to ‘time to market’, the all-important measure of how quickly we can get new products and services delivered. So it’s important to be able to engage as a coach but speak the language of Agile frameworks. Having that evidence (data / feedback) helps you to make the case to look at different interventions – in the other Lenses.
How we can we identify on what level we should work with the team? All of them are important.
This [Scenario Thinking] seems an approach of mitigating risks. Can we also think of trends or other opportunities in this phase? Yes it’s a way of identifying risks of change from the external business environment. By starting with a point in the future, in my example two years out, and working back to the present, we generate options for how to spot risks becoming issues. To turn the PESTLE analysis in Scenario Thinking into a way to identify opportunities, add a SWOT analysis as the second step of your facilitated process. Use your facilitation skills here.
After asking us to contribute to a word cloud to understand what we think of when we think of the word ‘ethics’ (I said ‘respect for the client’ and ‘honesty’), Shane showed the list of 18 points in the proposed Code of Ethics. He said it made more sense for the Agile Aliance to own it than for ICAgile because ICAgile is a standards organisation for training courses and contributes to professional skills development through its Learning Outcomes. (My company Future Focus Coaching is an ICAgile Member Organisation.)
While there are almost half a dozen professional training organisations globally, Shane used as a benchmark the Code of Ethics of the International Coach Federation (ICF). I’m a member of APECS, the Association for Professional Executive Coaching and Supervision, which has its own Ethical Guidelines.
Shane asked small groups to discuss the idea of a code of ethics in breakout rooms. Some points we raised in our room were:
We are being most ethical when we are being true coaches, and not teaching (telling).
We don’t always have a choice of how we help the sponsor roll out their agile framework. We arrive, and the sponsor tells us what has been decided, regardless of what the teams want or need.
In the plenary session, people from other breakout rooms said the points they raised were:
Some people perceive the role Agile Coach as another term for a Scrum Master. They’re different, and a coach should adhere to a different professional standard.
One should always have been a Scrum Master before becoming an Agile Coach, so that they understand the ins and outs of how Agile teams work. Someone else added: what about Product Owners?
Agile Coaches have many roles, as a true coach but also an evangelist, and partnering with management. It’s a difficult position to be in. People aren’t always aware of what role they’re in at a given time.
Some external coaches say ‘if you implement x framework, you’re agile’. People are trying to sell their preferred Agile process instead of working to the client’s agenda.
But the over-arching reason I think we need an ethical code for Agile Coaches is this. More people who identify as Agile Coaches have increased their professional coaching skills significantly during the last five years at least. When I spoke to Isaac Garcia, an organiser of Coaching Agile Journeys, in January, he said their members have matured in their use of coaching practices during the last six or so years. And they are increasingly looking for ways to learn at a more mature level, from CAJ. (Isaac said CAJ was started by Lyssa Adkins after her book Coaching Agile Teams was released 20 years ago as a learning group for people to practice what they’d learned.)
Some of the coaching approaches and themes I’ve seen arise in this space in recent years:
psychological safety
Open Space
Liberating Structures
Use of NLP
Somatic coaching
Solution focused coaching
High-quality facilitation
So if Agile Coaches are using more professional coaching skills among the four competencies then professional coaching standards and continuing professional development should apply.
When delivering a course online, great facilitation becomes more important than ever.
This article appeared originally in the ICAgile publication on Medium in April 2020.
As the new economic situation becomes clear as a result of the global pandemic, my friends and colleagues have been looking for ways to move their businesses online. More than one person has asked me for advice recently. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about with regard to successful online/virtual learning events.
The biggest learning from my experience has been this: everything is amplified in the online environment. When the facilitator designs opportunities for interaction, it pays dividends during the course. When little attention is paid to how to create engagement, it hurts even more online than if you were working with the group in-person.
Many of you will already have great facilitation skills from your in-person events — the soft skills you use to engage and acknowledge people to make them feel part of your group. That’s right, great facilitation isn’t just energetic hand-waving, Lego games, and other entertainment that so many trainers have come to rely on for good course feedback. Your rapport-building soft skills are crucially important for ensuring people feel they belong in the online group.
Small groups for maximum learning
Activities need to be scoped well for small groups, with transparent instructions that participants can refer back to. People may be working in breakout rooms and, unlike with in-person events, it’s not possible to overhear people’s tone of voice changing which could indicate confusion or frustration with the work to be done. Give examples and set expectations clearly — and leave room for people to ask questions and clarify what they’ve heard — before sending people off to their breakout rooms.
Activities need to be scoped well for small groups, with transparent instructions that participants can refer back to.
Then drop in to the breakout rooms — and be sure to let participants know in advance that you’ll do this — to offer to help get the work back on track if the group is stuck. It’s important that you let people know you’re going to do this and why, before people leave your main meeting for breakout rooms. And it’s important to be available to help the group, because it can be frustrating for people to have their breakout room close without having done the work and gained the learning in the activity.
For some group activities, roles don’t need to be defined, in fact it’s sometimes part of my instructional design to let the group decide how to get the work done.
For example, in my Agile Fundamentals module on Individuals and Interactions, one activity’s purpose is to allow course participants to experience self-organisation. For this type of activity, you need to be clear about how much instruction you’re going to give, and — contrary to the advice I gave earlier — allow the group to decide how it gets the work done. I offer participants the Lean Coffee approach, using any tools that they feel happy using. (I give every participant the link to the Lean Coffee website in a shared folder with all course materials, before the course starts).
Activities like self-facilitated Lean Coffee are sometimes chaotic, usually full of compromise, and require listening to each other to agree how to can achieve the task together.
Psychological safety
Activities are more impactful from a learning perspective when there is psychological safety. I’ve noticed the term ‘psychological safety’ being used a lot lately in the agile community. I’d like to see it used (and understood) more for all learning events. And I hope that facilitators know that simply calling something safe doesn’t create the safety.
I try to create psychological safety through intentional behaviours. Some things off the top of my head:
Let people know, any which way you can, that you want to know what they think.
Encourage small talk at the start of the course so that everyone speaks as early as possible in the meeting. I became consciously aware from talking to Judy Rees about remote facilitation that the warming up and ‘getting to know you’ that happens over a coffee at in-person events isn’t there for remote. I had already made it a conscious practice to chat to my participants about the weather – literally – and about where in the country / world they are sitting. ‘Oh what’s that picture behind you…? How’s the weather in your part of the country…’ etc. Now I make sure to plan that into the first 10-15 minutes of an online course. Lately the small-talk has been about our health and how we’re coping with the lockdown.
Let people know, any which way you can, that you want to know what they think. Leave space for them to jot down ideas, take a screen shot of the slides and annotations in the meeting room, use slides that present a single question for reflection. For example: ‘What do these frameworks have in common?’, ‘How will my role change?’, and ‘What is a team?’. Get into the habit of asking open questions that stimulate thinking to encourage participants to relate the information you presented to their own role/work/life. These are questions for self-reflection, however one of the most satisfying experiences for me as a trainer/facilitator is when people start to feel compelled to verbalise the answers to my reflective questions. They have something important on their mind and they want to be heard. Brilliant!
Make eye contact. I try hard to ensure that I can see every single participant’s video all the time – not just the video of the active speaker.
Make eye contact. I try hard to ensure that I can see every single participant’s video all the time – not just the image of the active speaker. Then I drag the floating palette left or right so the the image of the active speaker is directly underneath my camera – so that I have eye contact with the person.
Number of participants
I know a lot of passionate trainers who have a firm upper-limit on number of people for an event. I’m one of them. For online courses, my preferred upper limit is 8 participants, 10 at a push. That’s for my virtual Agile Fundamentals course using Zoom. There is no absolute number. What you can manage depends greatly on what is being presented (50 participants ok as in webinars) or learned (10 at most with small-group work in breakout rooms), plus the comfort level of the facilitator with the tools and for managing groups generally. Experiment and decide what you’re comfortable with. Don’t be tempted to increase the number of participants. There is a ’tipping point’ which when reached means the quality of your online event collapses due to confusion and poor communication. I have experienced this with large groups in-person. I don’t ever want to find out what that limit is for online courses, as it’s so difficult to get people re-engaged if you’ve lost them.
Use of tools
What I’ll say about Google Docs and any of the other great collaborative tools like Lean Coffee Table, Trello, Mural, etc, is that those are only viable when everyone already knows how to use them. For some of my participants, it took a lot of courage to agree to do a course online instead of in-person. Asking them to learn a new tool inside Zoom is a step too far for many people.
When I facilitate online, I let the participants in each breakout room decide what they’re going to use. There are a lot of benefits to letting the group decide and as trainers of agile development, we should be even more tuned into ways to empower a group. So for my online events, I focus on making sure everyone can get into the Zoom Meeting and then use all of the engagement approaches described here to make people feel part of the event. Then I draw on a suitcase of games, activities, and tools to offer to the group in-the-moment.
Ready to get started? Contact us. We’ll respond within one business day.
Answers to your questions from the webinar, my notes, and of course the webinar recording here.
Agile Coaching isn’t just for teams! Leaders have just as much, if not more, influence on creating a culture to beat the competition and stay relevant in today’s fast-paced market.
Agile Leadership coaching helps you build resilience, think strategically, motivate your teams, and plan for the future.
This webinar is for leaders of development organisations, directors, product managers, senior project and programme managers, and HR business partners.
Notes
I promised to send my notes on each the areas that come up for leaders that work in complex and uncertain environments — leaders who want to be agile. Here are descriptions of each of the areas for leadership coaching that I mentioned.
Adaptability
Being able to adjust to new conditions
Resilience
The capacity to remain flexible in thoughts, behaviours and emotions when under stress. For more on resilience coaching, have a look at the work of Carole Pemberton.
Servant leadership
A leadership philosophy and set of practices, defined by Robert Greenleaf, to build better organisations. A servant leader ensures that other people’s highest-priority needs are being served. He said the test of servant leadership is Do those served grow as people? Do they become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous? I discuss servant leadership in my book Becoming Agile.
Sense and respond
Sense – acute and accurate awareness of what’s going on in the world and in business, in broad terms. Awareness of the facts. Respond – to make a small adjustment in how we lead or work with others, to move closer to what we want. Working incrementally toward goals or objectives.
Critical thinking
Solving problems through rational processes and evidence-based knowledge.
Cross-silo leadership
Leading with the whole organisation in mind. Helping teams see their work though the eyes of customers, business partners, or suppliers. Read my book Becoming Agile for more about what this means for individual leaders and their teams.
Growth mindset
The belief that we were not born with all of the skills needed for life and work. We can learn and improve through our own effort. For more on this, see the work of Carol Dweck.
Q&A
How do you explain the Agile concept when you coach and in what session do you introduce it to the coachee?
I try to hold back from explaining or ‘telling’ in my work, as much as possible. Some of agile coaching is teaching agile frameworks and techniques, so I only explain concepts if appropriate. As a leadership coach, my first job is to find out what the client wants from the coaching session and work from that point.
How is ‘adaptability’ different from ‘sense and respond’?
Thanks for that great question. The phrase ‘sense and respond’ has to do with taking in a wide plane of information about current events and global trends in business and other arenas (political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental). By understanding systemic trends (sense), a leader can then work toward incremental change (respond).
To me, adaptability is a personal willingness to have the courage to throw away the plan when needed, and change to current conditions.
When you are coaching, how do you practice selflessness and how to understand it’s the moment your ego forces you to make the decision and how do you come to the state of ego-free coaching?
I mentioned that a great deal of information about your client and the coaching relationship comes from paying attention to your (coach’s) own feelings, instincts, thoughts, responses. Nevertheless, when coaching we always work with the client’s agenda, not ours.
What tips do you have for coaches on coaching leaders who don’t appear to have a growth mindset? Leaders who are stuck in their ways and are not seeing the reasons to change?
My question back to you is ‘how do you know’? It may seem at first as if someone doesn’t have a growth mindset, however I think what we’re noticing is a resistance to change. That can have many root causes. Tell your client what you’re noticing, and ask for their thoughts. Try giving feedback and asking a question to draw out their thoughts and feelings.
Some people really don’t have a growth mindset, and if your client determines that that’s the case or you’ve seen/heard evidence that convinces you of that, work with your client to understand the strength of their need to learn new skills. I’d ask the client to rate their need on a scale (say 1-5), and go from there.
Becoming Agile
The worlds of Agile development and professional coaching come together for the first time to show how organisations become Agile in more than name only. For all leaders, coaches, and change agents.
