The Agile Coaching DNA

The Agile Coaching DNA
Manoel Pimentel
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http://leanpub.com/TheAgileCoachingDNA
This version was published on 2018-11-13
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© 2014 - 2018 Manoel Pimentel

To those who inspired it and will not read it.
Contents
Release Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Version 6.0 (latest) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Version 5.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Version 4.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Version 4.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Version 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Version 2.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Version 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Version 1.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Who are the clients of Agile Coaching . . . . . . . . . 13

Who is the client in Agile contexts? . . . . . . . . . 15
Coaching Agile teams requires an integral approach 16
Why do we need Agile Coaches? . . . . . . . . . . . 17
CONTENTS
You may not need Agile Coaches . . . . . . . . . . . 22

How to avoid fluffy approaches. . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Identifying a reasonable level of coachability . . . . 26
Non-judgemental approach increases coachability . 30
The origin of this DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Introducing the DNA for Agile Coaching . . . . . . . 35

Catalyse Improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Promote Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Boost Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Facilitate Barrier Removal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Develop Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
How to evolve with this DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Practices to catalyse improvements . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Agile Coach as Change Facilitator . . . . . . . . . . 56
Strategies for change facilitation . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Reduce the friction in organisational changes . 62
GROWing improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Ingredients to catalyse organisational improvement 76

Change management vs change facilitation . . . . . 78
What are the most important ingredients for change? 80
CONTENTS
Extracting a metamodel of ingredients to change . 97

Clarity and responsibility about why change
is necessary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Desire to collaborate on the change journey . . 101
Low organisational friction and high safety to
explore new things . . . . . . . . . . 104
A continuous review cycle covering all the
listed ingredients . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
A brief story about this ingredient metamodel . . . 110
Takeaway from the ingredients to catalyse im-
provements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
How to promote awareness, boost ownership and

facilitate barrier removal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Improvement Mapping - A example of tool to hit
multiple goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
How to apply this canvas? . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Takeaways about the Improvement Mapping . 122
Practices to promote awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Key enablers for awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Driving people’s attention to actionable areas . . . 130
Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
CONTENTS
Situations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
A few more ideas to increase awareness . . . . . . . 143
Identity the sources of dissatisfaction using
STATIK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Be aware of interruptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Several things I think that help promote aware-
ness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Visual Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
System thinking to promote awareness . . . . . 150
Takeaway regarding the practices to promote aware-
ness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Agile Coaching supported by a data-informed culture 158

Why are metrics important? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Gathering data to feed good retrospectives . . . . . 162
A few examples of actionable metrics . . . . . . . . 164
Lead Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Flow Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Health Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
CONTENTS
Measure outcomes, not a particular practice

or technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Team Agility Health Check . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Organisational Agility Health Check . . . . . . 174
Business Measurements - Focus on the direc-
tion, not only on the speed . . . . . . 179
Experiments based on data . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Wrapping the learnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Practices to boost ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

Psychological Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
The Dude’s law - The key to unlocking ownership 195
Fix the system, not the individuals . . . . . . . . . . 198
Create an organisational exoskeleton to boost the
sense of ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Why decentralise the decision-making process? . . 205
A few more ingredients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Delegation board: A tool to foster engagement . . . 213
Key decision areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Factors to weigh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
The seven levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
The board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
CONTENTS
Another brief example of a delegation board . 218

The main takeaway regarding how to boost own-
ership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Practices to develop competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
It’s not only about providing training . . . . . . . . 224
The KAFE of competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
A simple real example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Designing new competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
The boundaries and overlaps between coaching
and mentoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
The everyday learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Agile Coach as a Learning Facilitator . . . . . . . . . 239
Ingredients to develop competencies . . . . . . . . . 241
Collaborative and emergent learning as a critical
element to developing competencies . . . . 249
Learning 1.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
Learning 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Learning 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
The essence of Learning 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
CONTENTS
Learning Canvas - A tool to promote collabo-

rative learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
How to use Learning 3.0 in Agile Teams? . . . 258
Cross-pollination of ideas and experiences . . . . . 260
The homework regarding the development of com-
petencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Agile Coaching as an activity, not as a role . . . . . . 264

A full-time role? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
Is there any solution for this situation? . . . . . . . . 271
Avoiding the kiss of death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Democratising the Activity of Agile Coaching . . . 275
The Great Takeaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
The general takeaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
Collaborate to the next versions of this book . . . . . 282
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

Release Notes
This book will be an evolutionary work to share ideas and
experiences about practices and techniques to catalyse im-
provements, promote awareness, boost ownership, develop
competencies, and facilitate barrier removal during the jour-
ney of agile adoption.
It will grow iteratively and incrementally. I will highlight the

new “features” of the book in the next release notes. Your
feedback will be the fuel to improve this material, and your
comments and ideas will drive the evolution of this book.
Thus, see more information about how to collaborate with
future versions in the last sections.
1
Release Notes 2
Version 6.0 (latest)
In this release, we are exploring the meta-skill of developing

competencies. In this version, we have a brand-new chapter
focused on exploring ideas and experiences regarding how
Agile Coaches can facilitate the process of learning during an
Agile adoption journey.
In this chapter, we are examining concepts and tools such as

the following:
• The differences and overlaps between coaching and

mentoring
• The KAFE (Knowledge, Actual Practice, Fluency, Effi-
cacy) model
• Collaborative and emergent learning
• Learning 3.0
• Activities to foster cross-pollination of ideas and expe-
riences
Additionally, we have a distinctive army of guests sharing

narratives about ingredients to develop competencies. I want
to say thanks to Anderson Hummel, Richard Aspinall,
Release Notes 3
Simone Pittner, and Victoria Thompson for sharing their

thoughts about this topic.
I sincerely hope you enjoy this new version. Feel free to

reach me out to talk about any idea in this version. Your
feedback/participation is the essence of this work.
Release Notes 4
Version 5.0
Welcome to the release number 5 of the book the Agile

Coaching DNA. This version is featuring the chapter regard-
ing practices to boost ownership. We are going to explore
elements like Psychological Ownership, The Dude’s Law,
Organisational Exoskeletons and Delegation Boards.
Additionally, we have two rich contributions from Ylva Fredriks-

son and Matti Klasson. They are sharing ideas and experi-
ences extracted from companies like Spotify and King.
It’s a special version with essential ingredients to uplift en-

gagement and collaboration in the organisations. Enjoy the
read.
Release Notes 5
Version 4.2
The release 4.2 is presenting a new chapter about “Agile

Coaching as an activity, not as a role”. My aim with this
chapter is to raise the awareness regarding when, to whom,
for how long, and how much the work of Agile Coaching
is needed. It’s an essential reflection because your company
may not require an intense use of Agile Coaching. I hope
this content may inspire you to enhance your approach as
a catalyst for improvements.
Release Notes 6
Version 4.0
Welcome to release 4.0 of the book “The Agile Coaching

DNA”. In this release, we are going to explore how Agile
Coaches can use the data-informed culture as an ingredient
to facilitate retrospectives, improve the delivery flow, support
the team evolution, and to catalyse evolutionary enhance-
ments. Furthermore, this version will present examples of
measurements and tools for agile ecosystems and will show
how to facilitate the interpretation of data to enable actions
to increase the organisational agility.
Release Notes 7
Version 3.0
The Release 3.0 is presenting a new chapter about “Practices

to Promote Awareness”. In this chapter, we are going to
explore how to combine different skills and tools to facilitate
people’s attention to areas to cause important improvements.
In addition, Alisson Vale, Amanda Varela, Daniel Ploeg,

Guilherme Motta and João Reis, are sharing great insights
and practices regarding helping people to enhance the focused
attention, concentration, and clarity regarding perspectives,
situations, gaps, bridges, and outcomes.
It’s a special version because it is describing lots of ideas

and tools to help you to promote awareness during Agile
transformation journeys.
Release Notes 8
Version 2.2
• This new chapter will explain how to use the Improve-

ment Mapping to promote awareness, boost ownership,
and facilitate barrier removal towards some improve-
ment
• Minor fixes and enhancements
Release Notes 9
Version 2.0
The chapter about ingredients to catalyse organisational

improvement is the most significant addition to this version.
In this new section, Alexandre Magno, André Faria Gomes,

Bob Martin, Caio Cestari, Celso Martins, Henrique Im-
bertti, Jason Little, Jon Gedge, Paulo Caroli, Shane Hastie,
and Vasco Duarte are sharing ideas and experiences re-
garding the essential ingredients for changes. I would like
to say special thanks to this crew for such extraordinary
contribution.
In addition, we are going to explore a pragmatic metamodel

of elements for catalysing improvements. This chapter aims
to increase your toolbox of actionable insights to facilitate
organisational improvements. That is the ultimate purpose of
the Agile Coaching DNA. I hope you enjoy it.
Release Notes 10
Version 1.0
Welcome to the first release of the book, The Agile Coaching

DNA.
We are going to explore the following chapters in this first

version:
• Who are the clients of Agile Coaching

• Introducing the DNA for Agile Coaching
• How to evolve with this DNA
• Practices to catalyse improvements
Notes to release 1.1: A few fixes regarding typos and formats.

Introduction
Due to the incredible popularity of Agile Coaching, the de-
mand to hire Agile coaches has increased in the last years.
Many companies are looking for this role, and several people
are offering services in Agile Coaching. It is possible to
see different styles and flavours in doing Agile Coaching,
which is good because diversity is important in our industry;
however, the most dangerous part is the massive number of
strange job announcements, asking for Agile Coaches, that I
have seen over there. For this reason, I think we need to reflect
on whether we know what Agile Coaching is and what the
expected outcomes for this role are.
I have been working with Agile since 2002 (I started with

Extreme Programming to be more precise), and I have been
providing Agile Coaching since 2008. Since then, I have expe-
rienced different ideas, formats, and techniques to support my
job as an Agile Coach. Because of this, I recognise it’s hard to
put this role into a box. To be honest, it’s challenging creating
11
Introduction 12
a universal definition for this sort of role. However, even with

this ambiguity, there are essential elements to define us as
Agile Coaches.
Trying to find this essence may be similar to examining

the DNA of some type of specimen. We can have different
shapes of organisms, but, at the end of the day, every cell
has the same genetic information. I have synthesised five key
elements to drive my performance as Agile Coach. I put these
components into a model called Agile Coaching DNA. This
model represents my essence as Agile Coach.
This DNA works as a compass to guide my decisions about

which practices and approaches I can use to help my clients to
achieve better results. I’m writing this book because I believe
this model can help others people to take some inspirations to
become better Agile Coaches.
Who are the clients of
Agile Coaching
Before the talk about Agile Coaching, let’s focus for a little
while on a few essential elements of coaching. We have
two primary roles in the professional coaching processes: the
Coach and the Coachee. The Coach is a professional who
applies coaching techniques. The Coachee is someone who
13
Who are the clients of Agile Coaching 14
is on the receiving end of the process and seeks support in his

or her journey toward a goal.
Who is the client in Agile

contexts?
Taking into consideration the definitions above, we can easily

infer who the Coachee is in the Agile Coaching process. The
Coachee is anyone who needs to learn new skills related to
Agile or use it to improve results or achieve a goal. In general,
we provide Agile Coaching to help people become better
Product Owners, better team members, better ScrumMasters,
better leaders, and better managers. An Agile Coach can act
on different organisational levels to facilitate change across a
company.
Coaching Agile teams requires an

integral approach
It is important to notice when we are coaching agile teams

that we need to work with the team as an integral element,
which means that the entire team is the Coachee. It is crucial
to help improve the relationships between team members to
reap the benefits of collective intelligence. For this reason,
all the team members should attend most of the team ses-
sions/coaching activities. The Agile Coach should be able to
facilitate the conversations in a way to create an inclusive
environment for every team member. Every team member
should have the chance to express their thoughts and to
collaborate to build the collective understanding regarding
the problems and the solutions.
Why do we need Agile Coaches?
That probably is the real burning question for the entire

agile community. Why do we need an Agile coach? Do
we really need that? Let me share a brief story about how
Agile Coaching can be valuable during the process of agile
adoption.
I started to work as an Agile Coach in 2008. I was working

for a big bank in Brazil. My initial goal was to help different
areas of IT (information technology) to develop the skills
and capabilities to improve deliveries from IT to the business
units.
I spent the first three months providing a lot of training

classes, organizing workshops, and working with different
teams to create a framework of an Agile workflow for the
organization. After a few months of doing that, I started to
notice a plateau effect regarding moving to a next level in the
Agile adoption. I noticed the level of resistance was increasing
among the people.
To better understand what was happening, I spent hours

having deep conversations with different people in this organ-
isation. I learnt two special lessons after these conversations:
• When you argue too much about the “why,” you fail
– When we’re in a change process, we can organise
the challenges into two big questions – why change?
How do we change? Most of the time, the “why” is
compounded by values, beliefs, assumptions, etc. The
“how” is more related to operational stuff. Due to these
aspects, in my experience, if you, as an Agile Coach, are
trying to argue about why the Coachee must change,
you’ll fail (I was failing exactly because of that). When
I was arguing about the “why,” I was trying to prove
to someone that “my point of view is better than your

point of view, so just accept what I’m saying!” It was
quite dangerous. It sounded like “my view about the
why is better than yours” or, in other words, “my values
are better than yours.” For sure, this kind of approach
caused resistance and difficulties in the change process.
For this reason, I learnt that as an Agile Coach, I should
help people with questions. I should especially ask open
questions to help them explore their mental model and
to find their own motivation.
* Knowledge is only one of the factors needed to develop

new competencies - As I mentioned earlier, I’ve spent the

first months acting as a mentor. When you’re acting as a
mentor, you provide the correct answers to solve some kind
of problem and the reasoning for some particular solution.
Mentors have the important role to help people to increase
their knowledge about something. It’s quite important. How-
ever, I noticed there was a lack of attitude in the people. There
was a huge gap between having the right knowledge and
putting it into practice. This situation was caused by elements
from the mental models of the individuals in the organisation.
According to Kate Ward in the book Mental Models: The
Key to Making Reality-Based Decisions, “A mental model
is your perception of reality about how something works in the
real world”. This means the people have motivations, needs,
desires, fears, values, beliefs, and expectations. Only telling
people what and how to do something does not help the
individuals explore (or change) those elements. I needed to
apply a different approach.
I found in the professional coaching approaches a way to

help me overcome this type of challenge. I also discovered
techniques to help people think about their thinking patterns,
reframe their fears, and explore new possibilities.
Once I started to effect this level of change, we were capable

of moving forward with the Agile adoption.
My biggest takeaway from this experience was my new view

on the need to combine mentoring and coaching to help
people embrace change. That is what Agile coaching is
about.
You may not need Agile Coaches
This is a strange thing to state this in a book about Agile

Coaching. It is a sad but true reality: most companies don’t
need Agile Coaches. Coaching is not mentoring. The two
are vastly different. When you’re acting as a mentor, you
provide the correct answers to solve a problem. When you’re
working as Coach, you provide a set of questions to help
people find out the answers by themselves. It is an approach to
make people more responsible for the solution. Also, it’s vital
that the Agile Coach recognises in which kind of situation
coaching and mentoring could be applied.
However, if your company is only looking for prescriptive

answers and doesn’t want to invest time in thinking about
their solution, maybe doing Agile Coaching is pointless. If
your company has this type of situation, perhaps a good men-
tor, an experienced consultant, or just an excellent manager
could be enough to promote improvements.
How to avoid fluffy approaches.
It is not too hard to find people who perceive Agile Coaching

as a fluffy type of work. Most of the time, Agile Coaching is
associated with fancy activities, using colourful elements, and
with too much focus on feelings, values, mindset, happiness,
etc. In fact, there are Agile Coaches around the world who are
incredibly focused on this type of approach. However, these
fluffy procedures are causing more resistance and misconcep-
tions in most organisations. For this reason, here are few tips
regarding how to avoid this type of approach:
• Identify the relevant problems to be solved – The

primary goal for Agile Coaches is to help individuals
and organisations to achieve better results. It is about
being more focused on tangible improvements. As Agile
Coaches, we should create a substantial connection be-
tween the process of Agile Coaching and the expected
outcomes from the company’s perspective.
• Understand your audience - It is important to un-
derstand what are the preferences or styles of work of
the people involved in the coaching process. Maybe the
people in your organisation doesn’t like to talk about

feelings, mindset, values, etc. Perhaps they don’t like to
attend some fancy and colourful activity. Maybe they
are more interested in concrete practices, numbers, met-
rics, results, etc. Identifying the styles of your audience
is essential. Tailoring the tone and the style of your
approach is necessary to avoid fluffy elements.
• Don’t start with magic solutions – Many Coaches start
their coaching process by offering specific frameworks
or specific tools to the Coachees. The knowledge about
agility, project management, business management, and
product development are vast and have a fantastic va-
riety of tools that can be used in specific situations.
So, as a Coach, invest most of your time listening to
people’s problems and help them to explore the tool or
framework that may better fit their specific need.
• Pull coaching instead push coaching – Let people pull
the Coaching or the Mentoring on demand. I mean
that you should avoid pushing your assistance on peo-
ple. Most of the time, it is only when people become
aware of their problems that they have sufficient clarity
and motivation to accept coaching. Many coaches get
anxious about making the process work for companies.

They don’t apply the right amount of patience needed
to see a solution fit or even to see a specific team
flourish. So, keep your days busy talking to people about
their environment, their problems, and even possible
solutions to their problems. Let people know that you’re
capable of helping them, and they’ll talk to you when
the time is right for them. With this approach, you will
get an excellent opportunity to focus your energy on
important improvements instead of wasting your time
chasing people who don’t want to listen to you.
Identifying a reasonable level of

coachability
When is someone willing to receive coaching? What are the

boundaries between push and pull coaching?
These questions ask about the most frequent concerns even

for experienced Agile Coaches.
In the article entitled “Are You Coachable?”, Timothy R.

Clark states,
“Coachability is the willingness to be corrected and

to act on that correction. When we are coachable,
we are prepared to be wrong”.
It’s fair to affirm the Coaching process only happens when

the Coachee has any motivation or interest for improving
or to achieve some goal. Having a desire for a future state
is one of the primary conditions for Coaching. Without these
conditions, the process of change will be much more laborious
and painful. In general, uncoachable people have far more
defensiveness and resistance to new ideas or to change.
Overcoming this lack of coachability is hard. There is no

magic recipe to turn people into a more coachable state. I
have been using a model to help me to assess the behaviours
and the traps related to defensiveness. I learnt this tool a long
time ago in the book named Alpha Male Syndrome. In this
book, Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson describe useful
approaches to coaching executives. One of this approaches
is about how to identify behaviours of high learning and
behaviours of high defensiveness. See in the figure below the
elements of this brief assessment. According to the Worth
Ethic website (www.worthethic.com),
“It is a tool for monitoring defensiveness. The

higher the score on the (+) scale, the lower the de-
fensiveness and the greater the openness to learn-
ing. A high score on the (-) scale indicates the
opposite: a lot of defensiveness and a mind closed
to learning”.
Monitoring Defensiveness
It is possible to use this tool as a way to promote awareness

in the Coachees. It is a vital ingredient during the coaching
process. When people are aware of the problems or the

implications of a behavior, they are more likely to accept the
coach’s help. We are going to explore awareness in greater
detail in the section on Agile Coaching DNA.
Non-judgemental approach
increases coachability
Why aren’t some people coachable? We can highlight a few

reasons, like lack of trust in the Coach, resistance to change,
and fear of having one’s vulnerabilities exposed. Lack of trust
and fear of exposure are typical situations because, most of the
time, we want to project the best possible version of ourselves.
We don’t like to be wrong. For this reason, we avoid situations
where our self-image may be compromised.
Let me tell you a short story about this kind of situation. I

was working for a bank a long time ago. My initial mission
was to coach managers on servant leadership, foster self-
organisation, and teach how to manage projects in an Agile
way and increase collaboration, among other things. How-
ever, despite all my efforts, the managers were impervious
to my recommendations. Why? One of the reasons was the
approach I was using. Due to my background as a trainer/con-
sultant, I started this process offering a set of initial solutions
for the current problem and why it was important to make
this type of change. That was my biggest mistake. I was trying
to convince them. I was trying to prove my point of view. To

make my arguments more effective, I judged what was wrong
and what the problems were. I took into consideration only
my perspective, my bias, and my personal experience with
the traditional ways of working.
Telling what was wrong was creating negative feelings in

the people, mainly because they had a sort of emotional
attachment to the old ways of work. Peter Senge in the book
The Fifth Discipline wrote,
“The harder you push, the harder the system pushes

back”;
in this case, if you try to change someone with your strong

arguments, this someone resists with other strong arguments.
I was only able to change this situation when I gave up on my

initial set of magical solutions and started to ask questions
to explore the problems from their perspective. I was not
judging if the current practices were bad or not. I was not
trying to convince them to go to my vision of a better place. I
was willing the help them to explore multiple dimensions of
the situations, which meant exploring all the positive points
of view, all the risks, and all implications from the traditional
ways of work.
Non-judgment was a vital ingredient to get the buy-in from

the managers regarding the change process. That is why non-
judgment is so essential to increase the chances to raise the
coachability in the people.
The origin of this DNA
Similar to any other idea, this model started without a name.

The first time when I came up with the elements of the Agile
Coaching DNA was in 2010. I was working as an Agile Coach
in a financial company in Brazil. I was struggling with my
contractors and with my coachees (ScrumMasters, Product
Owners, and managers from different agile teams) to create a
shared understanding regarding what exactly my job was.
It was a typical misalignment of expectations. My intention

was uplifting their capabilities in learning and solving their
problems by themselves. They expected me to act more as a
mentor, give answers, and lead the solution.
To overcome this misaligned thought, I invited my contrac-

tors and my Coachees for a conversation. The goal was to
create an alignment of expectations regarding my work.
Most of that conversation focused on listing the most signifi-

cant problems they had and the competencies they needed to
solve those problems. After a few rounds of brainstorming
and consolidation, we agreed on three big goals for our
change journey: improving the delivery process, training
people in new skills, and fostering collective ownership

and engagement during and after the change process.
We started to use those goals to guide our decisions as change

agents in the company. We started to weigh how each action
could help us achieve any of those three big goals. In this way,
I was able to show them the negative impact of giving out the
all the answers.
That was the first version of the Agile Coaching DNA. It was
not called DNA at that stage. I just called it “goals of my
service as Agile coach.” It was a useful solution to prevent
mistakes and be on the same page as my clients. I have been
using and evolving those goals over the years. I started to
compile those ideas into a model this year. I named the model
“DNA” as it embodies the essence of Agile Coaching. We can
use the model as a compass when providing Agile Coaching.
That is the ultimate purpose of this model.
Introducing the DNA
for Agile Coaching
Agile Coaching is an approach to foster an organisation shift
to improve the work, the behaviours, and the outcomes in
the context of the development of solutions/products. It is not
only about adopting framework X or Y. Agile Coaching is
about how to enable people to respond more quickly, with
less risk, and more qualitatively for business opportunities.
To provide this enablement, Agile Coaches can work on five

elements (see the image below): Catalyse Improvement,
Promote Awareness, Boost Ownership, Develop Compe-
tencies, and Facilitate Barrier Removal. Those elements
work as big goals for Agile Coaches. Let’s talk a little bit about
those elements.
35
Introducing the DNA for Agile Coaching 36
The Agile Coaching DNA

Catalyse Improvements
Agile Coaching is about change (period!). It is about how we

can improve the organisational behaviours, at different levels,
to produce better results.
As Lyssa Adkins, the author of the book Coaching Agile

Teams, highlighted,
“Coaching happens through a series of artful con-

versations in which the coach helps the coachee see
new perspectives and possibilities.”
Agile Coaches must act as catalysers for the continuous

improvement culture.
Providing support and facilitation to the change journey is the

primary element during the Agile Coaching process. As Agile
Coaches, we need to continuously help organisations, teams,
and individuals in the journey from the current state to the
future state. That is the real gist of coaching.
As Agile Coaches, we need to master models regarding change

management/facilitation. Those models can help us to support
people to create a smooth journey toward the change.
Promote Awareness
To catalyse the improvements, it’s important to help people

to be aware of the problems, gaps, needs, options of
solutions, etc. Most of the time, Agile Coaches give support
to people to explore their mindsets, behaviours, and conse-
quences to promote changes and improvements.
John Whitmore, the author of the book Coaching for Per-

formance, pointed out:
“The first key element of coaching is awareness,

which is the product of focused attention, concen-

tration, and clarity.”
We can use different ways to promote this sort of awareness.

For example, we can use open questions to help people to visu-
alise and understand some particular thinking or behaviour.
John Whitmore also describes:
“Open questions requiring descriptive answers pro-

mote awareness, whereas closed questions are too
absolute for accuracy, and yes or no answers close
the door on the exploration of further detail. They
do not even compel someone to engage their brain.
Open questions are much more effective for gener-
ating awareness and responsibility in the coaching
process.”
Another good example is about Agile itself. We can use data-

driven culture and all sort of metrics (Flow, Lead-time, Cycle-
time, Throughput, Velocity, Cost of delay, Business value,
etc.) as enablers for awareness in organisations. In this case, as
Agile Coaches, we can use the Kanban Method to start helping
teams and organisations to visualise the workflow. Based on
this shared awareness, we can help people to identify the

opportunities for improvements.
Boost Ownership
Awareness can lead people toward engagement. If we are

aware of our problems and their implications, we are more
likely to feel responsible for the solution. Ownership means
that the person has sufficient commitment on the path toward
some goal. In others words, the person is committed to know-
ing why and how to build the road to reach his or her purpose.
This situation builds self-esteem and self-motivation.
Ownership implies in more autonomy or in a low level of

dependency to create and sustain solutions. In coaching, we
put into practice this famous quote:
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a
lifetime.”
For this reason, when an Agile Coach provides answers or

dictates exactly how to solve some problem, it compromises
the Coachee’s ability in learning how to learn. Also, give
answers maybe will create a dangerous dependency to the
Agile Coach.
In this case, the Coachee (the individual, team, or organisa-

tion) will always need help from the Agile Coach to create and
maintain the improvements. Boost ownership is the reason
why most of the Agile Coaches are temporary agents in the
organisations.
As a take away to boost ownership, Agile Coaches should

avoid dictating the solutions and must practice a non-judgemental
approach to help people to build their path toward some goal.
Facilitate Barrier Removal
During an Agile transformation/change initiative, there are

lots of obstacles to adopting new behaviours and practices.
Most of the time, Agile Coaches must act as change fa-

cilitators. A Change Facilitator is someone who helps the
organisation to identify the opportunities to improve and
foster collaborative strategies to maximise the success of the
change efforts. We always have driving forces (positive forces)
and restraining forces (resistance) to achieve any goal during
a change initiative. For this reason, we need to reduce the
resistance and take advantage of the positive forces. How-

ever, Agile Coaches are not secretaries for the organisations.
Facilitating barrier removal is about how to help people to
develop the skills and resources to overcome the barriers by
themselves. It’s important to remember: teach to fish, not give
a fish. In this case, teach people to remove obstacles by
themselves instead of merely removing barriers for them.
Develop Competencies
As you saw in the previous elements, helping people learn

new skills (hard and soft) is one of the key ingredients of
Agile Coaching. To develop people’s skills, we can create a
combination of two approaches: Coaching and Mentoring.
However, there’s a huge difference between both. When we

are acting as a Mentor, we provide the correct answers to
solve some problem. When we work as a Coach, we are
always trying to promote awareness and ownership in the
people so that they can build their solution. It is important to
make this difference pretty clear for the audience. Also, it is

vital that the Agile Coach recognises which kind of situation
to which coaching and mentoring could be applied.
As Agile Coaches, we also need to help the organisation in

creating strategies to promote a learning culture. We can use
different practices to reach this goal. One of the ways is called
Learning 3.0 (www.learning30.co). It is about how we can
create an organisational environment to foster collaborative
and emergent learning inside the teams.
How to evolve with
this DNA
I’ve synthesised those elements into this model to serve as
a compass to drive the behaviours and outcomes for my
work as an Agile Coach. I always need to evolve this DNA.
I need to add more practices and elements according to the
environment of the company or the team. You’ll need to make
the same thing in your context. You can create an infinite
number of genetic combinations with this DNA. I’ll present
three examples of evolutions for this model below just to give
you a brief inspiration.
The first image below shows a case regarding how to extend

this DNA providing Agile Coaching at the team level.
48
How to evolve with this DNA 49
The Agile Coaching at Team Level
The second image is about how we can combine this DNA

with the Agile Coaching Competency Framework. This
framework is a useful and popular model created by the Agile
Coaching Institute. The Agile Coaching DNA can help you to
tie together the competencies described in this framework.
Combining the The Agile Coaching DNA with the Agile Coaching
Competency Framework
The third figure explains how we can apply the Agile Coach-
ing DNA to drive practices and ideas for coaching at the
enterprise level. It is important to notice the essence is still
the same; however, coaching at the enterprise level requires
different skill sets.
The Agile Coaching DNA at the Enterprise Level

Practices to catalyse
improvements
Agile is causing a great change in the way of we see and treat
the organisations. The traditional models of management
worked on the assumption that even in a complicated system,
it was possible to predict behaviour when things change and
we can therefore use this understanding to “solve” problems
in the system.
As organisations have had to deal with more complexity

and uncertainty it has become impossible to predict how
change will affect their systems and so the traditional model
of management falls apart. Managers are no longer able to
employ “management best practices” and guarantee success.
Complex systems thinking is emerging as a way to deal

with this uncertainty. Every year, many scientists, physicists,
biologists, sociologists and philosophers have tried to gain
knowledge under the label of Complexity.
52
Practices to catalyse improvements 53
Melanie Mitchell, in the book Complexity: A Guided Tour,

describes that a complex system is
“a system that exhibits nontrivial emergent and

self-organizing behaviours”.
It is a pretty good concept. Especially when she points out

the nontrivial emergent behaviour. In other words, it’s hard
to predict and to control the behaviour of a complex system.
In complex systems, the unpredictability of how change af-

fects the system means we’ll often be surprised by the out-
come. No matter how well planned or how deeply understood
the method is, we can not avoid some unexpected behaviour
or undetermined outcome.
So what can we do about it? Donella H. Meadows, in the

famous book Thinking in Systems, pointed out that
“We can’t control systems or figure them out. But

we can dance with them!”
Despite what the large majority of people are trying to do,

in a complex system, it is better to try and learn from the
inherent complexity than try to break the system down into
less complex components.
Organism vs. Mechanism
The critical point of this discussion is that the traditional

methods/approaches treated an organisation as a mechanical
construct decomposed of small, interchangeable parts that
come together to form the whole (e.g. a machine), whilst
the new organisation is seen as an organic construct, with
individual, collaborative cells that work together to achieve a
shared outcome (e.g. a human body).
John Young, the author of the book The Natural Economy,

shared in an article the differences between Organism and
Mechanism:
“Take a physical organism, say the human body. It

is composed of diverse parts, each having its own
operation, and all contributing to the good of the
whole body. Now, at first glance it might seem that
it is essentially the same as a mechanism, say a
motor car. This is not so, most basically because
the physical organism is one substance, whereas
the car is many substances combined by art. The
car is an artificial whole, not a natural whole.”
Agile treats the organisation as if it were an organism rather

than a mechanism.
For this reason, Agile Coaches must understand the full life
cycle of changes. Agile Coaches must act as Change Facilita-
tors most of the time. We are going to explore more details
regarding this type of work in the next sections.
Agile Coach as Change Facilitator
Catalyse Improvement is the central element in the Agile

Coaching DNA. It is one of the most expected outcomes for
most of the Agile Coaching initiatives. For this reason, change
management/facilitation is a crucial skill for Agile Coaches.
We are going to explore a few elements about change in this
section.
Changeability is one of the most important characteristics for

companies in the 21st century. As Peter Senge pointed out
“Organisational change combines inner shifts in

people’s values, aspirations, and behaviours with
outer shifts in processes, strategies, practices, and
systems”.
However, most of the time, the people do not know how to

foster this ability inside the corporation. They need help. They
need some facilitation to overcome the obstacles during the
change journey.
As we discussed before, A Change Facilitator is someone

who helps the organisation to identify the opportunities
to improve and foster collective strategies to maximise the

success of the change efforts.
After several years facilitating organisations in small and

large change initiatives, I have collected a set of brief lessons
to help Change Facilitators in order to maximise the chances
of success in a change/transformation initiative.
See the lessons below:
• Develop a shared vision - Everyone in the organisation

must see, understand, and support the vision of where
we want to go. A good vision must give the directions
and inspire the people’s actions toward the change.
• Focus simultaneously on the hard and soft sides of
the organisation - The organisation has two unsepa-
rated faces—the soft side and the hard side. The hard side
is visible, and the soft side, most of the time, is invisible.
The soft side is about values, beliefs, motivation, percep-
tions, etc. The hard side is about capabilities, behaviours,
metrics, results, growth, scale, etc. Change Facilitators
must look after both at the same time.
• Develop a network of committed people - Commit-
ment is a vital characteristic for everyone in the change
team. However, to achieve a good level of success, the

change team needs support from other enthusiastic key
groups of people throughout the organisation.
• Find the MVI - Where can we start the change? Some-
times, we need to start the change process by a counter-
intuitive place because it is the most effective lever. The
most successful changes begin with small and evolution-
ary experiments. In order to maximise the chance of suc-
cess, change facilitators have to support the organisation
to define the Minimum Viable Improvement (MVI).
It is a set of small actions that need a low effort and
can produce a congruent and noticeable improvements
in the company. It is a smart way to create quick wins
to strengthen the change process.
• Foster the SEE-FEEL-CHANGE cycle - Changes can be
harder if you try to convince people only by using logical
arguments. One of the most effective ways to cultivate
change is to put into practice the SEE-FEEL-CHANGE
cycle. This cycle helps people to see and become aware
of what the problems are, feel why it is important to
solve the problems and create actionable insights to put
the change into practice. Change facilitators must build
a toolkit to help the organisation to handle each stage

within this cycle.
• Maximise enablers and Minimise blockers - It is a sort
of universal law—we always have driving forces (posi-
tive forces) and restraining forces (resistance) to achieve
any goal during a change initiative. For this reason,
we need to reduce the resistance and take advantage
of the positive forces. However, be mindful when you
are trying to reduce the resistance because companies
are like organisms—they have an immunity system to
prevent threats. In this case, the resistance is a natural
response to protect the system. It is an essential element
to help the organism to survive and to grow. If you try
to remove this immunity, the system may crash.
• Monitor and adjust strategies in response to prob-
lems - The corporation is a living system with complex
behaviours. We cannot predict and determine the effec-
tiveness of our actions in the change initiative. For this
reason, we need to put into practice a strategy based on
continuous inspection and adaptation in order to reflect
on what is working well and what needs to be enhanced
in our change management approach.
• Walk the talk - Practising what is preached and leading

by example are important characteristics for change
facilitators. Probably the better way to inspire people
is to be congruent about what you say and what you
do. For instance, it is harder to help someone to stop
smoking if you smoke every day.
• Sustain and Reinforce- Most of the time, transforma-
tion produces wins and losses. The art of successful
change is to create a balance between the two over
time. It is also about how we can create beneficial im-
provements for as long as possible. In order to reinforce
any change, the change facilitator has to keep updating
the organisation about the quick wins; and in order to
sustain these enhancements for a longer period of time,
the change facilitator must prepare the organisation to
sustain the new behaviours without external interfer-
ence.
• Be a cultural mixer, not a cultural imperialist - Most
of the change facilitators fail when they attempt to
replace an old culture with a brand new culture. It
happens because cultures are not like machine parts—
we cannot substitute the old ones for the new ones.
Great change facilitators are not “trying to shove new

practices down people’s throats”. They do not act as a
cultural imperialist because they understand the current
practices and values and create links and combinations
with new behaviours and thinking.
These lessons are just a kickstart to support your own change

management strategy. They are not a sequence of steps or
a methodology (unfortunately, there is no silver bullet re-
garding change facilitation). We are going to explore more
practices and ideas about change management in the next
sections.
Strategies for change facilitation
Reduce the friction in organisational

changes
In the previous sections, I mentioned a brief lesson entitled,

‘Find the MVI’. We are going to explore a few more thoughts
and examples about it in this section.
MVI stands for Minimum Viable Improvement. As a general

concept, an MVI is a set of small actions that require a low ef-
fort and can produce congruent and noticeable improvements
in the company. It is an interesting concept because, as you
well know, organisational change initiatives are hard and can
take too much time.
Complexity: The biggest challenge
The systemic complexity inside the organisations is one the

reasons for the difficulty in change initiatives. In complex
systems, the unpredictability of how change affects the sys-
tem means we will often be surprised by the outcome. No
matter how well-planned or how deeply understood the
method is, we can not avoid some unexpected behaviour or

undetermined outcome.
Leading a large change initiative with extensive plans and too
many areas to work on, can be tough and frustrating. For this
reason, sometimes, we need a different strategy. We need an
approach based on small and sustainable actions. We need to
find the MVI.
Identifying something minimum and viable
Defining an MVI is about how we can create a small lever

to start a change in the organisation. OK, but, how identify
effective levers? Follow a few set of tips to consider when you
need to identify some change leverage:
• Look for unexpected places - Sometimes, the better op-

portunities for improvements are in the unusual places.
• Take it one day at a time - Changing small daily
behaviours can be easier than make big changes in
mindset.
• Don’t use labels - Avoiding labels may reduce the
resistance to new ideas.
• Roles come last - Changing roles and organisational
structures may increase the organisational friction. Avoid
starting the change journey by changing the positions

and job titles.
• Survive today to fight tomorrow - Sometimes, you
need to change your approach as change facilitator when
the current strategy is no longer effective.
• Help the organisation to visualise small benefits -
Identify ways to measure and celebrate quick wins.
• Validate small hypotheses - Don’t you know where to
start the change? Are you lost in a messy environment?
Keep calm and validate a hypothesis. Adopting short
cycles of probing and sensing is a useful approach to
learning in complex systems. An MVI can be expressed
in a single idea to be tested.
Putting it into practice
I would like to share a brief example of how we can put

those tips into practice. Imagine a company that is trying
to create a better relationship with its customers in software
development projects. Instead of trying to use an imposing
role (like Product Owner), the first single viable improvement
in this type of relationship is to ask the client to participate in
a phone call of up to 30 minutes twice a week with members
of the project team to answer questions, clarify requirements,

and help prioritise work. It is a much more feasible action than
trying to push people to act in predefined roles.
It is only a starting point. For sure, the company has a huge

journey ahead; however, with this single MVI, the company
can start to feel the benefits and gain confidence to go further
in its journey of change.
Takeaway about MVI
MVI is a useful approach to changing facilitators during

change initiatives. It is helpful because it provides a good
way to focus on small and feasible improvements first. Due to
the complexity of organisational changes, it is much better to
concentrate on small actions rather than trying to change too
many things at the same time. This is the entire idea behind
the MVI: think minimally, keep things simple, reduce friction,
and produce little wins to make positive reinforcements in the
organisational change/transformation.
GROWing improvements
In the previous chapters about the Agile Coaching DNA,

I pointed out that catalysing improvements is one of the
primary goals of Agile Coaching. Thus, Agile Coaches should
have different ways to help individuals and organisations in
facilitating the journey toward improvement. For this reason,
this section aims to help you understand how to use the
basic elements of the GROW model to support the process
of coaching during a change process.
As I mentioned earlier, Agile Coaching is an approach to

foster an organisation’s shift to improve the work, the be-

haviour, and the outcomes in the context of the development
of solutions/products. That is why Agile Coaches are working
as change facilitators most of the time. The GROW model is
a useful way to facilitate the steps toward the change. Let’s
explore more details about this model.
What is it?
GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and Way For-

ward. This model was well explained by John Whitmore
in the book Coaching for Performance: GROWing Human
Potential and Purpose – the Principles and Practice of
Coaching and Leadership.
The GROW Model is a valuable way of structuring an ef-

fective coaching process. We can use this model in different
ways. For instance, we can use it to structure a single con-
versation in a session, or we can use the model to create a
backbone of areas to explore in the entire coaching journey.
How to use this model in agile coaching?
Agile coaches can use this model to help people be aware of:
• the future situation

• the current situation
• the current problems and the current obstacles
• the implications of different options to overcome the
obstacles
• the wrapping-up of the next actions toward the goal
The first time that I had applied the GROW model was in
2008. It was at the beginning of my work as an Agile Coach. I
was helping a person to perform the role of a Product Owner,
and I was a bit lost, regarding how to help that person to
identify the first steps in this position. I found this model
when I was studying professional coaching. I saw lots of good
comments about the model from different sources. I decided
to begin an experiment due to the versatility of this model. I
realised that its structure could be well applied to support the
development of new skills, even if I hadn’t heard anything
about the application of the GROW in agile contexts.
The bottom-line of this experience was quite positive. The

GROW model was beneficial to helping the Product Owner
to be more aware of the big challenges and to organise the
first steps to overcoming it.
See the example below, which had been extracted from this
experience:
Goal (What do you want to achieve?):
• Improve confidence by prioritising the product backlog
Reality (Where are you now in relation to your goal?):
• No previous experience in this role

• Absence of prioritisation techniques
• Too many stakeholders with different expectations
• No room for mistakes with the customers
Options (What are your options? What would you do

differently?):
• Attend a course for product owners

• Learn more about how to engage stakeholders
• Involve the stakeholders to identify common criteria to
weigh the priorities for each product backlog item
• Facilitate sessions by using the technique “buy a feature”
with the stakeholders.
Way Forward (Which options work best for you now?

What actions will you take?)
• This Week: Run a survey to collect initial ideas for

prioritisation criteria
• Next week: Schedule a prioritisation session with the key
stakeholders
I love this example because it is simple and straight to the

point. However, don’t forget the necessity for conversations
in each area. The GROW model is only a foundation for your
process of coaching. That is the reason why it is so important
to use GROW in combination with other tools and questions.
Connecting GROW to others practices
It is possible to use the GROW model as a backbone to connect

other tools/practices. It is an interesting way to create a sense
of coherence and cohesion among different tools. See it in the
examples below:
Goal:
• Competency wheel
• SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, rel-

evant, and time-bound )
• OKRs (objectives and key results)
• Team health check
Reality
• Force Field Analysis (FFA)

• Agile assessments
• SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
and threats)
Options
• Brainstorming (as a team)

• Wins and losses (pros and cons) for each option
• Impact mapping
Way Forward
• Define the next Minimum Viable Improvement (MVI)

• Roadmaps
• Hypotheses to be tested
Structuring coaching questions based on the

GROW model
Promoting awareness is a vital element for the agile coaching

DNA. Agile coaches should help the coachees to be more
aware of the problems, the gaps, the obstacles, the implica-
tions of their behaviours, etc.
The use of open questions is a useful practice to promote

awareness. Agile coaches should master the use of this type
of questions. It is possible to use the GROW model to create
a better sense of purpose for the questioning process. We
are going to explore more concepts and practices about open
questions in the future sections. See a few examples below
about how to organise open questions around the elements of
the GROW model.
Questions to define the GOAL
• What do you want to achieve?

• What is important to you right now?
• What would you like to get from the next 30 minutes?
• What areas do you want to work on?
• What do you want to achieve as a result of this session?
• What will make you feel this time has been well spent?
Questions to be aware of the REALITY:
• Where are you now in relation to your goal?

• On a scale of 1-10, where are you?
• What has contributed to your success so far?
• What skills/knowledge/attributes do you have?
• What progress have you made so far?
• What is working well right now?
• What is required of you?
• What are the obstacles?
• What are the challenges?
• What are the risks?
• What are the opportunities?
Questions to explore OPTIONS:
• What are your options?

• How have you solved a similar situation before?
• What would you do differently?
• Who do you know has encountered a similar situation?
What were his/her solutions?
• If anything was possible, what would you do?

• What if could you have more options?
• What are the benefits of this particular option?
• What is the price of this specific option? What do you
need to give up to proceed with this option?
• What else?
Questions to define the WAY FORWARD:
• Which options work best for you?

• What one small step are you going to take now?
• What actions will you take?
• When are you going to start?
• Who will help you?
• How will you know you have been successful
• How will you ensure that you do it?
• On a scale of 1 -10, how committed/motivated are you
to doing it?
Takeway about the GROW model
GROW is a useful and versatile model to guide the con-

versations about improvements. This model provides a good
sense of direction for the coaching sessions. It is possible to

use this model as a backbone to create effective coaching
processes to catalyse improvements in different levels in
the organisation. You can organise your steps, your tools,
and your questions around this model. However, as John
Whitmore mentioned,
“the GROW without the context of awareness and

responsibility and the skill of questioning to gener-
ate them, has little value.”
Feel invited to apply this model in different contexts and to

make experiments and adaptations. Most importantly, use this
model as a tool to embody the Agile Coaching DNA elements.
For this reason, use this GROW model as a strategy to catalyze
improvements, to promote awareness, to boost ownership to
facilitate barrier removal and to develop competencies.
Ingredients to catalyse
organisational
improvement
Change facilitation is a critical competency for Agile Coaches.
Catalysing improvement represents the ultimate goal in
the Agile Coaching DNA. In the previous sections, we dis-
cussed models like GROW and MVI as useful tools to catalyse
improvements in organisations. However, due to the high
importance of this concept, we are going to dig a little bit
deeper into change facilitation in this section.
It is important to notice that, according to the Merriam-

Webster dictionary, a catalyst is “a substance that enables
a chemical reaction to proceed at a usually faster rate or
under different conditions (as at a lower temperature)
than otherwise possible”. Another interesting variation
of this definition is “an agent that provokes or speeds
76
significant change or action”.
Agile Coaches can use all elements of the Agile Coaching

DNA to evolve different strategies to promote change. It is
fair to state that, to catalyse organisational improvements,
we need to promote organisational awareness about what to
change, boost ownership regarding why the company needs
to improve, develop the competencies necessary to change,
and facilitate the removal of barriers during the journey.
Change management vs change

facilitation
I have been using “change management” and “change facili-

tation” interchangeably. Before we go ahead, it is important
to clarify a few issues around these terminologies.
Change management is commonly associated with the con-

ventional approach of treating change as a project, with a de-
fined start and end. This is not a wrong approach. Sometimes
we need to organise the change journey as a temporary effort.
However, sometimes social dynamics make the necessity for
change fast and unpredictable. Spotting a crystal-clear start
point and well-defined end point is hard. We cannot predict
or control the continuous mutation of the system. Change
becomes an ongoing activity in this type of environment.
Changes happen all the time, even when we don’t want to
change (it’s beyond our control).
To navigate scenarios with these characteristics, we need

adaptive and evolutionary approaches. We cannot manage
when to start, how to proceed, or when to finish. The only
thing possible is to facilitate a continuous process of transfor-
mation. Facilitation is about how we can reduce obstacles and

define components in order to preserve the system against
undesirable outcomes of change.
To avoid any misinterpretation around the Agile Coaching

DNA, and to amplify the possibilities of applying the tools, I
decided to call change management/facilitation as “catalyse
improvements”. Why is this important? To help us answer
this question, let’s explore what Eliyahu M. Goldratt pointed
out in Theory of Constraints:
“Not every change is an improvement, but cer-

tainly every improvement is a change.”
That is one of the reasons why the Agile Coaching DNA is

based on the idea of improvement catalysis. The goal is not
only to produce changes but to promote enhancements in
complex organisations. To achieve this goal, we need to learn
how to facilitate change processes. Because change facilita-
tion is a vital skill to work as a catalyst for improvements, I’m
dedicating a generous amount of this book to exploring ideas
and sharing tools about this topic.
What are the most important

ingredients for change?
Change facilitation is a vast and challenging subject, espe-

cially when we are focusing on catalysing improvements
across an organisation. There are different strategies, tools,
and practices to support and promote changes. However,
even with varying methods, tools, strategies, and approaches,
it is possible to identify a set of essential ingredients to
catalyse changes. Agile Coaches must help the organisation
mix different ingredients in order to maximise changeability.
I do not dare offer you a magic list of ingredients to catalyse

changes. At least, I can’t do it by myself. I strongly advocate
for diversity of ideas and perspectives. If you want to succeed
in change initiatives, you must consider all the different
points of view impacted during the improvement process.
To offer you more tools, I invited a group of brilliant change
facilitators from different parts of the world to share ideas
and experiences regarding the most critical ingredients to
catalyse organisational improvements. As you can see below,
the result of this collective sharing is a valuable set of insights
to increase the feasibility of changes.
“Improving learning is for me the most impor-

tant ingredient to make an organisational change.
Trying to change something in an organisation
is all about making people behave in a different
way. Usually, we do that by introducing new pro-
cesses, tools or structures, or even reframing the
current ones, and here is where the very chal-
lenge begins. If people find hard to learn the new
processes, which means put all that into practice,
they will feel uncomfortable and, of course, will
resist change. That’s why when they are in a train-
ing course about that new processes, for example,
they’re fine and enjoying it, but when they come
back to the real world and find hard to apply the
things and behaving differently, the resistance just
emerges.
Hence, if you improve the way they are learning

the new processes, by making this continuous,
somehow personalised and as part of the daily job,
most people will start to collaborate - and a new
behaviour will emerge.”
Alexandre Magno - Author of “How Creative Workers Learn”

- the first Learning 3.0 book (twitter.com/axmagno)
“The most important ingredient is to take into

consideration the individual motivation. Over and
over again I see people trying to make changes
without taking into account that the sum of peoples
behaviour plus the way they interact with each
other are crucial to making anything work. De-
cisions are made in closed doors, communicated
once and expected to work out. It doesn’t work.
Awareness is the first step, but there’s much more

to be done. That’s why I like to remember the AD-
KAR model when I want something to be different.
It reminds me that people should not only be aware
that the change is essential, but they also need to
desire the change to happen, they need to know
how to make it happen, they need to practice to
develop the competence necessary and the system

should somehow reward them along the way.”
(ADKAR stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability,

Reinforcement)
André Faria Gomes - CEO at Bluesoft (twitter.com/andrefaria)
“The most important ingredient for organisational

change, assuming we’re talking about positive or-
ganisational change, is the ability to actually have
a solid understanding of current state. Given that
we tend to talk about ‘Agile Transformations’ for
organisations, the focus is often on some mythical
‘transformed’ state in the future. This mythical
transformed state, this ‘future’ state, is always neb-
ulous at best. The best organisational changes I’ve
seen, or been a part of, start from a clear under-
standing of the now (which might include multi-
ple domains) and an idea (as described by Dave
Snowden) about doing more things like ‘x’, and
fewer things like ‘y’. Every new day is then a new
now. This allows for actions that are more inline

with an inspect and adapt mindset, and nudging
the organisation towards better outcomes.”
Bob Martin - Agile Coach at Elabor8 (linkedin.com/in/bob-

martin-5702297)
“After going through a few endeavours on Agile

transformations for the past 5-6 years, it’s astonish-
ing how there are millions and millions of dollars
invested on an initiative that has such a nice, fluffy
and hollow purpose.
You can go ahead and ask: “Why are we intro-

ducing practices A, B, C and D?”. Most of the
time, what I get from teams, managers and even
executives at the C-level is either “I don’t know”, or
something like “To become more competitive”, “To
boost staff morale and engagement”, or yet “This is
what the framework XYZ tells us to do”. But, at the
end of the day, what is the problem we’re trying to
solve with such practices?
Fitness for purpose: the missing ingredient for most

Agile transformations. It allows you to see progress,
to determine metrics, to experiment, succeed and
fail, to bond your organisation around something
that makes sense, around something that is solving
a problem - a REAL problem. Avoid using as a
recipe some Agile elements such as big up-front
frameworks, complete organisational re-designs or
technology pipeline strategies. Think about it!
How do we eat a cow? One bite at a time. So lay

out your problems first. Determine which hypoth-
esis could solve the most critical ones. Find your
success metrics. Try it. Learn with it. Tweak the
practices, if needed. The efficiency and effective-
ness of any process is directly proportional to the
effort on thinking about it - and it’s got everything
to do with fitness for the purpose of your Agile
transformation”
Caio Cestari - Agile Coach at Elabor8 (twitter.com/caiocestari)
—
“If I have to pick one, I would choose the ‘high

focus on metrics’. However, high focus on metrics
brings the necessity of high motivation to get the
metrics everywhere, interviewing people of almost
all areas within the company.
When you put the metrics in the core of your

transformation, you start to break down the most
strong barrier to the transformation success, the
system 2’s belief of the perfection judgment of the
System 1, or your intuitions, as Kahneman would
say. System 2 is a lazy system and will believe
in everything System 1 believes as truth, but the
System 2 can be trained to keep the System 1
alert to the traps of the intuitions. an excellent
way to accomplish the System 2 training to keep
a keen eye on the System 1 behaviour is using
metrics and maintaining all the company eyes on
the indicators.”
(System 1 is the brain’s fast, automatic, intuitive approach.

System 2 is the mind’s slower, analytical mode, where reason
dominates. From the book: Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel
Kahneman)
Celso Martins - Unified Flow co-creator, COO at Taller

Negócios Digitais and Managing Director at Agile Alliance
Brazil (twitter.com/celsoavmartins)
“I believe the willingness to change is a crucial

ingredient. If this element is not there, you can
create a sense of urgency by increasing awareness
about the current situation and the negative con-
sequences of not acting. It tends to help others see
the need for change.
Basically, you can’t coach someone that doesn’t

want to be coached. Inflicting help when it isn’t
wanted isn’t helpful.”
Henrique Imbertti - Director of Organisational Agility at

Magazine Luiza and Former Agile Coach at Spotify (twit-
ter.com/imbertti)
—
“The most important ingredient is feeling a need

to do something differently. Now that probably
sounds like a lot off of fluff, but once you boil
away the noise, frameworks, methods, models and
superficial urgency, all change starts with some
emotional response to what’s going on in the orga-
nization. It might be an internal event, or a change
in market conditions, but either way, there will be
an emotional response that provokes someone into
action.
That person will take action based on either being

motivated and willing to do something differently,
or they’re unwilling to live with what isn’t working
anymore. The trick is to validate whether or not
anyone else feels the same! All the change models
in the world won’t help if no one cares about the
change.
It’s important to deal with the emotional response

that provokes the change because people need time
to make sense of whatever the change is. We often
rush too quickly into creating a rollout plan, re-
sistance mitigation strategy, fancy strategic pillars,

metrics, and scorecards and then we find out too
late the change is wrong one, or no one cares.
Meaningful change takes time to explore, it’s vi-

tally important to be as loose as possible while
you explore what the change means to people,
how it affects the organization, and what ripple
effects are likely to be created. All organizational
change is social by nature, if enough people care,
the change will work, if not, no process will make
people change.”
Jason Little - Author of Lean Change Management (twit-

ter.com/jasonlittle)
“I think the most fundamental condition that has

to exist for an agile coach to help an organisa-
tion make the change it wants is a relationship of
trust between the coach and the client. Why do
I think trust is so important? Real organisational
change requires cultural change. Cultural change
requires a shift in organisational structures and

in people’s behaviour, and both of these require
mindset change at an individual level.
Coaching someone through mindset change re-

quires helping them examine fundamental beliefs,
some of which may be tightly coupled to how they
perceive themselves as a person. Without genuine
trust, people are unlikely to be comfortable with
the level of vulnerability this requires.
So what does it take to build a relationship of trust?
Over the course of a number of studies, the psy-

chotherapist Carl Rogers found that the three es-
sential elements for effective helping relationships
are:
- Unconditional positive regard – the helper ac-
cepts the client as they are without judgement.
- Empathic understanding – the helper is able to
see the World through the eyes of the client and
understand how it feels to be the client in their
current situation.
- Congruence – the helper is genuinely herself

with the client rather than wearing a professional
mask and hiding her true feelings.
I believe these are essential ingredients for nurtur-

ing a trusting relationship between an agile coach
and a client, but I believe there is one more.
Edgar Schein says asking for or being offered help

puts a client one down and a helper one up, and this
inequality can lead to a dysfunctional relationship
if it is not addressed. Because of this, Schein says
the helper’s first priority should be to equalise the
relationship through humble enquiry.
Humble enquiry requires the coach to be genuinely

curious, and to listen instead of making assump-
tions or trying to pigeonhole the client and/or
their situation. Listening like this helps to equalise
the relationship, but it also helps build rapport
and trust, and enables the coach to develop the
understanding that is necessary to offer real help.
By accepting your client (be they a senior leader,

a team, an organisation or a team member) as
they are now without judgement, striving to see
the World through their eyes, getting comfortable
being your true self with the client, staying curious,
and really listening without making assumptions,
I believe you are creating the conditions to build a
relationship of genuine trust and thereby laying the
foundations on which real organisational change
can be built.”
Jon Gedge - Agile Coach at Elabor8 (twitter.com/jongedge)
“Safety is the most important ingredient. When I

think about safety, I think about people safety. And
people are the catalyst or blocker for change.
The thing is, you want people to be the catalyst and
not the blockers. Therefore you must work on the
safety. The organization is changing from some-
thing people are familiar with to something new.
So you must ensure people are safe to experiment,
try, fail, adapt, and change again.
The moment people don’t feel safe to enter an

unknown state of change, they will look for safety.
And this typically means blocking the unknown,
the change.
Some quick wins for fostering safety: collaborative

environments, diversity-friendly, retrospectives, open
positive feedback walls, one on one constructive
feedback sessions.
The change is not about the organization, but about

the people. The people are the organization. People
will explore new options when they feel safe to do
so. Therefore you must work on fostering a safe
path for people to go throw.”
Paulo Caroli - Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks and au-

thor of Fun Retrospectives book (https://twitter.com/paulocaroli)
“I think that the single most important factor in

organisational change is genuine support at a lead-
ership/executive level. Many executives pay lip-
service to organisational change initiatives, they
tell someone “make them agile” without adopting

an agile mindset and genuinely adopting a mindset
conducive to genuine change and growth. Unless
people at the most senior levels of the organisation
adopt a growth mindset and visibly both encourage
changes in the behaviours and attitudes across the
organisation as well as making changes themselves
then any change initiative is bound to wither and
die as soon as it becomes tough. People won’t
persist unless they have examples from the top.
It is really important that senior executives ac-

knowledge their own fallibility, admit that they are
also on a learning journey and accept that they will
make mistakes; if they don’t then no-one else in
the organisation will be prepared to take chances
and learn. Any significant change is a series of
small steps and learning from mistakes and leaders
need to exhibit vulnerability and create a culture
where it is not just OK to make a mistake, but
find ways to celebrate the learning that comes from
failing fast and adapting to the constantly changing
circumstances which constitute the VUCA world

we are in today.”
(VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and

Ambiguity).
Shane Hastie - Director of Agile Learning Programs at ICAgile

and Chair of Agile Alliance New Zealand (twitter.com/shanehastie)
“If there’s one advice about Change Management

you can rely on, it’s this: “don’t think your way
into a new way of acting. Rather, act your way into
a new way of thinking!” David Marquet gave this
advice to me in a Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
interview. David is the author of Turn The Ship
Around!, one of the most important books about
change I ever read. But there’s another advice:
focus on the work you need to do, not on the
change! The focus on the change distracts us from
the real reason for the work: improve the world
around us. We need simple and effective solutions
to real problems, not another change project!
In short, here are two pieces of advice: First, do

something now as if the change had already hap-
pened. Second, do what delivers value to your
stakeholders! If you try to do these two you will
change the world!
Oh! And the third piece of advice: Read Turn the

Ship Around! Awesome book!”
Vasco Duarte - Agile, Lean and Scrum Speaker. Author of

#NoEstimates Book (twitter.com/duarte_vasco)
—
Extracting a metamodel of
ingredients to change
All insights, ideas, and experiences above are incredibly pre-

cious. I’m happy to have the chance to share such rich and
diverse perspectives in this book. Thanks to everybody who
contributed to this section. However, the burning question for
us is how to extract a common essence from those different
drops of knowledge. Is it possible? Well, I believe it is. In this
section, we are going to synthesise all those various points of
view into a metamodel of ingredients to catalyse changes.
The intention of this metamodel is not to create a framework

or a methodology. It is hard to identify a one-size-fits-all
approach when we are talking about strategies for change
management. As mentioned earlier, change processes are
hard to control and predict. As a change facilitator, you
can never rely on just one model of change. However, it is
possible to identify a few key ingredients in most successful
changes. These ingredients are important, because if you
don’t have them the change initiative is more likely to fail.
Thus, identifying the existence of these ingredients is a vital
skill.
I have facilitated change initiatives in various companies over

the years. I’m happy to confess I failed in several change
initiatives I was involved in. Based on my experiences and
combined with the insights from my guests, changes are more
likely to happen when the organisation has:
• Clarity and responsibility about why change is nec-

essary
• Desire to collaborate on the change journey
• Low organisational friction and high safety to ex-
plore new things
• A continuous review cycle covering all the listed
ingredients
These are key ingredients in any change initiative. You can

facilitate organisational change in different ways by mixing
these common ingredients. Let’s explore these elements in
more detail below.
Clarity and responsibility about why

change is necessary
Clarity is about awareness of exactly what we are trying

to change and why we should change it. Responsibility is
about having a sufficient sense of accountability, influence,
impact, and motivation to make the changes. Clarity and

responsibility about change are reasons promoting awareness
and boosting ownership are elements in the Agile Coaching
DNA.
Most of the time, change facilitators should elaborate strate-

gies to help people be aware of problems and the implications
of issues. We can use strategies based on metrics or data
visualisation to help people be more aware of problems.
For instance, if we need a way to identify opportunities for
improvements in a software development workflow, we can
help the team measure flow efficiency. It’s a common metric
in Kanban/Lean approaches. Flow efficiency is a measure of
the percentage of time we spend actively adding value to an
item as it flows through a system. The calculation of flow
efficiency is as follows:
Flow Efficiency in % = Work Time / (Work Time

+ Wait Time).
In practical terms, flow efficiency between 6% and 12% is

quite common in product development teams in large or-
ganisations. What can this tell us? The idea of this metric
is to identify how efficient the system is. To calculate this
number, we need to consider the end-to-end view (from the

job arriving in the system to end user delivery). For example,
if the current flow efficiency is 10% it means jobs are spending
around 90% of the time in waiting stages and queues. This
number can be quite dangerous and can cause lots of pain at
different levels of the organisation.
Pain is a powerful trigger. When we feel the consequences

of problems, we are more likely to take action toward some
improvement. For sure, pain is not the only possible trigger.
Sometimes, the simple desire to reach a better place is enough
to drive change. We, as human beings, are seekers. Having
some destination, something to reach or pursue, is part of our
essence. We only need to focus most of the time. As Agile
Coaches, we must help people organise their thoughts and
draw their attention to the what and why of change.
Desire to collaborate on the change

journey
Organisational change is more likely to happen when people

feel the desire to help and be part of the change movement.
Creating a network of committed people is an essential condi-
tion, and willingness to change is not something to be forced.

We cannot use fear or authority to push someone toward a
state of “I want to change”. It is an inside-out process.
Creating the sense of desire is not an easy task. Desires are

part of a complex tissue of drivers, believes, aspirations, needs,
and expectations. We don’t need fancy tools or fluffy ap-
proaches to create this sense of desire. Sometimes, a genuine
and straightforward conversation about the points of diffi-
culty could be enough to trigger this willingness to change.
Neuroscience can be a useful source of elements to help us fa-

cilitate this process. One of neuroscience’s findings regarding
human behaviours is based on the fact our brain is always try-
ing to minimise danger and maximise reward. For instance,
the SCARF model is based on this idea. This model helps
us explore five domains of human social experience: Status,
Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. David
Rock, the creator of this model, states in the Neuroleadership
Journal (Issue 1, 2008):
“These five domains activate either the ‘primary

reward’ or ‘primary threat’ circuitry (and associ-
ated networks) of the brain. For example, a per-
ceived threat to one’s status activates similar brain

networks to a threat to one’s life. In the same way,
a perceived increase in fairness activates the same
reward circuitry as receiving a monetary reward.”
Helping individuals create ways to minimise the danger and

maximise the sense of reward will increase the chances of de-
veloping a strong desire to collaborate in a change initiative.
The first step to achieve this result is raising awareness about
threats and potential rewards related to a particular change.
As a general takeaway from this ingredient, we can under-
stand that promoting awareness is one of the best ways to
help people develop the desire to collaborate on change. If
everyone in the organisation or team is aware of the problems
and implications, they will be more open to working on the
change initiative. In this case, if we did a good job with the
previous ingredient regarding clarity and responsibility about
why change is necessary, the chances to increase the desire to
collaborate on the change journey will be higher.
Low organisational friction and high

safety to explore new things
It is necessary to create strategies to reduce friction to move in

order to maximise the feasibility of change. The formal defi-
nition of friction states it is *“the force resisting the relative
motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material ele-
ments sliding against each other”. As I mentioned earlier,
defining a Minimum Viable Improvement is a good way to
reduce organisational friction. Sometimes it is necessary to
slice the change into small pieces of experimentation to avoid
high levels of resistance.
Safety is another critical element because, most of the time,

change initiatives require navigation in unknown terrain.
There are too many uncertainties and risks to be mitigated
during change initiatives. According to Dr Evian Gordon
in the book The Brain Revolution: Know and Train New
Brain Habits:
“The safety first principle continually organises all

your brain’s networks and functions and deter-
mines what is most significant to you from mo-
ment to moment. It primarily keeps you out of im-

mediate and long-term danger, and then helps you
position yourself to achieve a range of rewards.”
This balance between avoiding danger and seeking reward

describes why people fight against some change. If the path
towards the improvement is a risk or contains many obstacles,
people will identify those difficulties as a danger and it will
cause more resistance to change.
Another common cause of friction is fear of failure. It is one of

the most dangerous obstacles to progress. It causes paralysis.
People spend too much time overthinking or seeking excuses
to not start moving toward improvement. Agile Coaches
should help people reframe the meaning of failure. People
don’t need to consider failure a goal, but it could be positive
if they consider failure an excellent opportunity to learn.
Importantly, one of the strategies to reduce fear of failure is
helping people implement actions to mitigate the risks and re-
duce dangerous implications in case of failure. Agile Coaches
should help the organisation overcome any difficulties for
change and create a safe environment to experiment with
new ideas and ways of work. That is why facilitating barrier
removal is one the essential elements in the Agile Coaching

DNA.
As Agile Coaches, we should help people identify strategies to

remove the impact of obstacles. For instance, one of the most
effective strategies to reduce friction is using exploratory
and evolutionary approaches. Running experiments may help
the organisation reduce the natural resistance to change. It
happens because learning is the goal of running experiments.
There’s an interesting positive psychological effect when
people are aware “we are not changing things forever, we
are just running a temporary experiment”. This type of
approach can increase the chances to maximise engagement.
Another good way to make the journey a little smoother

is helping the development of new competencies in the or-
ganisation. This is important because people need new skills
to surpass the challenges; hence, developing competencies is
part of the DNA for Agile Coaches. To facilitate the change
journey, we should help individuals create strategies to learn
and grow new skills. That is why Agile Coaches should
combine mentoring (teaching) and coaching (professional
development) to support this.
A continuous review cycle covering all

the listed ingredients
Organisational change is a complex endeavour. As I men-

tioned earlier, change management is hard and full of sur-
prises. Organisations are Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).
For this reason, change journeys are always exposed to un-
predictable effects. We don’t have control of all the results
and outcomes during a change process. Due to this high
risk of surprises, we need strategies to enable a reasonable
level of responsiveness. We need review cycles covering the
approaches. We do need to inspect and adapt the ways of
coaching. Maybe your current approach is causing more
resistance than expected. Perhaps a particular practice is not
creating a good result. Possibly your current way of working
is not fostering sufficient collaboration to change. Maybe you
can figure it out via new ways to evolve the Agile Coaching
DNA.
As mentioned previously, doing small experiments is an

efficient way to learn in complex environments. For this
reason, change facilitation involves continuous review of the
improvement experiments. Continuous improvement is also
the focus of Agile. The same statement is true when we

are talking about Agile Coaching. As Agile Coaches, we
should continuously review and improve our behaviours and
practices.
To simplify the process of continuous improvement, I like to

help my clients adopt a little model of work. I named this
model FLY. This acronym stands for:
• Focus on achieving a small goal

• Learn rapidly from the results
• You can improve in the next cycle
It is a useful and simple model to help teams adopt behaviours

of continuous improvement. Using this model, we can iden-
tify a small experimentation goal, set a short time limit to
review the results, and identify adjustments for the next cycle
of experimentation. It is a productive way to review the
efficacy of the other ingredients above.
A brief story about this

ingredient metamodel
Let me share a story about a place where I successfully

found the presence of these four ingredients for change. A
few years ago, I was helping a multinational company in its
Agile transformation journey. It was an exciting challenge
regarding the scale of work and the type of problems to be
solved.
Before this transformation initiative, this organisation had at-
tempted to adopt Agile for years using isolated and dispersed
efforts, with no success. Due to the size of this company, those
disconnected experiments did not produce concrete results.
One day, this company got a new CIO. He was the great
catalyser of a brand new vision for this company. This vision
was based on the idea to create better ways of work to
increase efficiency and preparation to go digital. He built a
strong coalition of internal leaders and influencers to help the
organisation understand the motivations to solve this type of
problem.
This global coalition dedicated a considerable amount of

effort to make this vision more visible and alive in different

countries. With this clear sense of direction and a strong sense
of urgency to solve the problems, the company could move
forward. This visibility of the issues and the opportunities
were crucial to foster the desire to collaborate in this change
initiative. However, this company had almost one hundred
thousand employees around the globe. Lots of different areas,
departments, process, process, systems, subsystems, etc. This
complicated and massive structure increased the difficulty of
change.
The path toward change was not accessible. Many problems

and obstacles became evident during that journey. It was
necessary to reconsider a few elements from the original
vision to overcome the challenges. They had to mix aspects
of the new way of working with elements from the old way
of working. For example, the original vision was to create a
profound change in the organisational structure. The inten-
tion was to develop tribes to work in a more driven fashion
on products and features. They figured out during the journey
that this type of change was not yet feasible. To increase the
feasibility, they had to create a hybrid structure combining
the traditional functional areas with the brand-new structure.
It was a mix of cross-functional teams, working together with

functional groups. It was not the perfect structure, but it
was a structure that worked for that company. That situation
illustrates two things: the necessity for continuous review
of ideas, and the necessity to reduce the friction opposing
change.
That particular company is still on the transformation jour-

ney. They achieved lots of quick wins regarding improve-
ments in the organisational processes and structure. They
have a new CIO now, but the vision for enhancements is
still active and the people still engaged in experimenting with
different and better ways of working. That is the goal of
catalysing improvements.
Takeaway from the ingredients

to catalyse improvements
The Agile Coaching DNA is about change, because agile

coaching is about helping organisations mix different in-
gredients to make changes happen. Unfortunately, there is
no magic recipe for this mix, but we can prepare different
approaches using various ingredients. It is possible to use
the five elements of the DNA as a guiding light to organise
approaches to change. The five elements of the Agile Coach-
ing DNA are not disconnected from one another. Any tool,
practice, or strategy can be associated with more than one
element from the model, and the same thing applies to all
ingredients mentioned in this section. The Agile Coaching
DNA should work as a complete organism to maximise
the power of each ingredient. That’s the ultimate purpose
of Agile Coaching.
How to promote
awareness, boost
ownership and
facilitate barrier
removal
The Agile Coaching DNA is not a linear method with a
bunch of rules to follow or a defined set of practices to
apply. It is a concept to enable the activity of agile coaching
to evolve in an organic way. For this reason, I have only
been sharing examples of practices and tools in this book.
It doesn’t mean you have to use or apply the practices/tools
described here. It is possible to achieve each goal of the DNA
by using and combining different means. You can use some
well-known practice/tool, or you can create your own unique
114
115
How to promote awareness, boost ownership and facilitate barrier removal
approach/tool to help you hit each goal.
It’s important to realise that it’s quite common to achieve

multiple goals using a single practice. For example, it’s quite
possible to use questioning skills to promote awareness, boost
ownership, and develop competencies. Information radiators
are another interesting example of this type of situation.
It’s entirely possible to achieve all five goals of the Agile
Coaching DNA using a good strategy of visualisation and
democratisation of information.
The tool below is an excellent example of the plurality behind

be Agile Coaching DNA. This single canvas can help us to
promote awareness, boost ownership, and facilitate barrier re-
moval towards some improvement. Let’s explore more details
about this tool.
116
Improvement Mapping - A
example of tool to hit multiple
goals
This tool is a canvas to help people to understand essential

questions regarding what and why to change. We also can
define the actions to create/maximise the enablers and learn
how we can minimise the blockages. I have been calling
this tool Improvement Mapping because it is an easy way
to promote awareness, boost ownership, and facilitate barrier
removal towards improvements.
This tool is based on a technique called Force Field Analysis

- FFA (developed by Kurt Lewin). It can help people to be
more aware of the driving and restraining forces involved in
achieving a goal. The FFA is similar to cycling - to go faster
and farther, we need to increase the power on the pedal or
reduce the wind resistance. In some ways, a similar situation
happens when we are trying to improve an organisation.
117
How to apply this canvas?
The canvas will create more direction for the conversations

or sessions of work regarding changes. Thus, it is possible to
use it in several different ways. You can use this tool to guide
one-on-one sessions or facilitate conversations among team
members about how to improve some aspect of their work.
Regardless of how you apply it, Improvement Mapping is

organised into six sections as described below:
What to improve - This area is essential because it can

promote awareness regarding the goal for some particular ini-
tiative of improvement. It will create visibility and alignment
118
among people about the essence of the change initiative. It is

possible to explore the current problem to solve or the future
state to be achieved. It doesn’t need to be a big goal or a long-
term objective. We can apply the concept of Minimum Viable
Improvement (MVI) to identify some small and viable target
in this section.
Example of content for this area:
• Enable a cross-functional team composition
Why improve - In this area, we are going to explore why

that particular improvement is necessary. If people are aware
of the reasons to change, they are more likely to develop a
sense of ownership for a change initiative. In this field, it is
possible to explore benefits, gains, advantages, etc. It can be
articulated in a qualitative form or using some quantitative
representation (like a metric, for example).
Examples of content for this area:
• Reduce waiting time in current workflow

• Improve time to deploy
• Increase end-to-end collaboration
119
Enablers (driving forces) - What’s leading us towards the

improvement? What elements can facilitate our journey?
In this section, people can identify the current strengths,
significant opportunities, and key motivators to enable the
change. This is a relevant section because it is possible to use
the enablers to maximise the chance of success or to build
momentum toward some improvement.
• Desire for learning new things

• Highly skilled professionals
• Organisational intention toward customer experience
• Support from the C-Level of the company
Blockers (restraining forces) - What is stopping us from

achieving our improvement goal? What is preventing us from
moving forward? What can jeopardise our journey? What are
the obstacles? The goal of this section is to identify the major
threats, weakness, and gaps to achieving the improvement.
This type of mapping is important to help us to create strate-
gies to facilitate the barrier removal.

120
• Few members offshore (remote)

• Current budget policies based on functional silos
• No previous experience working in cross-functional teams
• Unawareness of the current value stream
Actions to maximise enablers: - Coaching is about help-

ing people take concrete steps to improve their reality. For
this reason, agile coaches should help the coachees identify
and put into practice the necessary actions to maximise the
enablers to change. Sometimes, utilising an existing strength
or opportunity is a clever way to maximise the chances of
success towards some improvement.
• Identify the first pilot product

• Organise Lunch and Learn sessions
• Run an inception workshop involving the entire team.
Actions to minimise blockers - As mentioned many times

before, change is hard. Most of the time, there are lots of
obstacles during the journey to change. Facilitating barrier
removal is one of the goals of the agile coaching DNA. Thus,
121
it is essential to help people to implement actions to make the

journey smoother.
• Identify a pilot product where the Product Owner can

be accountable for the budget
• Run sessions of value stream mapping with managers
and teams
• Enable video conferencing using ChromeBox
See the image below for a complete example of this canvas.

122
Takeaways about the Improvement

Mapping
This canvas is a useful way to facilitate sessions of work to

define and review the actions during a change journey. Its
usability is quite straightforward, and you can create it using
simple tools like flip chart sheets or whiteboards. In summary,
the Mapping has an especial benefit to generating alignment
about what to change and why to change it. This type of
information is a crucial ingredient to promoting awareness,
boosting ownership, and facilitating the barrier removal for
some improvement.
Practices to promote
awareness
“Without awareness there is nothing, not
even knowledge of nothingness” (F. Perls).
As I mentioned earlier, awareness is one of the critical el-

ements to catalyse improvements. We, as Agile Coaches,
should help people in this journey to augment the collective
awareness of problems, gaps, needs, and options for solutions.
People are more likely to develop a sense of ownership for the
change when they are conscious of those elements.
John Whitmore, in the book Coaching for Performance,

pointed out:
“The first key element of coaching is awareness,

which is the product of focused attention, concen-
tration, and clarity.”
123
Practices to promote awareness 124
He also mentioned,
“Increased awareness gives greater clarity of per-

ception than normal, as does a magnifying glass.”
That’s one of the reasons our task as coaches lies not only
with raising a coachee awareness of how his world impacts
him but also in facilitating awareness of how he impacts his
world and the process between him and his world.
In this chapter, we are going to explore how to start the

process of increase people’s awareness regarding the journey
to catalyse improvements. There are different ways to foster
this process of awareness. We are also going to explore how
to combine different skills to drive people’s attention to areas
to cause relevant improvements.
Key enablers for awareness
There are various strategies and practices for increasing aware-

ness, from a straight one-to-one conversation to sophisticated
information radiators. It is possible to enrol a few essential
competencies to enable Agile Coaches in the process of in-
creasing people’s consciousness. Here is a brief list of key
enablers for promoting awareness:
Cognitive science - the interdisciplinary, scientific study of

the mind and its processes. Cognitive science examines the
nature, tasks, and functions of cognition. Understanding how
the human mind works is a powerful construct to facilitate
the process of improvement. When we study cognition, we
explore how people process information, how they generate
ideas, how perception can affect behaviours, and how people
make decisions. In general, cognitive science is about think-
ing. By mastering the basic elements of how the brain thinks,
we can help individuals explore their mindset and behaviours
in search of improvement.
Questioning Skills - How can we use powerful questions to

help people explore their mindset? What are the differences
between open-ended and closed-ended questions? How can

we use open questions to foster actionable insights? Good
Agile Coaches should have strong skills in questioning. This is
a useful competency because it can create a mirroring factor
during the coaching process. Most of the time, coaches should
act as a mirror to the coachee. Agile Coaches can achieve this
goal by asking powerful questions. This approach is necessary
to help coachees see, listen, and reflect on their thoughts.
Helping individuals to explore their mindset is one of the
strongest key elements of the coaching process. During this
exploration process, people can identify what is necessary
to change and improve any aspect of their thinking and
behaviours. That is one the reasons why questioning skills are
so essential for any coach. However, not all sorts of questions
will help people explore mindset and change behaviours. For
example, asking, “What do you think about this option?”
will trigger a much deeper exploration rather than asking
“Is it the best option for you?” The first question is a good
example of an open-ended question, and the second question
is a typical example of a closed-ended question. That is why
understanding the differences between leading questions and
open questions is so important. I will explore other details
regarding how can we potentialize questioning skills in future

chapters.
Tools to increase visibility - Visibility is a vital element

to promote transparency, collaboration and improvements.
There are different ways to put visibility into practice in Agile
ecosystems.
Information radiators are one of the most common ways to

enhance visibility in an environment. According to Agile Al-
liance (https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/information-radiators),
Information radiator is:
“The generic term for any of a number of handwrit-

ten, drawn, printed or electronic displays which
a team places in a highly visible location, so that
all team members as well as passers-by can see
the latest information at a glance: count of auto-
mated tests, velocity, incident reports, continuous
integration status, and so on.”
In the same material, there is this complementary informa-

tion:
“The term “information radiator” is coined by Alis-

tair Cockburn, part of an extended metaphor which

equates the movement of information with the
dispersion of heat and gas.”
It is possible to apply information radiators do increase the

visibility of a great variety of subjects in different levels areas
of the organisations. For example:
• Progress of work using a Task

• Numbers of bugs, incidents and failures using some
continuous integration monitor.
• Numbers of passed tests
• Impediments
• Risks
• Metrics regarding velocity, throughput, lead time, cycle
time, flow efficiency.
• Progress towards some milestone
• Absences
• Team’s capacity
• Peer recognition using kudos cards
• Improvement backlog
• Happiness index/map to show the team morale
• Business metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), conven-

tion rate, activation, etc.
• Where the current bottlenecks are
For sure, there are many more ways to improve the visibility.
We are going to explore more examples and ideas in the next
sections.
Driving people’s attention to

actionable areas
Agile Coaches must help the organisation be aware of action-

able elements. It is possible to use a wide range of tools to
achieve this objective. Over the years, I have been collecting
different approaches to help me out with this type of chal-
lenge. In my experience, it’s important to increase people’s
awareness in five key areas: perspectives, situations, gaps,
bridges, and outcomes. As you can see at the image below,
I put those elements together into a model entitled House of
Awareness. I have been using this model as a reference to
uplift people’s awareness during agile transformations. Let’s
explore these elements.
Perspectives
Perspectives are all about helping people to explore different

point of views. Most of the time, the coachee is firmly fixed
in only one position regarding some problem or situation.
It is a dangerous condition because it can blind people to
explore different options and alternatives to overcome some
the challenges. For instance, when someone is running out of
ideas, it’s possible to help that person by questioning:
• Do you have someone who tackled similar situation?

• Do you have someone who you admire most?
• What could she or he suggest you in this situation?
Another exciting way to explore different perspectives is

helping people to see the situations for various positions
(or roles). Most of the time, people adopt the position as a
victim of the problems. We can spot it by noticing people
complaining or blaming someone else for the responsibility
for some circumstance. It can create a vicious cycle of lack of
actions. We, as Agile Coaches, can break this cycle. Asking
people to imagine the situation through the eyes of a villain
could be incredibly insightful. Just ask people something like:
• Imagine you are the villain in this history. What are

you doing to cause this situation? What could you do
differently?
This sort of question is a powerful trigger to promote reflec-

tions and inspire changes.
If we consider the typical challenges during an agile trans-

formation journey, we can map the perspectives of different
stakeholders or roles involved in this particular change ini-
tiative. In this case, it is possible to use techniques like the
empathy map to be aware of the main pain paints, risks, and
goals from the perspective of each important persona during

the journey to adopting Agile. One of the best ways to build
this map is by interviewing some key actors impacted by
the transformation. After a few rounds of conversation with
those people, the organisation will be more aware of relevant
challenges to adopting Agile. See the image below for a brief
example of this type of mapping of different perspectives.
Situations
Where are we? Where do we want to go? What are the

current problems? What are the most relevant threats and
opportunities? Those are common questions to promote more
awareness about the situations. Having a situational aware-
ness is about having a 360 view regarding all the essential

elements around us. For example, I’m used to helping my
clients be aware of the warnings and risks of adopting Agile.
It’s an important mechanism to help people be prepared and
take actions to mitigate risks during an Agile transformation
journey.
Visualising the pain points in a workflow is another powerful

way to promote awareness of the current situation. The
image below shows a simple and effective way to facilitate
this type of awareness. It is a combination of bits of value
stream mapping, flow management, and heat mapping. The
goal of this tool is to identify the pain points or source of
dissatisfaction in the current processes and activities. It is
possible to use this sort of tool to engage the entire team in a
conversation to identify points of improvement in the current
system of work.
Here are a few steps for using this tool in a group session:
1. Map the workflow of the actual process of work. It is

important to consider all the activities (ex: In Design, In
Development) and the waiting areas in the process (Ex:
Ready for Testing). Metrics are more than welcome at
this stage. Historical data about lead time, cycle time,

time in status, flow efficiency, etc., may drive deeper
conversations about the process.
2. Ask the participants to identify the major pain points in
this process on stick notes.
3. Stick the pain points next to where the problem happens.
4. Discuss and refine the material
5. Prioritise the most painful elements using dot voting (for
example, two dots per person)
See the result of this type of activity in the image below:
Gaps
Most of the time, it’s necessary to combine changes in “being,”

“doing,” and “having” to achieve some particular goal. Once
people are aware of the current and the future situations,

they need to be mindful of the gaps to be filled. The burning
questions to drive improvements is what the gaps are in the
following areas:
• What are we?

• What do we do?
• What do we have?
Once we are aware of our gaps to achieving something, we

can act to fill them to improve.
Most of the time, to achieve some goal, we need to develop

new competencies. For this reason, The Competency Wheel
is a good example of a tool to promote awareness of the
current gaps. In this case, the aim is to identify the potential
gaps in skills, knowledge, abilities, and characteristics to
achieve some goal. It will be an important step to developing
and growing new competencies.
The image below shows the Team Competence Wheel. It is

a simple example of an application of the competence wheel
in a team. In this canvas, we can identify the team name, the
members of the team, the key collective skills, and what the
next actions to grow competencies are. The team can decide

together if they are closer to the level of novice or if they
are closer to the level of expert. It is possible to capture the
individual perception regarding where each team member
believes they are for each competency (dots may represent
this information) and what the consensus about the level of
competence is.
Here are the steps to use this tool during a joint session in a
team:
1. Agree, as a group, what the major competencies for the

team are.
2. Ask them to make an individual self-evaluation re-

garding how satisfied they are or how much experi-
ence/knowledge they have in each competency. We can
express it in any position between novice and expert.
3. You can use dots to represent each team member (one
dot per person).
4. Use a line (like an arch) to capture the consensus as a
team regarding the collective level of competency for
each element.
5. Help the team to define which skills or characteristics
need to be improved and what actions are required to
increase the level of competency for each one.
See below an example of the application of The Team Com-

petency Wheel.
Bridges
People need to build bridges once the gaps are acknowledged.

Helping people to build bridges is an important and frequent
part of the Agile Coach’s life. In this context, a bridge is any
connection used to overcome gaps. These connections may
have the format of new meanings, new learning, further ac-
tions, or new situations to facilitate the process of overcoming
challenges and achieving results/outcomes.
It is possible to see an interesting example of a bridge in the

Team Competence Wheel (described above). As you can
see on this canvas, the team can decide together what the
best actions are by which to grow competencies. Actions are
excellent examples of building bridges to overcome gaps.
The GROW model (goal, reality, options, way forward) –

as described in previous chapters– provides another good
example of how to identify bridges. In the GROW model,
elements such “options” and “way forward” can help us to
visualise the bridges and overcome the obstacles (realities)
to achieve a goal. As such, GROW is a versatile model for
coaching.
Outcomes
Why change? What are the benefits? What are the expected
impacts? Why is it so important for us? These are typical
elements by which to visualise desired outcomes. It is ac-
cordingly important to understand the differences between
outputs and outcomes. The main difference is that outputs are
about results and outcomes are about the benefits caused by
the results. For instance, delivering 30 points per sprint or 10
features in each release is an example of the output. Improving
customer satisfaction or creating a solid relationship between
business units and IT are exciting examples of outcomes.
In agile coaching, it’s important to help people understand

the benefits of the outputs. Promoting awareness regarding
outcomes is about helping people visualise and understand
the reasons and benefits for and the impacts of each goal. It
is an essential type of awareness used to catalyse most of the
relevant improvements in an organisation. It is fair to state
that the process of coaching happens when people have a
reasonable comprehension regarding the current start point
and the desired endpoint.
Sometimes, the simple fact of asking people about what the

benefits are or what the success criteria for this initiative are
is enough to generate sufficient consciousness regarding the
most important drivers to achieve some goal.
Activities of “futurespective” are useful ways to visualise the

desired outcomes. On the website www.funretrospectives.com
curated by Paulo Caroli and Taina TC Caetano, you’ll
find an excellent collection of tools to facilitate sessions of
futurespective.
The Success Criteria activity is one of my favourite tools

described on this website. It’s an effective way to clarify in-
tentions and target outcomes. It’s possible to use a whiteboard

or a flip chart to help the team to identify four key things:
• “Intention”: the idea that you plan (or intend) to carry

out.
• “Target”: the key target outcomes from the intention.
• “Successful if”: The indicator(s) that prove(s) the criteria
are being met.
• “Failure if”: The indicator(s) that prove(s) the criteria
are not being met.
You’ll find a complete description of this activity on the Fun

Retrospectives website.
A few more ideas to increase

awareness
Similar to what I did in the chapter about Ingredients to

Catalyse Improvements, I invited a few special guests to share
their opinions regarding their favourite practices/approaches
to promote awareness. The result is a rich and diverse list of
tips to help you out in your journey to enhance organisational
awareness.
Here is the list:
Identity the sources of dissatisfaction

using STATIK
“I always start with visualisation. Visualisation helps put

everyone on the same page, visualising the current process,
current problems, working load, and purpose. I use Kan-
ban boards and visual facilitation techniques when trying
to understand the current team and project situation. When
I spot a problem, I always try to build some visualisation
that makes the problem evident. When visualisation is not
enough, especially when scaling information to higher levels
of the organisation, having good metrics in place also helps

with radiating information and making the need for change
undeniable and compelling.
In the last few years, one of my favourite approaches has been

a tool called STATIK. STATIK stands for “System Thinking
Approach to Introduce Kanban”. The interesting thing
about STATIK is that it is not only about Kanban but also
usable anytime you want to understand the current process
that has been executed. With STATIK, you start understand-
ing the purpose of the services provided, the current sources
of dissatisfaction, how frequently you receive requests, how
you are meeting customer expectations, among other useful
information that might set up the stage for you to start a
coaching initiative. After you run a STATIK workshop, you
will have enough information to start bringing to surface
boards and visuals about the current situation, and that will
be the basis on which to catalyse the improvements on the
current system of work.
Frequently, STATIK is the first workshop that I run with

a team, or people involved in the provision of a service.
Understanding their purpose and letting them talk about their
sources of dissatisfaction is a good way to start, as from

a coaching perspective, there is the message that there is
someone listening to your pains, and this person can help
you with some of them. Agile Coaches can use STATIK as an
opportunity to validate the alignment of the team according
to the purpose, and raise the opportunities from coaching
from the sources of dissatisfaction. Starting by addressing the
team’s/organisational pains is a good way to start and pri-
oritise improvement opportunities. It gives more social capital
with the involved ones for the implementation of new ideas.”
Amanda Varela (twitter.com/amandavarella)

Kanban Coach and Consultant at Elabor8
Be aware of interruptions
“Interruptions are one of the most common challenges we

face across different organisations. When developing and
delivering software, interruptions may cause severe impact on
the ability of an individual or a team to deliver a specific goal.
One of the main problems is the amount of time it takes to get
back to having the focus on the previous task at hand. And it
gets worse when we look into what kind of work environments

we are currently in. Open-space offices that have been widely
used in IT also bring undesired interruptions. To make it
worse, we are dealing with creative work, which benefits from
collaboration between individuals. It is natural that our work
environments are not as quiet as a library, but higher noise
levels tend to impact individual focus negatively.
We need to be more diligent about interruptions. We need

to be conscious about when and how we are generating
interruptions among software engineers. One tool to create
awareness about interruptions is the Interruption Canvas.
This item helps to reveal who is being interrupted, and with
what, and shows if the frequency of interruptions is reaching
unacceptable levels.
The first step in this strategy is to put up a blank canvas on

a wall near the team or the individual who is often affected
by interruptions. You may start by dividing the observation
into 5 equal parts, each part representing a day of the week.
Whenever a new interruption comes up, ask the people who
are interrupting you to pick up a post-it note, write their name
on it, and include the reason why they are generating the
interruption (making a help request, answering a question,

asking about something operational, asking about something
for fun. etc.). Only help those who have written on their post-
its and after they have added their post-its to the Interruption
Canvas. This can lead to understanding which days you
get more interruptions, who is helping more than others in
the organisation, which topics generate more interruptions,
demands for specific training (in case multiple individuals ask
you about the same topic, it could be a symptom of a bigger
problem), and many other potentially beneficial actions.”
Guilherme Motta (twitter.com/gfcmotta)

Agile Coach at Globo.com
Several things I think that help promote

awareness
1. Visualise - Most knowledge work is hidden, and often,

the process is not commonly understood. Visualising work
and the process it follows helps get everyone on the same
page - but it should be collaborative to make sure all the
things you mentioned (problem, gaps, needs, options, etc.) are
discussed. I’ve often found this to be an illuminating process

as often, teams disagree about the process and come to a
common understanding. I guess the key is a good (but still
lightweight) facilitation to allow the exploration of these in a
safe environment
2. Limit WIP - This is harder to accept than visualisation

because a lot of people react badly to people saying, “We’re
not starting your widget yet because we’re working on another
one first.” This will catalyse further improvements by allowing
the team to focus on what is important right now and get the
flow right rather than task switching away all the time.
3. Retrospective processes - Although I originally thought

this was all about learning and improvement, there are a lot of
team-building elements that take place here. Often, this forum
is a foundation for building future trust and improvements.
Again, doing this collectively and giving the team ownership
of the improvements helps the emotional attachment to the
outcome.
4. Vision & purpose - Moving away from project managers

directing tasks to a team empowered to implement an out-
come. I find the agile inception process really helpful here. In
particular, I like the elevator pitch and success sliders the best.
Often, I’ve done this with an executive/sponsor in the room,
and how they define success is often quite different from what
the team assumes. Getting them all on the same page allows
the team to self-organise around the solution rather than just
completing tasks.”
Daniel Ploeg (twitter.com/danploeg)

Agile & Lean / Kanban Coach IT Delivery Leader
Visual Thinking
Visual thinking is a powerful way to communicate and facil-

itate the collaboration and engagement. What is the best way
to talk about visual thinking? Well, by using visual thinking
itself. For this reason, João Reis (medium.com/@jreisstudio),
an experienced Agile Coach and Visual Facilitator, shared a
brilliant visual summary to explain visual thinking. See the
image below.
System thinking to promote awareness
I will answer these questions in two parts. First, I will address

the systemic problem behind awareness.
In order to understand the importance of awareness, first, it

is necessary to notice that we, as individuals and in teams
and organizations, are embedded in a higher system and, as
such, we struggle to interact in a proper way that will fulfil its
purpose. A system is not the sum of its parts, but the product
of its interactions. If we assume that premise, awareness is a
fundamental element of a purposeful knowledge work system.
In a system, interactions are not based on actions of limited

and controlled effect. A specific action or decision can re-
verberate (and probably will) far outside its scope and time.
For example, a change in the method or frequency by which
a development team delivers its product can affect quality
assurance or deploy capabilities downstream, or a unilateral
decision made by a team to pursue a specific method of work
can harm the capacity of the whole organization to meet
customer expectations. In essence, in a system composed of
interdependent parts, every action (including improvement
initiatives) is an interaction that can act, potentially, against
its own purpose. So, then, comes awareness to remediate the
problem.
By expanding the awareness of the system about the decisions

of its own elements, you minimize unintended consequences
of each act. More than that, you enhance the capacity of
the system to orient and align the set of efforts towards a
common goal. This doesn’t mean that everyone should know
everything about everything. It’s not about control; it is about
the harmony of the individual goals with the purpose of
the system. Technical nature and responsibilities bound the
awareness of decisions.
So, the question is: “How can we be more careful about the
effect of our actions?” The answer lies in systemic thinking.
First, be sure that your improvement serves the system in
which you are embedded. This should be valid in the short and
the long-term, as well as in multiple dimensions (individual,
group, and organizational). Second, be sure that it does not
change the parameters of the service you provide; if it does,
make sure that your customer and other areas involved are
aware of the rational and expected benefits of the change.
So far, I have given you a systemic answer; it is useful for

a change agent whose main concern is the harmony of the
system where he or she is acting as a whole.
Now I want to focus on the psychological part of the answer.
It is well known already that encouraging the involvement of

people in the reasons and nature of change since the beginning
is paramount. They need to be the constructors of their future,
not the recipients of it. You don’t create a future and give it to
people for free. They will reject it, simply because there is no
better future without downsides and those will be remembered
as “givens” as well. So, that’s a starting point.
Psychologically speaking, people are more afraid of what they

might lose than excited about what they will gain when
change is on the horizon. Agile Coaches, especially, focus a
lot more on the change as such and on what people or the
organisation will gain with it. That’s a mistake. It is important
to identify those objections and coach people out of the fear
of losing what they have now, which is frequently intangible
and emotional. It could be a comfort, safety, a position, a
status, their identities, and so on – both psychological and
sociological.
It is also important to consider that it is natural to experience

fear in front of change once it implies going to unexplored
territory. In such a state, you need to be more alert, and the
body responds with anxiety; you need to break old habits and
build new ones. That is why you need to ensure that changes
are small and incremental.
The point is: in regard to change, it is more important to locate

and deal with the negative emotions (fear, anxiety, disbelief)
than trust that the positive ones (excitement, hope, optimism)
will support the change effort. Just early adopters stereotypes
go through change with those positive emotions, and they are
the minority.
As a coach, knowing that it is inevitable that the person

or group will indeed lose something, you need to make this
transition as clear as possible and help them find the way by
themselves.
In this regard, I think Agile Coaches need to develop more a

way of thinking and acting - which I tried to describe in this
answer - than using specific practices. Tons of practices and
tools are available. I believe practices are pulled by necessity
that emerges as the circumstances evolve. However, I will not
let you down by not suggesting a specific practice to help in
these situations.
I really like and recommend the work of psychologist Kurt

Lewin. In his book, Resolving Social Conflict, he talks about
the self-regulation of forces that maintains the present state
of affairs. Being aware of these forces has a huge impact on
people’s perceptions of the current situation and the factor
involved in changing it. Thus, a force field analysis could be a
good way to go in such cases. It is a good coaching practice
tool to have in your toolbox in order to bring awareness
of the change and its meaning to an individual, group, or
organization.
As a final word, I should say that people should also be in-

spired to assume responsibility and go to unexplored territory
and make of it a better world where we can all live. In other
words, get out of your comfort zone and do what it is
necessary to do in order to make things better. That’s our
ultimate duty as human beings.
Alisson Vale (twitter.com/alissonvale)

Software Zen Founder
Takeaway regarding the

practices to promote awareness
Promoting awareness is an important ongoing activity for

Agile Coaches. We can combine enablers like Cognitive
science, Questioning skills, and Visualisation tools to fa-
cilitate this process of awareness at different levels and areas
of an organisation.
It is necessary to help people to draw the attention to action-

able points to drive actions for improvements. That is one the
reasons why “The House of Awareness” is a useful reference
to help you to adapt your strategy to promote awareness.
Promoting Awareness is a continuous activity in the Agile

Coaching DNA. Awareness is the fuel to catalyse improve-
ments, boost ownership, facilitate barrier removal, and de-
velop competencies.
The tools and ideas described in this chapter are just examples
of how to promote awareness. You, as Agile Coach, should
create and adapt your own methods to foster people’s con-
sciousness. That is the reason it is so important to understand
the gist of promoting awareness. This essence is about help-
ing people to enhance the focused attention, concentra-

tion, and clarity regarding perspectives, situations, gaps,
bridges, and outcomes.
Agile Coaching
supported by a
data-informed culture
Metrics and data are one of the most useful enablers for
the Agile Coaching DNA. Promoting awareness regarding
158
valuable measurements and actionable information can catal-

yse improvement, boost ownership, facilitate barrier removal,
and develop competencies. In this chapter, we will discuss
through a few examples how actionable metrics can be used
to build a solid foundation for your work as an Agile Coach.
Why are metrics important?
Metrics can be a catalyst for improvements during an Agile

transformation journey. If you can ask about it, you can
measure it, and if you can measure it, you can improve it.
That’s the basic idea about metrics.
In the book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of

Intangibles in Business, Douglas Hubbard states:
“For all practical decision-making purposes, we

need to treat measurement as observations that
quantitatively reduce uncertainty. A mere reduc-
tion, not necessarily elimination, of uncertainty
will suffice for a measurement.”
From the Agile Coaching perspective, metrics are a mighty

door to start conversations and actions toward improve-
ments. Therefore, paraphrasing this definition from Douglas
Hubbard, metrics are observations that quantitatively reduce
uncertainty while promoting actions to effect improvement.
Without this sense of improvement, you are only producing
vanity numbers. As Agile Coaches, we need to help people to
overcome this type of trap.
With an approach based on data-informed culture, Agile

Coaches can avoid pointless discussions based only on gut
feeling or personal preferences, and also it may work as an
excellent strategy of change facilitation because data can help
relevant decisions about what and why change.
Another substantial benefit from the data-informed culture is

the support for the empirical approach. It is essential because
measurements can support continuous cycles of learning. Yet
another advantage is the possibility of running small experi-
ments or minimum viable improvements (see the previous
chapter about MVI) during an organisational transforma-
tion.
Making the problems so visible until it becomes undeniable is

the aim of the data-informed culture. Once we overcome the
denial stage regarding the issues, it increases the likelihood to
engage people to solve them; by the way, it is a tremendous
way to soar ownership.
Gathering data to feed good

retrospectives
Retrospectives are an effective way to reinforce this sense of

continuous improvement driven by data. As Agile Coaches,
we can help people to build strategies to use data to improve
the flow and the outcome of the retrospectives.
In the book Agile Retrospectives Making Good Teams Great,

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen describe a useful central
structure for retrospectives. This structure is based on:
• Set the Stage

• Gather Data
• Generate Insights
• Decide What to Do
• Close the Retrospective
It is a compelling structure since it provides a backbone to

apply different techniques and formats of retrospectives.
As you can see in this structure, gathering data is an essential

ingredient to run successful retrospectives. For this reason, the
image below enlightens us how the measurements provide
enough data and information to drive the generation of

insights and definitions of actions.
From the Agile coaching perspective, metrics are an effective

way to promote awareness, boost ownership, identify barriers
to be removed, and to support the development of competen-
cies. Consequently, retrospectives backed by data can work as
triggers to put in place the entire Agile Coaching DNA. That’s
the reason why a data-informed approach could be a handy
tool for Agile Coaches.
A few examples of actionable

metrics
There is a variety of possibilities of measurement in the soft-

ware development field. It is fair to assume that everything
can be measured somehow. However, you should not mistake
with the narrative of “everything should be measured.” Iden-
tifying the right thing to be measured is an essential activity
to cause improvements. Let’s explore, in the next sections, a
few examples of actionable measurements.
Lead Time
How slow are we to deliver a single feature? How long

does it take from the moment the request was received to
the moment the solution has been released to the customer?
The answer to these questions will reveal the Lead Time.
Let’s dive into how to use this information as an actionable
measurement.
Lead time is a robust metric inherited from the Lean approach.

There is an interesting definition of lead time in the book Lean
Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate
at Scale. In this book, the authors define lead time as:
“The time from the point a process accepts a piece

of work to the point it hands that work off to the
next downstream process.”
Jeffrey Liker, in the classic book The Toyota Way: 14 Man-

agement Principles From the World’s Greatest Manufacturer,
adds a precise short definition of this notion:
“Lead time is the total time the product stays in the

system.”
It is possible to summarise the concept as the summation of

all work time and all waiting time to deliver something in an
end-to-end perspective.
Once the organisation is aware of the lead time, it’s possible

to identify bottlenecks, problems, gaps, and opportunities for
improvement to optimise the delivery flow for the clients and
customers. That is why the next examples of measurement
will be useful the catalyse organisational improvement.
Flow Efficiency
As mentioned in earlier chapters, flow efficiency is a mea-

surement of the percentage of the time spent actively adding
value to an item as it flows through a system (lead time). We
can identify the efficiency of flow using the formula below:
Flow Efficiency = Work Time / Lead Time.
The image below provides an example of how to gather this

information from your system.
Based on the system described above, the image shows an

example of a spreadsheet that stores information about the
flow. It is important to notice that if we are gathering data
on lead time, work time, and waiting time, it is possible to
identify the average flow efficiency of the system by using

the calculation described above.
This information promotes an essential process of aware-

ness to drive conversations regarding workflow improve-
ment. Moreover, it can lead in-depth discussions about the
real obstacles, bottlenecks and problems in the system. As
you can see in the image below, flow efficiency can help
people understand the consequences of non-effective queue
management. Using measurements as a robust platform, Agile
Coaches should help people by asking the right questions to
increase the awareness and ownership of the necessity for
improvements. The image below shows us a few examples
of inquiries as well.
Flow efficiency is one my favourite metrics. Collecting this

information is not always easy. However, it’s a worthwhile
way to promote the eagerness for improvements in the or-
ganisation.
Health Checks
Identifying how healthy the organisational practices and be-

haviours are is another useful approach regarding measure-
ments. Health checks could be a valuable instrument to supply
the improvement cycles. Let’s explore how this measurement
can be used in Agile Coaching.
Measure outcomes, not a particular

practice or technique
There are many options of assessments and models to help

organisations to identify the current level of experience with
agile practices. In general, those assessments and models are
an exciting way to promote awareness. However, there’s a
danger. Most of the times, those assessments are driven by
the goal of being compliant with a prescriptive set of practices
and techniques. The primary focus of this assessment is iden-
tifying whether teams are conforming well to the rituals or
whether the people are following some rule of some particular
framework.
Measuring the outcome is much better than measuring the

level of conformity. For this reason, I have been using differ-
ent approaches while working with my clients. I have been
running health checks to spot the satisfaction level regarding
essential abilities to solve organisational challenges. The idea
is to use this level of awareness to trigger engagement to
provoke significant improvements in the organisation. Let’s
dissect how we can use these tools to make that happen.
Team Agility Health Check
Assess the current ability in solving team challenges is one of

the most effective catalysts of improvement during an Agile
transformation. This kind of awareness will feed introspec-
tion and conversations regarding what is necessary to change
in order to improve the team performance.
In general, I help the teams to be aware of how happy or

satisfied they are regarding ten key abilities for agile teams.
Here is the list of abilities:
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Visibility and Transparency
• Sustainable Pace
• Technical Mastery
• Learning and development of skills
• Productive tools/technologies for work
• Productive processes for work
• Goal clarity
• Impact of work
• Embedded Quality
I usually run quick surveys every iteration/sprint asking

the team members to rate their level of satisfaction in the
following scenarios:
• Cross-Functional Collaboration - In this sprint/itera-

tion, we had an excellent collaboration among all team
members to achieve high-quality work on time.
• Visibility and Transparency - We had enough visibility
of the daily progress, impediments, problems, and rele-
vant team decisions in this sprint/iteration.
• Sustainable Pace - In this sprint/iteration, we achieved
or exceeded the goals with no need for long work hours,
overtime, or even working weekends.
• Technical Mastery - We are proud of our design solu-
tions, quality of code, and all technical decisions we’ve
made in this sprint/iteration.
• Learning and development of skills - In this sprint-
/iteration, our daily work contributed to improving our
competencies (we learnt new practices, techniques, tech-
nologies, tools, and tricks to solve technical challenges).
• Productive tools/technologies - We had the best tool-
s/technologies to do the work in this sprint/iteration
productively.
• Productive processes of work - In this sprint/iteration,

we had the best methods (meetings, activities, practices)
to do the job productively.
• Goal clarity - In this sprint/iteration, the set of user
stories/scope was clear, and we collectively agreed and
understood the needed tasks to implement it.
• Impact of work - Based on the results of this sprint/it-
eration, we fundamentally believe the work we’re doing
matters and helps the organisation to create value.
• Embedded quality - We had a proper teams compo-
sition, processes and tools to integrate quality into all
stages of the workflow in this sprint/iteration.
As mentioned before, it’s a health check based on the iteration

cycle. I have been running this brief survey every iteration
with enough time to feed the conversations during the ret-
rospectives. It is a kind of warm-up of the retrospectives. As
you can see at the image below, we can build up a radar chart
based on the results of this survey.
At the beginning of each retrospective, the team can identify

what the critical areas to be discussed are. As you can notice
in this chart above, based on the average of the responses,
there are a few opportunities for conversations about how to
improve areas like cross-functional collaboration, embedded
quality, and useful tools for work. In addition, information
like minimum and maximum can lead us to a conversation
about different perspectives, and the collective action points
of improving the team’s agility.
If there are multiple teams, it’s important to keep some

consistency of areas assessed across all of them. The result of
health checks can drive collaboration to share learning among
different groups in the organisation.
Organisational Agility Health Check
Team Agility Health Check is a useful tool to support the

sense of continuous improvement inside teams. However,
sometimes we are working with multiple teams and in scaled
contexts, so, for this sort of case, it’s essential to promote
awareness regarding how healthy their organisational agility
level is.
Organisational agility is about having the behaviours and

practices to enable the company to respond to change and
generate value with less friction. This means that the com-
pany is capable of quickly and smoothly moving different
areas, levels and groups of people to deliver solutions in an
end-to-end approach.
Mastering the real value stream of the company is an essential

part of this process of awareness. According to James P
Womack, author of book Lean Thinking, value streams are:
“The specific activities required to design, order,

and provide a specific product, from the concept
to launch”.
Karin Martin, the author of the book Value Stream Mapping,

enriches this definition with:
“Value stream maps force an organisation to think

holistically regarding cross-functional work sys-
tems and product families”.
She hammers this in by saying, “Wherever there are a request

and a deliverable, there is a value stream”.
Our challenge as Agile coaches is to help people identify new

behaviours and abilities to create better versions of their value
streams. That is why organisational health checks may be
necessary.
Similar to the team agility health check, I have been running

organisational agility health checks based on ten critical Agile
abilities and behaviours:
• Visibility and transparency

• Risk management
• Management of dependencies
• Cross-collaboration
• Predictability of deliveries
• Fast decision-making
• Continuous improvement based on frequent feedback

• Smart queue management
• Embedded quality
• Value optimisation
I usually manage this health check by asking people at differ-

ent levels of the organisation and from different teams to rate
their satisfaction with the following:
• Visibility and transparency - We have enough clarity

about problems, impediments, and progress with epic-
s/features in the current release cycle.
• Risk management - We have short cycles of defining
and reviewing actions to mitigate risks.
• Management of dependencies - Relevant technical and
organisational dependencies are visible and managed
adequately.
• Cross-collaboration - The collaboration among differ-
ent teams and departments is efficient and constant.
• Predictability of deliveries - We have enough confi-
dence to define goals/milestones for this release cycle.
• Fast decision-making - Local decisions regarding de-
sign and implementation are efficiently made without
the overhead of meetings, approvals, and bureaucracies.

• Continuous improvement based on frequent feed-
back - We have short cycles of feedback to identify
global enhancements for the program.
• Smart queue management - The backlogs are ordered
and managed to improve the efficiency of the value
stream.
• Embedded Quality - We have a proper composition
of teams, organisational design, processes, and tools to
integrate quality into all stages of the value stream.
• Value optimisation - We prioritise the work using a
sense of optimising the delivery of value to customer-
s/users.
As a product of this survey, it’s possible to synthesise the

results using a radar chart similar to the image below.
This health check could be useful to supply program ret-

rospectives and identify actions to improve organisational
behaviours. Organisational health checks may carried out
every month or two. The duration of the release life cycle in
large initiatives is the best trigger to run health checks at the
organisational level.
Heath checks are just a tool to help people at different corpo-

rate levels and teams to determine where to devote attention
and energy to produce better results.
The list of abilities above is just an example of areas of

improvement. You can use a different set of capabilities to
run your organisational team health check. Despite the list of
questions or dimensions to be assessed, work as an ingredient

for continuous improvement is an essential characteristic of
any health check.
Business Measurements - Focus on the

direction, not only on the speed
Business performance is one of the most actionable triggers

for improvement in an organisation. All the energy spent on
measuring efficiency, velocity, and the health of teams may
be useless if the organisation is going in the wrong direction.
There are a variety of alternatives related to business metrics.

It is possible to find alternatives from traditional metrics to
visualise performance. Both could be useful in catalysing
improvements, even if the only consistent improvement is
ceasing to use crap measurements in the company.
It is essential to understand business dynamics. Companies

have different stages and also the competitive landscape can
quickly change overnight. For these reasons, it’s important to
keep a wide range of options open with which to measure
business performance health.
Agile is a mighty enabler for product innovation and for

designing better services for customers. Therefore, measure-

ments of customer engagement, revenue, and brand aware-
ness are common tools to help product owners, product
managers, and teams explore alternatives to creating better
products and services.
There are different ways to measure the performance of a

business. However, business metrics may be as simple as
asking the users to rate their satisfaction with the product
using smiley faces (such as sad, neutral, or happy) or using
a range of stars.
Let me share a brief story about how business metrics can be

simple and powerful at the same time. A long time ago, I was
coaching a banking solution provider. Among many company
indicators, one particular measure had started drawing our
attention: user satisfaction.
After a massive a platform migration, the users started to

experience an increase in the system’s response time. Even
with a beautiful user interface (UI), the users weren’t happy
with the product. Motivated by a massive number of com-
plaints from the customers, the company started to capture
the satisfaction level every fortnight. It was a simple pop-up
screen asking the users to rate their satisfaction using a scale

from terrible to excellent.
The result was an incredible disaster during the first weeks.

Almost 80% of the users rated the product as terrible or bad.
The awareness about this result triggered actions in different
organisational levels to improve this scenario, one of the first
actions was run customer research to capture more details
about the causes of user’s dissatisfaction.
The results were translated into backlog items for a variety

of agile teams. The prioritisation process has changed as well.
The product owners (POs) have started considering the goal
of improving user satisfaction as criteria for sequencing the
user stories in the backlog. This concern promoted more space
for innovations. Thus, hackathons and innovation days have
become regular events in the company. The user’s feedback
was fuel for more ideas and more improvements in the
product.
As you can see at the chart below, after four months of

hard work, the company has celebrated the mark of 66%
of the users rating the product as good or excellent. It
wasn’t perfect yet, however, it represented a significant user
experience improvement.
This story illustrates the power of data-informed culture

as fuel for continuous improvements. As Agile coaches, we
should enable organisations to take advantage of this ap-
proach. It is not about framework X or method Z. It is
about continuously nurturing people to interpret historical
data as support for actions to evolve the organisation. This
is the essence of data-informed culture and the gist of Agile
Coaching.
Experiments based on data
As I described in the chapter on strategies for change facilita-

tion, sometimes it’s necessary to identify a Minimum Viable
Improvement (MVI) as a strategy of change facilitation. Most
of the time, experiments are an excellent example of an
MVI. Running tests is an essential part of any empirical and
evolutionary approach to change. Therefore, measuring the
evolution and the results of the experiments is a vital activity

to support learning and to identify new improvements.
In this section, I am sharing a tool called Improvement Lab.

The intention is to explore how to use this tool to support the
experimentation cycle during a process of agile coaching.
The image below exhibits the six areas of the tool. I use this
tool to help teams and individuals to identify key experi-
ments to catalyse improvements. It’s a simple way to enable
coachees to formulate and review experiments.
Following is the description of each section of this tool:
Target (main question)

Used to identify the critical problem to be solved. The prob-
lem can be something more abstract like “how to improve

the collaboration among team members” or something more
concrete as in “How to reduce the lead time by 25%”.
Current symptoms
Current symptoms are about visualising the significant prob-
lems inside of the main question (target). This area will de-
scribe the critical situations, facts, and perceptions about the
consequences or the blockers that stop the organisation from
solving the central problem described in the target section.
For instance, if we consider the situation about the long lead
time, the consequences and blockers can be described as in
the example below:
• Low customer satisfaction

• Work on multiple demands at the same time
• Losing milestones of delivery
• Too many dependencies on vendors
Assumptions
People will be more capable of identifying assumptions after
a reasonable clarity of the symptoms. Assumptions are the
central belief in possible causes or short narratives that can
explain or help solve the main question target. In the example

about how to reduce the lead time, we can identify these
assumptions listed below:
• Work in multiple parallel demands decreases productiv-

ity due to context switching
• Long wait time in between stages
• Queue blindness is hiding significant bottlenecks
• We should focus more on finishing the current demands
in progress, instead of starting new ones.
• Low WIP fosters more collaboration
Experiments
Assumptions are beliefs. We believe that a particular situation
or idea is valid. Each hypothesis should be tested to identify
whether or not that theory is true. For this reason, it is neces-
sary to translate the assumptions into concrete and observable
experiments. For instance, it’s possible to run the experiments
listed below in an attempt to validate assumptions about how
to reduce the lead time:
• 1) Visualise the entire workflow including all types of

queues (wait time and work time)
• 2) Create policies to prevent the arrival of non-important/urgent

demands
• 3) Limit WIP to 3 items in the development column
Measurements
As mentioned earlier, good experiments should be observable.
For this reason, identifying ways of measurement is an essen-
tial part of running experiments. For example, in the question
about lead time, the team needs to:
• Collect Time in status

• Capture Flow efficiency for each demand
If necessary, it’s possible to define the expected values for each

metric as successes criteria to validate the experiments. For
instance:
• Time in status shouldn’t be higher than two days.

• The flow efficiency must be above 40%.
Learnings from the experiments

Reviewing the significant learning is the final step in the
experimentation lifecycle. Debriefing the findings, results
and perceptions is a necessary activity once the experiment

is done. In this stage, it will be possible to perceive and
discuss if the investigations have succeeded or failed. This
knowledge will lead people to review the symptoms and the
assumptions and create new experiments. For example, some
of the outcomes from the instance above:
• Experiment 1 succeeded and reinforced our assumption

about queues and wait time.
• Experiment 3 had a partial success in promoting more
focus and collaboration. We need to find additional ways
to improve it.
See the image below for a full example of how to use this
canvas.
Wrapping the learnings
Data-informed culture is a useful ingredient to support changes

and continuous improvements in organisations. Data is in-
credibly powerful to eliminate the noise during the process of
change/transformation.
For the Agile coaching DNA perspective, metrics and infor-

mation radiators are excellent ways to promote awareness,
engage people in the process of boosting the ownership to
solve problems and identify the barriers to be removed. Def-
initely, metrics and data visualisation are essential skills for
Agile Coaches who want to contribute to profound improve-
ments in organisations.
Designing a data-informed culture is not about creating a cold

culture where numbers and reports are the most important
thing in the organisation. Data-informed culture is about
using numbers and data to support the decisions and actions
to contribute to a better organisation. This is one of the goals
of Agile Coaching as well. So, we can have quite a potent
combination between both.
If the organisation doesn’t have a data-informed culture in

place, one of the first steps for Agile Coaches is to help

people create an organisational exoskeleton to facilitate the
information flow to capture and democratise data. This is an
excellent start to catalyse improvements in your system.
Practices to boost
ownership
Boosting ownership is one of the critical goals of Agile Coach-

ing. It is a relevant objective because a sense of ownership is
an essential element by which to engage people towards some
improvement. However, it is not an easy task. There are many
obstacles that can create a healthy organisational environ-
191
Practices to boost ownership 192
ment to increase people’s sense of engagement, commitment,

belonging, and autonomy. In this chapter, we are going to
dig deeper into the topic of ownership. As such, we are going
to explore how to use some key ingredients to increase the
likelihood of boosting ownership.
Psychological Ownership
What are the psychological facts that can trigger a sense of

ownership? Are they emergent characteristics? Alternatively,
can they be bred? Maybe science can help us to increase the
essential elements behind a sense of ownership.
Psychological ownership (PO) is a vast field of study for

psychologists, educators, sociologists, and economists. There
is a considerable number of academic papers and research
projects on this topic.
In the paper entitled “Psychological Ownership—Effects

and Applications”, Helen Campbell Pickford, Genevieve
Joy, and Kate Roll state the following:
“Psychological ownership is the feeling of posses-

sion over a target—an object, concept, organiza-
tion, or other person—that may or may not be
supported by formal ownership. This ownership
not only defines the object (“that is my team”), but
also, more importantly, the owner (“my team is
Oxford United; I am an Oxford United fan”).”
In the same paper, the authors summarise that the sense of

identification, control, responsibility, and the desire to be-
long are the most common channels to develop psychological
ownership.
From the Agile Coaching perspective, our challenge is about

how to unlock the elements to create this feeling of possession
over a new idea or any needed organisational improvement.
Let’s explore a few elements to facilitate this process.
The Dude’s law - The key to

unlocking ownership
The perceived value is one of the key ingredients in causing

a sense of ownership about something. One of the simplest
and effective ways to understand how people perceive value
is using a model called the Dude’s law. It is a simple concept,
and it can be applied to create the initial conditions to develop
a good sense of ownership. Let’s explore it.
David Hussman (in memoriam) developed the Dude’s law a
few years ago.
This law states the value (V) is the result of why (W) divided
by how (H). We can express this law using this formula:
V = W / H. The dude’s law is a useful concept because it
leads us to think about the intentions (why) and the mecha-
nisms (how) involved in achieving some result. According to
David Hussman (https://devjam.com/2010/08/05/dudes-law-
gordon-pask-shoveler/), it is possible to explain this law by
using the following definitions:
“[I]f (H)ow increase and (W)hy is constant, then

(V)alue is reduced. Or, in a similar way to Ohm’s
Law, If your W is constant (you know what you

expect) and you reduce H (less process) then the
V increases. As you drive the mechanics (H)ow
towards zero, which you could call leaning out
your processes, (V)alue increases even if Why is
constant”.
This concept is a perfect synthesis of how people can develop

a sense of ownership for something.
From the coaching perspective, Dude’s law is a useful tool

to help people understand the underlying conditions needed
to boost ownership. A bold sense of why and an efficient
way of work are the essential conditions to foster a strong

sense of ownership. If those conditions are not in place, people
are more likely to avoid ownership or engagement during a
change journey.
If the perception of value about a particular idea is low, as

agile coaches, we can help people explore all the possible
intentions or motives to embrace that idea, or we can help
people to figure out a different way to improve the efficiency
of the process/way of work. You don’t need to improve both
dimensions all the time. Sometimes, you can not change or
enhance the sense of “why”, but, quite often you can improve
the “how”. It is about generating value with less friction.
Once again, if the perceived value is high, people are more
likely to develop a good sense of ownership about something.
Especially in regarding immaterial stuff.
Fix the system, not the

individuals
The traditional sense of coaching and change management

postulates ownership and engagement as individual respon-
sibilities. In this case, the presumed lack of responsibility,
ownership, and engagement is an individual’s fault. Based
on this assumption, coaches, change agents, and managers
should supposedly fix individuals in this traditional approach.
However, trying to change people may be an ineffective
approach because the tissue of motivators, perceptions, fears,
hopes, needs, and expectations is vast and complex.
It’s hard to make precise predictions regarding how people

will react to a particular change, especially because the
sense of “why” is individualised. People can have multi-
ple perspectives and interpretations about the reasons why
something is important or not. Don’t try to label people
according to their drivers. People are different, and it is hard
to establish any patterns for motivators and personal drivers.
As an Agile Coach, avoid the temptation of using recipes or
mythical frameworks about how to make people happier or
more motivated. As an Agile Coach stay open to anything in

regards the complex tissue of needs and wishes.
So how can we foster this sense of ownership? To start with

the answer to this question, let me share a short story about
the first time I developed a strong sense of ownership for
something.
The year was 1997. I was young, I had hair, and I was at
the beginning of my career in the IT field. I was a generalist
about everything related to computers. I was used to coding
in Clipper and in Delphi, working as a graphic designer,
doing maintenance on computers, and building networks and
servers using Novell and Windows NT. I was hired to work for
a coffee factory as an IT assistant. In that company, we had a
small team of data processing centers to support IT solutions
for the entire business of the organisation. I was extremely
driven by curiosity for that type of work.
I had the privilege of working for a guy named Romulo Costa

as my manager. He was an experienced IT professional, and
without any particular intention or any particular method-
/framework, he created the conditions to my very first great
experience with self-organisation in work environments.
That company had offices in different cities, for this reason,

we had to travel around to solve problems in our systems all
the time. We were a small team, working in a fast and intense
business. My experience with those systems was little and,
Romulo, the manager, was not willing to become a bottleneck
for the team’s decisions. Thus, he decided to give me the
full autonomy to make any technical decision necessary to
solve the IT problems. He was used of saying: “As long you
have a recent backup, and you’re doing nothing against the
law, you can try anything to solve the problems”. For sure,
Romulo always was spending moments training me and give
me guidance about all the necessary skills to work with those
systems.
I started to work with the users freely, and I became responsi-

ble for the full implementation of a few systems. At that time,
I didn’t even know about empowerment. For me, Romulo was
just a great manager who trusted in my work. His attitude
of delegation and demonstration of trust were essential to
helping me to develop a strong sense of responsibility for
finding solutions. In less than one year, I became responsible
for different systems, and I grew a strong feeling of belonging
in and bonding to that organisation. I was part of something
quite important for the success of the company.
This little narrative illustrates the influence of the environ-

ment on people’s behaviours. In the book Principles Of
Topological Psychology, Kurt Lewin explained this type of
influence by using the equation B = ƒ(P, E). This equation
states that behaviour is a function of the person (P) in
his/her environment (E). It’s an interesting point of view
because even though we cannot change people’s personalities,
it’s possible to foster behavioural changes by altering the
environment.
Certainly, we can’t predict people’s behaviours. However, a

good organisational environment will work as an attractor
of positive behaviours. It is about creating organisational
elements to promote, support, protect, and facilitate a better
way to work.
Create an organisational
exoskeleton to boost the sense of
ownership
The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers two interesting defi-

nitions of “exoskeleton”:
• an external supportive covering of an animal (such as an

arthropod)
• an artificial external supporting structure
Grasshoppers, cockroaches, ants, bees, scorpions, lobsters,

and crabs are all examples of animals with exoskeletons. In
the robotics fields, scientists are creating exoskeleton pro-
totypes to enhance human capabilities or even help people
paralysed by severe spinal cord injuries recovery the ability
to move their legs.
It is possible to use this concept as a metaphor to explain the

type of change in the organisational ability to promote better
behaviours and results.
Specified detailed processes, events, rules, and steps are not

necessary to catalyse improvements when people have an
organisational exoskeleton.
This exoskeleton is about aligning the parameters and founda-
tions of how the work can be done, managed, and improved.
This is a useful approach when the organisation has multiple
teams that are working together on the same initiative/prod-
uct.
The alignment of how frequent the organisation will deliver

features to the customers is a good example of an organisa-
tional exoskeleton. In this scenario, discussions about Scrum,
XP, and Kanban are unnecessary as long the organisation is

able to demonstrate/deliver small features to the customers
in a short cycle of work. Another interesting example is
the cross-functional composition of the teams. In order to
facilitate the delivery flow and reduce the dependencies, the
company may need a new organisational design to ensure an
end-to-end cycle of development inside of the teams, which
means each team should have all the necessary skills to define,
develop, test, and deploy the increments in every iteration.
Based on this kind of alignment, managers, stakeholders, and

clients will not care if the teams are doing X or Y practice
every day. This alignment will provide more freedom and
more protection to try different practices to facilitate the
work of delivering small pieces of features. It will keep the
micromanagement away from the teams.
Hence, an organisational exoskeleton enables self-regulation

and self-organisation in a system of work. Both elements may
work as essential ingredients to increase the likelihood of
boosting a sense of ownership.
Why decentralise the

decision-making process?
Besides the benefit of increasing a sense of responsibility, par-

ticipation, and belonging, decentralising the decision-making
process will help the company to uplift its flexibility level and
its responsiveness to changes. The competitive landscape is
moving very quickly. Every day, the marketplace demands
quicker answers to consumer problems and needs.
If your decision-making capability is based on centralisation

and specialisation, you will always spend too much time
waiting for decisions from bosses or specialists. For this
reason, organisational agility requires fast decision making.
Agility enables quick decisions through decentralisation in
decision-making. However, it is not a trivial process because
there are many tensors and obstacles due to the conventional
sense of power in organisations. As Agile Coaches, we must
help managers, leaders, and teams to reduce friction in this
journey. In this chapter, we are going to dissect important
concept and tools to
According to Jurgen Appelo, author of the Management

3.0, decentralisation of the intelligence of decisions is nec-

essary because central control of a complex system doesn’t
work. This is because the central node of a network cannot
possibly contain all the information that is needed to make
good decisions everywhere.
The entire environment of work is a complex system. It is

important to notice each worker’s view is an incomplete
mental model of the whole system. This applies to workers
and managers equally. One of the ways to take advantage of
this collective intelligence is to distribute control to be shared
by all.
In the book Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal

shared a history of how he needed to change the structure
and the behaviour of military operations to fight terrorism.
He pointed out:
“Driven by the necessity to keep pace with an

agile enemy and a complex environment, we had
become adaptable. We had fused a radical sharing
of information with extreme decentralization of
decision-making authority.”
That is the reason why decentralisation is so important nowa-

days. People are more likely to develop a strong sense of own-
ership when they can contribute to the decision-making in
relevant matters. It will be a crucial factor to grow companies
more resilient and adaptable to unpredictable challenges.
A few more ingredients
I invited two experienced change facilitators to share their

experiences and ideas about essential ingredients to create
a good organisational environment to boost people’s owner-
ship.
The first guest was Ylva Fredriksson, who is an Agile Coach

and former Spotify worker. She gently shared the following
great advice:
“If I only can pick one ingredient, it has to be the

super versatile skill of ‘being curious’!
“Being curious means asking exploratory questions

and truly listening to the answers. Exercise curios-
ity in all levels of the organisation and don’t limit
yourself to only work-related topics.
“There is wisdom in all parts of the organisation.

If you can tap into that potential, you’ve accessed
so much power. Curiosity is the key to unlock the
systemic view.
“How to use this ingredient? When blame is flying

around in the organisation and teams don’t deliver
according to plan, I simply ask the teams and
the stakeholders what’s up and what they know
about the situation. When people feel heard and
not judged, they tend to calm down, and I can help
them take it to a constructive level. It also injects
trust and safety knowing that your opinions are
valued without being judged or ridiculed which of
course contributes to boosting ownership.
“Curiosity also allows me to connect with people

and has gained me a rich network full of people
with brains, skills, humour, and strange hobbies.
Life at work and in general becomes more fun
when you feel connected. They might be as sur-
prised as you over your connection, and we all
know that positivity boosts productivity”.
She also added a few final suggestions for leaders who want
to create participating environments:
“When you’ve started to walk down the curious

and open-minded path and gained people’s trust,
you need to stick to it or you risk losing everything

you’ve built up, be labelled a snake, and get burnt
forever. It might sound dramatic, but it takes a lot
to gain back trust, and it’s not rare that leaders fall
back to command-and-control under pressure.
“Overcome this by being open to early signals and

feedback directed to you regarding your behaviour,
own your mistakes, and be curious about why they
happened.
“In addition, always be clear and outspoken about

the vision. Where are you all heading? And read up
on “non-violent communication” an excellent tool
for efficient and curious communication.”
Matti Klasson, Agile Director at King Digital Entertain-

ment, gave a rich point of view about what he called extreme
ownership in Candy Crush. He said:
“In our live title, Candy Crush Saga that we de-

velop in our game studio in Stockholm, Sweden,
speed is everything. We need to fail fast to learn
fast to earn fast.
“We manage speed with a mission system. Each

team in Candy has a mission that’s aligned with the
overall vision for the game. The mission comprises
of a vision, a hypothesis, and a prediction of KPIs
we think could help us understand the success of
the mission.
“The team, together with the producers (PO) and

agile team coach, is responsible to create the vi-
sion, hypothesis, and KPIs so the team can create
experiments that prove or disprove the hypothesis.
The team has full ownership of the mission even
when the mission is done. A mission runs between
six weeks and six months.
“To govern the mission system, we have two meet-

ings on a monthly cadence. The mission review
meeting has the purpose to prioritize the missions
and pitch new missions. The outcome is a clear
top list of missions for teams to choose from when
changing mission. The portfolio balance meeting
will review the business and current mission bal-
ance and make an adjustment to the balance if
needed. This will give us a more balanced mission

portfolio based on current game trends.
“This system creates a sustainable business and a

high-quality product and, at the same time, high
alignment and autonomy. We called it extreme
ownership”.
I believe the gist of these two pieces of advice is about collec-

tive awareness and a strong sense of trust. These elements will
be an important enabler to creating an organisational culture
based on empowerment and a collective sense of ownership.
However, the next burning question for us is this: How can
we start this journey? Let’s explore one more tool may help
us in this sort of challenge.
Delegation board: A tool to foster

engagement
A delegation board is one of my favourite tools with which

to ignite the conversations regarding empowerment and how
to boost the sense of ownership.
The delegation board is one of the tools in the Management 3.0

ecosystem (as you can see in this link: management30.com/practice/delegation
board). It is a useful tool because it is a visual representation of
the current situation of delegation, responsibility, and control
in the organisation. The main differentiator of this tool is the
idea that delegation/empowerment is not a binary thing. The
delegation board offers the possibility to work with seven
different levels of authority. However, before we dig deep into
the seven levels, let’s align a few basic concepts.
Key decision areas
A key decision area is a relevant type of judgment/settlement.

In the traditional management approach, each key decision
area is the responsibility of the manager (for example, de-
cisions about the work schedule). Adopting a decentralised
approach, managers will start to share this responsibility with

the teams. For this reason, it’s essential to increase awareness
about the level of delegation for each key decision area.
Factors to weigh
It is possible to adopt any set of factors in order to support

the decision about the level of authority for each key decision
area. In general, the most common elements are trust, compe-
tence, and impact. Thus, a manager can apply different levels
of empowerment depending on the current perception of how
high the trust is in the team, how skilled the team is, and how
dangerous a wrong decision could be for the organisation.
The seven levels
Based on the two concepts above (key decision areas and

factors to weigh), we can dig deep into the seven levels. It
is important to notice that the levels range from 1 to 7 from
the Manager’s perspective.
• Level 1 — You, as a manager, make a decision for others

and may explain your motivation. A discussion about it
is neither desired nor assumed.
• Level 2 — You, as a manager, make a decision for others

but try to convince them that you made the right choice,
and you help them feel involved.
• Level 3 — You, as a manager, ask for input first, which
you take into consideration before making a decision
that respects people’s opinions.
• Level 4 — You, as a manager, enter a discussion with ev-
eryone involved, and as a group, you reach a consensus
about the decision.
• Level 5 — You, as a manager, will offer others your
opinion and hope they listen to your point of view, but
it will be their decision, not yours.
• Level 6 — You, as a manager, first leave it to the others
to decide, and afterwards, you ask them to convince you
of the wisdom of their decision.
• Level 7 — You, as a manager, leave the decision to them
and don’t even want to know about details that would
just clutter your brain.
The board
One of the significant inhibitors to good self-organising is the

“invisible electric fences”. Imagine, for example, you are in a
field with invisible electric fences, you probably would not

feel safe walking into this field, right? The same situation
could happen with a team without sufficient visibility of these
constraints.
To avoid this type of situation, we can build a delegation

board in order to increase collective awareness about bound-
aries and responsibilities in decision making.
On a delegation board, we can communicate the level of

authority with which the manager has empowered the team.
This is a useful way to lead conversations about the flow of
work between the team and the manager.
In the image below, see a brief example of an empty delegation

board with a set of key decision areas.
After a few conversations with the team and based on the

perception of trust, competencies, and impact, the first version
of the delegation is done.
It is important to notice that the delegation board is not static.

It is dynamic and can change over time.
This type of evolution is quite common because the per-

ception of competencies, trust levels, and degree of impact

can all change over time. This change must be reflected
on the delegation board. A manager can promote regular
conversations with the team (fortnightly, monthly, quarterly,
etc.) in order to review the configuration of the delegation
board.
Another brief example of a delegation

board
As I mentioned earlier, the delegation board is one of my

favourite tools with which to foster the culture of empow-
erment and the decentralisation of decision-making.
The image below is a brief example of one of my clients. It

is from a company that is transitioning from a conventional
and heavy process to a model that is more flexible and agile.

In this case, the delegation board is a great tool to manage
the expectations and put everybody on the same page about
the constraints and responsibilities. The example below is
how the delegation board aligns the relationship between the
product manager and the agile teams.
This board itself is just a consequence of something greater.

The conversation during the process to build this board was
greatly beneficial. The tool was the channel for in-depth
discussions about trust and the gaps in development or com-
petence. It led people to a state of continuous improvement.
The delegation board has been an interesting approach be-

cause people are much more aware and much more keen
on collaborating and identifying better ways to optimise the
decision-making process in this organisation. Consequently,
this dialogue and collaboration regarding the key decision
areas created a better sense of collective ownership in this
company.
The main takeaway regarding

how to boost ownership
The image above shows that the delegation board could be

a powerful tool with which to support incremental changes
inside organisations. Rather than promoting an extreme rev-
olution across the enterprise, we are improving the system
with evolutionary changes.
This is a useful approach for change management. The dele-

gation board is a tool that can increase collective awareness
about boundaries/constraints. Based on this awareness, man-
agers and teams can get into deep conversations about how
to create a fluid and organic intelligence regarding decisions
across the company. As a bottom line, we can foster more
adaptable and resilient teams and organisations. This sort of
outcome works as an excellent incentive to create a better
sense of ownership.
As Agile Coaches, we can use these concepts and tools to

help people in their journeys to enhance a sense of owner-
ship about change initiatives. This spirit will be an essential
catalyst to agile adoption in the organisation.
Practices to develop
competencies
222
Practices to develop competencies 223
Introduction
Learning is an endless cycle of discoveries and consolidation

of ideas and experiences regarding something. It is a lifelong
journey, and we are always seeking and exploring new fields
of knowledge. The learning process is particularly impressive
during an agile transformation journey. People will need a
different set of skills to achieve the desired state toward some
organisational improvement. For this reason, growth compe-
tencies are a significant part of the work of an Agile Coach.
In this chapter, we are going to explore key concepts and
practices to assist the development of people’s competencies
and foster a learning culture in the organisation.
It’s not only about providing

training
Firstly, it is crucial to acknowledge that overloading people

with formal courses and certifications is a frequent miscon-
ception in agile transformations. I made this mistake many
times in the past, and it was not a cheap misjudgement.
Developing competencies is not only about transferring knowl-

edge to people. The process of growing new competencies is a
little bit more complex and more prolonged than what we can
do in a classroom. As I mentioned previously, knowledge is
only one of the factors needed to develop new competencies.
People will need to work on different dimensions to increase
the spectrum of some skills. For this reason, let’s explore a
simple concept called the KAFE model to help us to under-
stand the anatomy of a competency.
The KAFE of competencies
As an Agile Coach, I used to be hired to assist people to

develop or to improve different competencies surrounding
agile. Usually, I have to work with Team Members, Product
Owners, Scrum Masters, Managers, and Executives, to help
them in the journey to grow soft and hard skills to perform
better in their roles. Most of the time, people will work in
these roles for the first time. For this reason, they need to
understand the ingredients of competence, and they need to
be aware of their current level of development in each of these
ingredients. Once people are aware of these elements, they
can establish the best ways to uplift competencies.
I have been using a systematic approach to help people to

create strategies of enhancement of competences. I call this
approach as KAFE. It is an acronym for Knowledge, Actual
Practice, Fluency, and Efficacy. See the key concepts for these
elements in the list below:
• K - Knowledge - This is about having all the nec-

essary information, concepts, and theories regarding a
domain/subject.
• A - Actual Practice - This is the proper experience of

applying the knowledge and handling the issues and
nuances in a domain/subject
• F - Fluency - This element is about how to perform more
naturally without expending too much energy during
the practice.
• E - Efficacy - This is about how to continuously use the
competence to produce the best results and outcomes.
Allow me to explore how we can use these elements in the

process of developing competencies. Let’s imagine you are
learning to play some instrument, ukulele, for example. To

enhance your competencies as a ukulele player, you need to
acquire knowledge about the essential elements of music,
scales, notes, chords, strumming patterns, etc. There are dif-
ferent ways to obtain this set of knowledge. Maybe you can
watch videos or, perhaps, you can have a teacher. There are
different ways of acquiring knowledge about something, and
this is an ongoing process of learning.
Nevertheless, collecting knowledge about music theory is not

enough to develop skills as a ukulele player. The actual prac-
tice is important to make it happen. As a ukulele learner, we
need the discipline to play the ukulele with regular practice
sessions. If you keep the discipline of frequently playing the
ukulele, as time pass by, you can enhance the fluency of
playing beautiful songs more naturally. It is important to
notice that when you started the practice, you had to pay
attention to every minor detail about playing the ukulele. You
had to dedicate your attention to where to put your fingers,
how much pressure to put on the strings, etc. It was not a
natural movement for your fingers and hands. Only with
continuous repetition and practice; you were able to develop
muscle memories to make the movements more natural. This
is the reason why fluency is a long-term journey for most of

the competencies.
However, having the elements of knowledge, actual practice

and fluency may be pointless if you are not obtaining the
benefits of playing the ukulele. I’m not saying you have to
play the ukulele professionally (in the sense of making money
with this). There are different ways to gain benefits. Maybe
you have a joyful hobby, maybe you are happier with that, or
maybe you can have much more fun by playing along with
friends and family members. In these cases, you have a good
sense of efficacy in the competence of playing the ukulele.
Efficacy is about how you can evince the skills and abilities
regarding a particular domain. This is the aim of the KAFE
model.
It is possible to apply this narrative above to any other agile

competence. For instance, think about skills like backlog man-
agement, working in teams, flow management, facilitating
ceremonies, navigating conflicts, etc. We can always identify
the set of knowledge required, how to keep practising, how
to enhance the fluency and the best ways to generate efficacy
with this competence.
A simple real example
The KAFE model is a useful approach to reinforce the fact

that to train and to teach people is not enough to enhance
competencies. Training and teaching are useful approaches to
help people amplify knowledge about some domain. Having
formal knowledge about a specific subject does not necessar-
ily mean you can show competence in real situations.
If we consider agility as one great competence for the entire

organization, we can apply the KAFE model to identify dif-
ferent strategies to uplift this ability. I had this experience
in one of my recent clients. It was a software development
provider who invested heaps of money in giving formal
training to people. However, formal knowledge and cer-
tifications about agile don’t prepare people to solve the
real challenges on how to translate agile to their context.
To fill this gap, they need to make changes in technical
practices and the systemic relationship among people. They
had integrated agile with other approaches creating unique
solutions of prioritisation and estimation, implementing new
ways of slicing of user stories, defining useful policies of
documentation, establishing better build and test processes
and fostering more adaptive managerial practices. It wasn’t

a short sprint of changes. It was more like a long marathon of
small and frequent improvements to develop the full spectre
of agility in the organisation. They had to combine knowledge
and discipline to keep the practice of continuous improvement
to enhance the fluency levels of Agile. This cycle of contin-
uous improvement triggered a better relationship between
the development teams and the business units. This better
relationship was crucial to improving business efficiency in
that company.
This short story illustrates the real essence of this model. It fo-
cuses on a systemic and integral development of Knowledge,
Actual Practice, Fluency, and Efficacy, which is the gist of the
KAFE model.
Designing new competencies
We can use the KAFE model to uplift an organisational

capability (as in the example above), and we can use this
model in teams and individuals, as well. Especially at the
individual level, the KAFE model has proven to be a powerful
tool in helping people to organise their steps towards a better
competence level.
The tool described below is an example of how Agile Coaches

can facilitate the elaboration of strategies to develop new
competencies. This tool is called KAFE Design. It’s a sim-
ple tool for helping Coachees in the journey to understand
necessary actions and behaviours to enhance a particular
competence. This tool works as a canvas to help people to
think about the following areas:
• Knowledge - How to get relevant information, theories,

and concepts about this domain?
• Actual Practice - How to start using the knowledge?
• Fluency - How to develop/enhance the naturalness in
doing this competence?
• Efficacy - What are the desired results for this compe-

tence?
See the image below for an example of an application of

this tool. In this example, the coachee was one team member
who wanted to increase his skills regarding collaboration and
facilitation.
The next example is about a Product Owner who wants to

improve his or her competence regarding product design.
We can use this tool to assist the conversation in a coaching

session about how to define actions to grow/enhance com-
petencies. This session can be a one-on-one conversation, or
perhaps a joint session with the whole team. I have been
applying the same tool in both types of situations.
The boundaries and overlaps

between coaching and mentoring
As you can see in the KAFE model, knowledge is an essential

ingredient to develop competencies. Approaches such as men-
toring and teaching are useful ways to facilitate people’s jour-
neys towards some particular knowledge. Sometimes, Agile
Coaches may act as trainers and mentors to increase people’s
awareness of the different options to solve the challenges of
adopting agile.
Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, training and mentoring

are not enough. Most of the time, people need assistance to
connect Knowledge, Actual Practice, Fluency, and Efficacy.
Helping people to create the bridges between these elements
is an essential duty for Agile Coaches. Coaching people is
not about following some method to the letter. Coaching is
about working with people to translate the knowledge to daily
habits and practices. It is about assisting people to make the
necessary adaptations and tailoring of the knowledge to their
context. Additionally, coaching is about helping people to
overcome the obstacles and minimise the difficulties during a
journey of learning and implementation of changes.
Coaching and Mentoring are different approaches. It’s a fact.

However, there is a massive potential of combining these two
approaches. It is important to observe that I am not saying
we should have two different people working in these roles.
Having different people acting in these roles is possible and
could be useful. I had a few experiences when I was entirely
focused on coaching, and someone else was concentrated on
mentoring people about a specific domain. It was a healthy
joint of skills to help people’s development.
However, we can combine both approaches when we are

doing Agile Coaching as a sole role. As part of the objective
of developing competencies, Agile Coaches can provide men-
toring regarding available options to solve some problems and
can coach people to support them to decide what is the best
choice and how to apply this option to actual work. Thus, the
KAFE model can help us to see when we should use mentor-
ing and when is the best moment to use coaching. People will
need both approaches to develop their competencies.
The everyday learning
It is necessary to acknowledge the fact that learning is differ-

ent from teaching. Learning is the ultimate goal, and we must
facilitate the journey to achieve this goal. Most of the time,
we are too focused on techniques to improve our ability to
teach some subjects, and we forget to think about the learning
process. It may be disruptive to the entire learning process.
Learning is an individual experience. Everybody has different

and unique ways of learning and most importantly, it doesn’t
happen only in the classroom. Learning is an ongoing activity,
and as Agile Coaches, we should consider it.
We have to take into consideration all the idiosyncrasies of

human complexities when we are facilitating a process of
learning. People have different motivations and unique ways
of learning. There is no one size fits all in regards to models
and theories of learning. As agile coaches, we should be open
to sense and experiment with different approaches to support
the people’s needs during the entire journey of learning.
In the book Experiences in Self-Determined Learning, Lisa

Marie Blaschke, Chris Kenyon, and Stewart Hase pointed out:
“Learning is a natural capability and it occurs

across the human lifespan, from birth to last breath.
In contrast, educational and training systems are
concerned with the production of useful citizens,
who can contribute to the collective economic good.”
That is one of the reasons why learning is an everyday activ-

ity, and learning facilitators should create an environment
to facilitate this continuous learning. This environment
should create the conditions to help people to achieve their
learning goals, not only to support the teachers to achieve
their goals of teaching. It is about how we can create op-
portunities to pull learning, not to push teaching. This is our
primary responsibility as learning facilitators.
Agile Coach as a Learning

Facilitator
Regardless of the difference between coaching and mentor-

ing, Agile Coaches should be learning facilitation to support
the full cycle of development of new competencies.
Learning facilitation is about assisting people to reduce the

difficulties and obstacles during the learning journey and to
help people to maximise the opportunities of learning.
As learning facilitators, we can recursively apply the Agile

Coaching DNA itself to facilitate the journey to develop
competencies. For instance, in order to assist people in this
journey, we can do the following:
• Help them to be more aware of the situations, per-

spectives, gaps, and bridges. Competence wheels may
be a good tool to apply in this type of situation (see
the house of awareness in the chapter about promoting
awareness).
• Create conditions to boost the sense of ownership for the
learning process. In this case, we can use Dude’s Law
to help understand their personal drivers to learn and

how to create better ways of learning (see the chapter
regarding boost ownership).
• Identify the obstacles and barriers to learn and assist
the creation of an organisational environment more
favourable to continuous learning.
Ingredients to develop
competencies
I invited a selected group of Agile Coaches and Facilitators

to share their ideas and experiences regarding how to facili-
tate the process of learning during an Agile transformation
journey. These guests shared their thoughts regarding the
following question: What is the most essential ingredient to
help people develop/enhance competencies? Could you tell us
a brief narrative regarding how to apply/use this ingredient?
Let’s see these fantastic drops of knowledge about this subject:
Anderson Hummel, a Certified Scrum Trainer, brought an

interesting point of view regarding the desire for learning.
“In my view, the most important ingredient is the

desire for having a particular competence. It’s hard
to help someone who doesn’t have this desire.
In general, this sense of desire comes from the
perception of a gap or lack of competence.
“The expended energy in awakening someone for

the necessity of improving a competence is high
and takes time. The person must want your help

to develop his or her skills. It may come from
admiration or the fact that people may believe you
have a higher level of proficiency in a particular
domain.
“I believe that without these two ingredients, it’s

almost impossible to help someone in the develop-
ment of any competence.”
Richard Aspinall, founder of This is English, shared a great

narrative about the balance between talking and listening. He
said:
“It always struck me as odd that I was actively

discouraged to speak in my French lessons because
it was my understanding that the whole point of
learning a language is to actually communicate. Oh
well, I guess the powers that be had a very different
view and I was simply told to stand outside the
room and let me fellow classmates quite literally
suffer in silence.
“20 something years on, I found myself in the world

of teaching English as a foreign language and when
the course tutor told me about Teacher Talking
Time (TTT), I was pretty much blown away. It
was his opinion (and the industry’s wider view)
that students should do about 70% of the talking
in class and the teacher, not lecturer, should make
up the other thirty. What a novel idea, allowing
students to do some communication in a language
classroom! Who knew?!
“Fast forward another dozen years or so, with a

modest wealth of teaching experience, I question
the deeper notion of the whole point of teaching
in comparison to the real point; to aid learning… I
can’t imagine how stressful it must be having thirty
or more bored, demotivated teenagers trying to
follow a wildly out of date syllabus and I can totally
sympathise with the goal of simply surviving the
lesson and sticking rigidly to the lesson plan…but,
what about the goal of the students; learning.
“It may seem obvious to most but being a little

slow, it took me a while to understand that the

point of any class, lesson or lecture is learning, not
teaching. In fact, if you look up the definition of
learning, I would sheepishly claim that you would
not find any mention of teaching at all. That’s not
to say it doesn’t play a huge role and that it isn’t a
pillar but by no means is it the way forward. Put
simply, if you are in a position of trying to educate,
put yourself last. Think about how to facilitate
learning. Consider learning styles, personalities,
needs, levels, creativity and so on. In short, make it
about them, not you!”
Simone Pittner, Head of the Lean-Agile Operations at GFT

Group, explored the four rooted features for Agile Coaches:
“We understand that an Agile Coach uses tools to

help people turn the human potentialities into a
tangible product. This is the real application of lean
principles to achieve better team performance. It
is about how to use the pure PDCA cycle (plan,
do, check, and act) with continuous improvement
based on metrics.
“An Agile Coach born with agile DNA has these

four rooted features:
- self-knowledge and self-development
- sees and values individual knowledge
- stimulates learning sharing
- promotes and improves scaled learning
“The real challenge of these four items is to create

and maintain a fertile environment. He or she will
need to create space and time for the ongoing
self-development. Your impartiality and neutrality
skills to see beyond appearances will always be
tested.
“Your toolbox must have materials like facilita-

tion techniques, visual management, approaches
for promoting self-management, and tools for col-
lecting qualitative and quantitative indicators. With
the short feedback cycles in agile, it is possible to
review how yesterday’s knowledge applies to solve
today’s problems. For this reason, it’s important to
make sure people can turn the relevant changes
into reusable learning for the future.
“With these skills and toolkit, an Agile Coach

will be able to turn someone who is interested in
people and agile processes into a Scrum Master, a
former Business Analyst who believes in an idea
into a Product Owner/Product Manager, and a
group of people who know and live technology in
a team that delivers incredible products. Increas-
ingly, what helps it to become tangible will turn
viral in the organisation. In this case, the primary
metric of success is ROL—Return on Learning; in
a matter of time, this will be the success metric of
any company.”
Victoria Thompson, Agile Coach & Trainer, explained the

importance of having a solid sense why:
“I would say that the most important ingredient

to help develop competencies is to instil in your
coachee what it really means to be Agile. Give him
the building blocks so that he may build on that
foundation with confidence and independence. So,
how do I go about doing that? “Start with Why”,
as Simon Sinek points out in his great book so
named. People are much more open to learning

and practising something if they know why they
need those skills or knowledge. As a mentor, walk
them through difficult situations and nudge them
to think for themselves and to not take anything
for granted.
“Continuous improvement is one of the pillars of

Agile, so how can you improve if you do not
show the importance of questioning the status
quo? Teach them the ropes and then mentor them
through the real practice of what they have learned,
always making them aware why they are doing
something or have taken a certain approach. That is
the only way to pave solid understanding of Agile
and to keep it on track, giving your coachee power
over what he does and humility to know that he is
always learning.
“When you mentor, teach and share, you learn

even more, so both coach and coachee improve.
Encourage your coachee to begin coaching his
team on the knowledge he feels more confident
on, free him to find his own way, let him make
mistakes, be available when he comes to seek help,
but don’t do it for him. My greatest pleasure is to
see my coachees flying out of the nest into the wide
blue sky, equipped with the essential Agile mindset
and knowledge, and aware that it is a never-ending
journey of improvement. Prepare them to set them
free!”
As you can see in the narratives above, protagonism is

one of the secret sources of learning. The learners should
be the protagonists in their own process of learning. It
is the foundation of emergent and collaborative learning.
Let’s explore how Agile Coaches can use these approaches
to facilitate learning processes.
Collaborative and emergent

learning as a critical element to
developing competencies
The world is changing quicker than ever. New concepts and

techniques are emerging throughout the different industries,
and all this has to be learned quickly. Workers, teams and
organisations are still trying to get to grips with those new
concepts through old methods; with that, they can memorise
theory (they focus only on the Knowledge element the KAFE
model), but they do not learn how to put that theory into
practice in the real world of work (Actual practice in the KAFE
model). By looking at this new reality, we have to relearn
to learn, redefining the relationship between learning itself,
space, and time.
As Agile Coaches, we will have to help the merging of

learning and performing in order to make it happen con-
tinuously. We need new concepts, new habits, and we need
to practice new learning tools. In this section, we are going
to explore one of my favourite approaches to facilitate the
process of learning. This approach is called Learning 3.0.
Before understanding the gist behind Learning 3.0, let’s take

a quick look over the existing models of learning.
Learning 1.0
In the 1.0 model, as a learner, you are a knowledge receptor,

waiting for an expert, teacher, master, or institution to decide
on what and how you have to learn. They determine the
product and the process of learning in which you will be
involved. These are the roots of what we can call prescriptive
learning.
If we analyse this model in-depth, we will notice the similarity

with a hierarchical structure. Like a pyramidal organisation,
this model is based on the separation between the thinkers
and the doers. The thinkers are the experts, teachers, or
masters who are responsible for deciding what and how the
learners must learn. Notice that in this model, learners are
passive receivers of a prescriptive knowledge provided by an
expert.
Alexandre Magno, the creator of Learning 3.0 and the author

of the book How Creative Workers Learn, pointed out:
“The big criticism of what I call Learning 1.0 is its

inefficiency in dealing with the dynamic world we

have today. This model was created in a period in
which information was more stable and what had
to be learned was mostly known and repeatable.”
Because of the lack of this stability, we needed a different

approach to learning when we came across some complex
situations.
Learning 2.0
The 2.0 model is quite similar to the 1.0 model, especially

about the structure to create/transfer knowledge. It is simi-
lar because of the separation between learners and experts.
However, there is a small difference regarding the behaviour.
Learning 2.0 encourages more dialogue and more interactions

between the learners and the expert. Even with some elements
of collaborative learning, this model is still based on the
prescriptive approach. In other words, the decision about
what is correct to learn still depends on the expert.
In a practical view, it is possible to see several examples of

this model in practice. For instance, many trainers are looking
for manners to engage their students in discussions or some

collaborative work. However, despite this significant effort,
the final answer is always provided by the trainer.
Learning 3.0
Finally, in the 3.0 model, the experts no longer define the prod-
uct of learning. It emerges when faced with new conditions
and challenges in the real world. The process of learning is
inclusive, promoting discussion with multiple perspectives. It
is the foundation of emergent learning. This is where, if you
want to learn, you will have to share.
Learning 3.0 is strongly based on emergent learning. Accord-

ing to Marilyn M. Taylor, in the book Emergent Learning for
Wisdom:
“Emergent learning means more than acquiring

knowledge over a lifetime; it means that we create
new knowledge continuously as we encounter new
conditions and challenges.”
What exactly is emergent learning? We can find this answer

in the paper “Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in
Web 2.0.” This paper explains that
“learning which arises out of the interaction be-

tween a number of people and resources, in which
the learners organise and determine both the pro-
cess and to some extent the learning destinations,
both of which are unpredictable.”
In complex systems, the unpredictability of how change af-

fects the system means we will often be surprised by the
outcome. No matter how well prescripted or how deeply
understood the method is, we cannot avoid unexpected be-
haviours or undetermined outcomes.
We cannot predict the behaviour of a complex system. We

need to learn from the interactions and adapt our knowledge
according to new emergent pieces of information.
For this reason, Learning 3.0 was created. It can be a powerful

tool to face the complex challenges inside organisations.
The essence of Learning 3.0
If organisations want to deal with the complexity of the new

century, they will need to create workplaces where knowledge
can be constructed not only accidentally but intentionally as
well. They need to practice what Steven Johnson, author of
Emergence, calls Artificial Emergence. Learning 3.0 provides
some critical elements that can potentially build an emergent
learning environment:
• Dialogue - Enabling emergence in a learning process

requires people to interact with each other, exchanging
their stories and ideas, rather than listening to presenta-
tions. In fact, the dialogue is the way in which a group
of individuals become a team—and when people act as

a team, learning emerges naturally.
• Egalitarianism - Hierarchy can be a significant in-
hibitor of emergent learning. It is more effective when
people talk to each other as equals, rather than as
individuals at different levels of a hierarchy.
• Multiple Perspectives — Differences can foster emer-
gent learning. When we all agree on a given subject, or
when we detect no difference between points of view,
learning will not emerge. Thus, a system that intention-
ally invites people to think from multiple perspectives
actively encourages those perspectives to challenge an
accepted practice. This is one of the reasons why there
are always different guests sharing drops of knowledge
in each chapter of this book. The concept of multiple
perspectives is one of the pillars to evolve the Agile
Coaching DNA. It is a strategy to avoid any form of
“dictatorship” in my point of view as an author and, at
the same time, facilitate access to multiple truths to my
readers.
• Non-Expert Based — Organisations often seek experts
who can provide the “correct answer” for a given prob-
lem. Experts’ answers are useful only as far as organisa-

tional issues are technical in nature — if the problem is
based on human systems, then expert advice, no matter
how prized, becomes only one of many perspectives on
an issue.
Learning Canvas - A tool to promote

collaborative learning
There are different ways to put the Learning 3.0 concept into
practice. However, it is possible to get a quick start using the
Learning Canvas. This canvas was designed to facilitate the
conversations during the process of emergent learning.
The Learning Canvas is completely problem-driven. For this

reason, the entire content of the canvas will be pulled from the
problems or from their symptoms. The pull approach is crucial
to avoid waste in the process and the product of learning. To
promote this pull behaviour, the Learning Canvas has two
significant areas: Past and Future. These two areas are useful
to organise the evolution from the problems (past) to ideas and
actions (future).
Thus, the Learning Canvas will create a welcome space for

everyone to share stories and ideas. This is the real purpose

of Learning 3.0. A summary of the main areas of the canvas
is in the image below.
See in the image below an example of a simple application of

this canvas to facilitate the learning process in any domain:
Caio Cestari generously shared this example above
In the photo below, you can see a real example of this canvas
in the context of software development:
How to use Learning 3.0 in Agile Teams?
To summarise this section, I would like to reinforce that

Learning 3.0 is a concept that can be applied in different
contexts and environments. This concept can be useful for
Agile teams in a variety of ways. As Learning 3.0 fosters a
collaborative and emergent learning, we can apply Learning
3.0 in situations like a single team retrospective or to help/-

facilitate organisational transformation. We can use Learning
3.0 to solve issues such as the following:
• How to start our Agile journey

• How to address the corporate obstacles to adopting Agile
• How to grow or scale our Agile adoption
• How to improve our work on the next sprint
In the traditional approach of learning, the company could

probably spend much effort hiring consultants to provide the
right answer to each of these questions.
In complex systems, every single element is the cause and the

effect at the same time. It causes unexpected behaviours of
the system, and then, in complex environments, it is difficult
to determine the correct answers. Therefore, in Learning 3.0,
every single participant is the creator and the receiver of
knowledge at the same time. That is the reason why we need
to learn different ways of learning.
Cross-pollination of ideas and

experiences
Imagine you are a software developer working in an Agile

team. Writing elegant code is your great passion; however,
now, you are in an environment where you are invited to
participate in all the stages of the development cycle. You
don’t have much knowledge and experience in activities such
as user experience and testing. In this scenario, maybe you, or
your company, are tempted to spend a considerable amount
of money on training to develop other skills, which could
be a good start, but let me tell you a secret about working
in an agile team: Regarding the process of learning new
competencies, team members can use the cross-pollination
behaviour to share ideas and experiences.
In botany, cross-pollination is the transfer of pollen from one

flower to another. In agile teams, we can use this concept
as a metaphor to describe the process of knowledge sharing
among team members. Therefore, cross-pollination is the
transfer of ideas and experiences from one person to
another.
Cross-pollination may happen in different ways in an agile

environment. It may occur as a result of the daily collabora-
tion between members, and it can be triggered by activities
to promote learning sharing. Brown bag sessions are an
excellent example of this. Indeed, “brown bag session” is only
one of the many names for short meetings where anyone
in the team can share any idea or experience with other
members. The name of brown bag is a reference to the idea
that these meetings should be as easy to organise as a simple
lunch alongside co-workers.
Events to foster cross-pollination in a team is an excellent

example of how powerful the collaborative and emergent
learning can be. Following the same scenario we started to
picture at the beginning of this section, you, as a software
developer, highly specialised in writing codes, can develop
other relevant skills (like user experience and testing) as a
result of the constant cross-pollination with others members.
This is the real power of collaborative and emergent learning.
The homework regarding the

development of competencies
Allow me to use the traditional concept of homework to

summarise the key ideas regarding how to facilitate the
development of competencies. As we explored in this chapter,
learning is a lifelong journey, and each person has different
and unique ways of learning.
As Agile Coaches, we should help people to create effective

strategies for the development of competencies. The KAFE
model can provide a useful foundation for the learning jour-
ney. It is a useful model because it will help the identification
of how to increase the knowledge(K), the actual practice(A),
and the fluency and the efficacy (E) in some competence.
Collaboration and emergence are essential ingredients as

well. Agile Coaches should help people create an environment
where the learners are the protagonist in the process and the
product of learning. This is the essence of Learning 3.0.
Evolving these ingredients to help people develop their skills

is your great homework as an Agile Coach. Development
of competencies is a massive part of our work as Agile
Coaches. For this reason, you must increase your toolbox of

practices and techniques for teaching, mentoring, facilitation,
etc. Thus, try to practice the ideas described in this chapter
to improve your fluency in these tools and to increase
the likelihood of producing a positive impact on the or-
ganisations. This is the ultimate goal of the meta-skill in the
development of competencies.
Agile Coaching as an
activity, not as a role
As I mentioned earlier, Agile Coaching is about uplifting

people’s abilities to improve organisational results using Agile
approaches. It is a noble mission; however, uplifting the
organisational capability is not an exclusive activity for Agile
Coaches. Anyone in the company, with the proper techniques
264
Agile Coaching as an activity, not as a role 265
and skills, can perform this type of activity. We don’t need to

handle the title of Agile Coach to catalyse improvements.
As part of Agile becoming a mainstream approach in the

corporate world, Agile Coaching is becoming a profitable
activity for many consulting companies. For this reason, the
thirst for having Agile Coaches is part of a massive industry
of body shopping companies. It’s not a criticism. It’s just a
fact.
This phenomenon is leading the industry to have many peo-

ple calling themselves as Agile Coaches but acting without
focusing on uplifting the organisational agility to catalyse
improvements. Most of the time, this situation is shoving
down the throat a role that an organisation doesn’t need.
That is the reason why we need to be careful about the real
necessity for Agile Coaches. In order to help you avoid this
typical mistake, let’s explore a different perspective in this
chapter.
A full-time role?
As I mentioned in the chapter about “Who are the clients of

Agile Coaching,” the Agile Coach role maybe not be required
in the organisation, at least, not in a full-time position. Most
of the time, the dysfunctions in the activity of Agile Coaching
are caused by having a full-time Agile Coach. Why is it
possible?
Agile Coaching is about quality, not about quantity. Some-

times, we don’t need to work in a full-time mode to leverage
the improvements in the organisations. In many cases, a good
session of work, along with exploring the right topics with
the right people is enough to cause relevant improvements.
We do not need to work eight hours per day, every weekday,
for twelve months to generate evolutionary changes.
This acknowledgement is essential because in some cases,

the amount of time dedicated to promoting improvements is
small in a typical day as an Agile Coach. In situations like that,
in an attempt to prove the value created by this role, Agile
Coaches start to fill the rest of their capacity with activities
not related to Agile Coaching (I know, it’s funny to say, but
it’s true). These other activities are mostly related to acting

as a policeman to reinforce the new law of Scrum, Kanban,
SAFe, or any eccentric flavour of Agile.
For this reason, the impact of having a part-time Agile Coach

could be more significant than if the organisation has a
full-time Agile Coach pretending and misleading true Agile
Coaching.
I am not arguing against having a full-time Agile Coach

position. My point is about using this role without a real
necessity. For sure, there are scenarios where it’s necessary to
have full-time Agile Coaches. A full-time Agile Coach may be
highly needed in situations when this role can serve multiple
Teams, ScrumMasters, Product Owners, Product Managers,
Project Managers, etc. However, even for scenarios like that,
the burning question is: For how long?
“OK, but I have a business model based on sell

services of Agile Coaching”
If you have a business model specialised in offer services

of Agile Coaching, it’s great. Well done! You don’t need to
abandon this business. However, it’s important to understand
the undeniable fact your power of catalysing valuable im-

provements tend to decay over time.
Agile Coaching is about helping people to question the cur-

rent ways of work, behaviours, and mental models. It’s about
challenging the status-quo.
An interesting aspect regarding the status-quo is when you

introduce new ways of thinking and working in some social
system, you’re creating a future status-quo. Which means,
this new status-quo should be questioned and reviewed at
some point in the future.
If you, as an Agile Coach, spend too much time working in the

same place, you may become a defensor of this new status-
quo. For instance, if you helped the company to shift from
Waterfall to Scrum, you tend to act as a defensor of Scrum.
In this case, you’ll defend any evolution, adaptation or even
replacement of Scrum. If you are doing it, you’re acting as a
policeman, not as an Agile Coach anymore.
That is the reason why I avoid situations where I need to

stay for a long time working at the same company or in the
same context (project, product, team etc.). I don’t like act as a
policeman to dictate people’s behaviours.
“But, how can we assure people is doing Agile in

the right way if the Agile Coach is not present
every day for the team?”
That is one of the most common concerns for those who hire
Agile Coaches. Unfortunately, if you, as an Agile Coach, have
to answer questions similar to this, it is telling you the size
of the upcoming challenge. In cases like that, the organisation
didn’t understand the real essence of being adaptative yet, and
you are about to start to work as a policeman, babysitter, or
commander of the team. Agile Coaching is not an instrument
to force people to adopt new behaviours or practices.
In scenarios like this one, there is a lack of trust. We are not go-
ing to resolve this lack of trust by doing more overlooking and
supervising on people’s work. That is exactly the tendency if
the Agile Coach spends too much time working in the same
company/context.
“But, who takes responsibility for implementing

the improvements?”
Repeat after me: people will be responsible for something if

they participate in the process to decide and build the solution.
If the Agile Coach is the only one responsible for the im-
plementation of the improvements, it will create a strong
dependence. The enhancements will not be sustained or will
not evolve when the Agile Coach is not present anymore. That
is one of the reasons why “boost ownership” is one of the
elements of the Agile Coaching DNA.
It’s important to notice there is nothing wrong if the Agile

Coach is also responsible for helping the organisation to
implement the change. The Agile Coach can have skin in the
game; it could be a decision about the business model for the
service in Agile Coaching. My point is the Agile Coach should
not be the only one responsible for it.
Agile Coaching is about engaging and enabling people to par-

ticipate in all the stages in order to implement any improve-
ment actively. It’s an excellent way to promote ownership,
independence, and keep the improvements alive, even when
the Agile Coaching is finished in that particular context.
Is there any solution for this

situation?
I have something to confess; it’s hard to combat situations

like this, especially because these situations are related to the
business model of many providers of services regarding Agile.
My intention with this book is to help you to be more aware

of what could be a better way to provide Agile Coaching.
The golden rule to help you to identify when you are acting
as a good Agile Coach is following: if you have to push
your service as an Agile Coach, it’s probably an indication
that the organisation doesn’t need Agile Coaching in that
particular context.
Try to use Agile Coaching only when it is necessary and

depending on who needs this type of approach. The Agile
Coaching is more likely to work when people are keen for
this type of help. Don’t try to force people to consume your
service as Agile Coach.
Avoiding the kiss of death
My good fellow, Alexandre Magno, posted in his blog a quite

interesting perspective about it.
Alexandre pointed out a situation called “kiss of death”. In

this blog post, he stated:
“The chances are good that you’re working out-

side the team by focusing on things like people
or process development across the organisation or
helping other areas of your company to “change
their mindset” or you’re busy “building a new cul-
ture”, or maybe you’re even responsible for lead-
ing the “Agile Transformation” program in your
organisation. If that’s the case, you’re not part of
the product development anymore because you’re
not in charge of that. You don’t deliver product in-
crement. You’re now an outsider. You’re a chicken.
You’re in the deep hole that exists between builders
and decision-makers. This is your kiss of death”.
Alexandre’s point of view is fully covered with truth. Maybe

there are many explanations for this type of situation. How-

ever, I strongly believe one of the most relevant causes is
the idea of having the Agile Coach as a full-time role for
cases where you don’t need Agile Coaching (as I mentioned
in the previous chapter entitled “Who are the clients of Agile
Coaching”).
Alexandre shares a few interesting suggestions about how to

avoid this kiss of death. He mentions:
“Based on what I have experienced during a long

time of practicing, shadowing, watching, teaching,
and advising ScrumMasters and Agile Coaches, my
current understanding is that honest and valuable
Agile Coaches apply these behaviours:
• Be honest with the business, and for someone

practicing Agile Coaching, the only way to
do that is to be part of the delivery team or
flow. Be in charge of the delivery—there’s no
escape.
• Be honest with the team or people you’re

supporting. First, ask them if they recognise
in you the Agile Coaching skills you say you

have. Ask people (not the sponsor) if they
really need you—continuously. Ask them (not
the sponsor) if they feel your cost is worth
it for them. Empower them by sharing your
Agile Coaching skills. Leave this role as soon
as possible.
• Be honest with yourself. Agile Coaching is not

a career. It’s just a transitory role that you’re
playing. Maybe it’s really important for some
companies who are transitioning from a very
traditional model to a more agile one. But, it’s
temporary. Don’t overrate the role, please.”
Alexandre’s full view is available on the Songfaces blog:

https://medium.com/songfaces
Democratising the Activity of

Agile Coaching
Democratising the activity of Agile Coaching is a sacred

aspiration for this book. That is the reason why its title is
The Agile Coaching DNA (not The Agile Coach DNA). My
experience tells me any role in the Agile ecosystem can use
practices of Agile Coaching. Equipped with the right skills
and techniques, ScrumMasters, iteration managers, and team
members can use Agile Coaching to improve the organisation.
It is much better any other role doing Agile Coaching properly
than an official Agile Coach who doesn’t apply Agile Coach-
ing in their work. That is the reason why democratising the
Agile Coaching capability should be your great aspiration as
an Agile Coach.
If you were hired as a full-time Agile Coach, one of your

goals is to help others’ roles in the organisation to absorb
the activity of Agile Coaching. At least, that is the way
I’ve been working in the last years. As an Agile Coach,
hired to help the organisation improve any aspect related
to the Agile adoption, I’m always helping roles like Scrum
Masters, managers, and leaders to understand how to use

coaching to cause relevant and observable improvements in
the organisation. If you have any doubt regarding how to
observe the benefits of some change, take a look at the chapter
“Agile Coaching supported by a data-informed culture.”
I’ve been using the Agile Coaching DNA as a tool to help

me out with the objective of democratising Agile Coaching.
Having regular sessions to develop people’s competencies
about this model is an everyday activity in my routine as an
Agile Coach; it is part of the roll-out strategy for my service as
an Agile Coach. It’s also a meaningful way to finish my work
as an Agile Coach by helping people to feel more engaged and
responsible for continuing to evolve and improve the system.
I have a recent experience to illustrate this type of situation.

I was doing coaching for a provider of solutions to the Aus-
tralian government. One team member from one of the teams
I was working with spotted the necessity for introducing
practices to improve the quality of the code, and to avoid
implementations of technical debt.
He asked me to help him introduce and develop this idea

because the rest of the team were reluctant to embrace it.
However, my technical abilities are quite rusty nowadays,

and I didn’t have much experience with their technology. I
wasn’t the best person to develop this conversation with the
team. I was an external agent without technical mastery or
influence in the team’s decisions; so, how could I help with
this?
Recognising that I wouldn’t be the best Coach for this sit-

uation was the smartest decision I could have made in this
particular case. Actually, the natural Coach was already there.
The guy who asked my help would be the perfect Coach for
this situation. He only needed help to overcome the resistance
of the others members. My contribution was just to help him
use metrics to support a retrospective focused on code quality
and to support his use of the Improvement Lab (described in
the chapter “Agile Coaching supported by a data-informed
culture”) in a session to identify a few technical experiments
to improve the development practices. That was exactly what
we did. After a few rounds of conversations, the team was
able to run experiments regarding the implementation of Test-
Driven Development (TDD), the Single Responsibility Prin-
ciple (SRP), and the Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle (DRY).
This situation created a better sense of technical mastery and
helped the team increase the daily productivity in maintain-

ing the code.
The Great Takeaway
As narrated in the story above, the team member was the

actual Agile Coach for that particular situation. He was doing
a bit of Agile Coaching to improve the code quality. I was only
there backstage, supporting him with techniques and tools to
overcome the resistance. My work was short and specific in
this case. I just helped him in promoting awareness, boosting
engagement, developing competencies and facilitating barrier
removal to catalyse technical improvements.
The Agile Coaching DNA was a useful tool because it helped

us to create a brief strategy to tackle the situation. The team
member was the real channel to make it happen. He did
actually use the Agile Coaching DNA to solve a practical
problem.
The key takeaway is a reminder for the moments when you’re

acting as an Agile Coach. It is essential to think of Agile
Coaching as an activity rather than a role. Others roles can
perform small and different portions of Agile Coaching when
is necessary, and to whom is needed. At least, that is my ideal
view of the world, and that is my driver to write this book.
The role of Agile Coach can be an excellent way to help com-

panies to reduce the friction to improve the organisational
agility. My aim with this chapter is to raise the awareness
regarding when, to whom, for how long, and how much the
work of Agile Coaching is needed. It’s an essential reflection
because your company may not require an intense use of
Agile Coaching to cause improvements. It’s similar to one of
the Obi Wan’s lines in Star Wars; maybe Agile Coaching is
like a lightsaber: “An elegant weapon, for a more civilised
age.” We don’t need to use it all the time. Think about it.
The general takeaway
I have been using this DNA in a variety of ways because each
person, team, and organisation has different problems and
different contexts and requires different approaches. Even
applying different approaches, I’m trying to keep the congru-
ency with these five key elements. The Agile Coaching DNA
is a compass for my work as an Agile Coach.
I did not come across those elements overnight. I’ve spent

years doing coaching, researching, and working with other
colleagues to identify the characteristics of good Agile Coaches.
The Agile Coaching DNA is the synthesis of this long
journey. My intention with this book is to inspire you to think
about your performance as an Agile Coach and what you
can do to improve your work. Feel free to use this DNA as
a compass/driver for learning.
281
Collaborate to the next
versions of this book
Here is the end of this version. Each version is a Minimum
Viable Product (or I would call it as Minimum Viable
Book). It is an evolutionary work. We are going to explore
more elements of the Agile Coaching DNA and more tools
and practices in the next releases of this book. However, your
help is quite important. I will iterate on this material using
the feedback from the readers. I need your inputs to evolve
the next chapters of this book. If you have ideas, comments,
or feedback, just send an email to manoelp@gmail.com or
contact me on Twitter (@manoelp). I will be grateful for any
type of intellectual contribution.
282
Acknowledgements
This first version of this book is the first step to synthesising
the result of many years of working as an Agile Coach for
different companies in Brazil and Australia. I am aware that
defining Agile Coaching is hard. There are various flavours
and styles of Agile Coaching. The Agile Coaching DNA is
the result of years of having different types of problems,
challenges, and experiments to perform as an Agile Coach.
This DNA is my north regarding better ways to do my job.
It is important to acknowledge that I am grateful for the

challenges, the failures, and the achievements I have had over
the years. For this reason, I would like to say thanks to all
my clients, coachees, and colleagues for all the moments of
agreement and disagreement we had. I want to say special
thanks to all my directors and friends at Elabor8 for all the
support and space to practice my ideas and techniques. It
is a great pleasure to evolve my approach in this exciting
ecosystem of innovators and forward thinkers.
283
Acknowledgements 284
I would like to finish these acknowledgements expressing my

gratitude to Melinda Harrington (@melindafentonsm), Ed-
uardo Brandao (@edubrandaobr), Guilherme Motta (@gfc-
motta) and Joao Marcelo Sgreccia (@jmarcelos) for the ad-
ditional review and for the valuable feedback and comments.
Your contribution was incredibly useful.
About the author
Manoel Pimentel
Manoel is a catalyser of changes, author of the book ‘The

Agile Coaching DNA’, speaker, cyclist enthusiast, and Agile
Coach at Elabor8 (www.elabor8.com.au).
He has over 20 years of experience working as a designer of

solutions and helping software development teams to create
better ways of working.
285
About the author 286
Manoel is also passionate about innovative ways of improving

organisations, for this reason, he helps companies applying
practices of Management 3.0, Learning 3.0 and Lean Change
Management and Agile in large scale.
More content is available in: www.medium.com/changingdojo.

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The Agile Coaching DNA

This book is for sale at

This version was published on 2018-11-13

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and

© 2014 - 2018 Manoel Pimentel

Who are the clients of Agile Coaching . . . . . . . . . 13

You may not need Agile Coaches . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Introducing the DNA for Agile Coaching . . . . . . . 35

How to evolve with this DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Practices to catalyse improvements . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Ingredients to catalyse organisational improvement 76

Extracting a metamodel of ingredients to change . 97

How to promote awareness, boost ownership and

Practices to promote awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

Agile Coaching supported by a data-informed culture 158

Measure outcomes, not a particular practice

Practices to boost ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

Another brief example of a delegation board . 218

Practices to develop competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

Learning Canvas - A tool to promote collabo-

Agile Coaching as an activity, not as a role . . . . . . 264

The general takeaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Collaborate to the next versions of this book . . . . . 282

About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

It will grow iteratively and incrementally. I will highlight the

Version 6.0 (latest)

In this release, we are exploring the meta-skill of developing

In this chapter, we are examining concepts and tools such as

• The differences and overlaps between coaching and

Additionally, we have a distinctive army of guests sharing

Simone Pittner, and Victoria Thompson for sharing their

I sincerely hope you enjoy this new version. Feel free to

Welcome to the release number 5 of the book the Agile

Additionally, we have two rich contributions from Ylva Fredriks-

It’s a special version with essential ingredients to uplift en-

The release 4.2 is presenting a new chapter about “Agile

Welcome to release 4.0 of the book “The Agile Coaching

The Release 3.0 is presenting a new chapter about “Practices

In addition, Alisson Vale, Amanda Varela, Daniel Ploeg,

It’s a special version because it is describing lots of ideas

• This new chapter will explain how to use the Improve-

The chapter about ingredients to catalyse organisational

In this new section, Alexandre Magno, André Faria Gomes,

In addition, we are going to explore a pragmatic metamodel

Welcome to the first release of the book, The Agile Coaching

We are going to explore the following chapters in this first

• Who are the clients of Agile Coaching

Notes to release 1.1: A few fixes regarding typos and formats.

I have been working with Agile since 2002 (I started with

a universal definition for this sort of role. However, even with

Trying to find this essence may be similar to examining

This DNA works as a compass to guide my decisions about

is on the receiving end of the process and seeks support in his

Who is the client in Agile

Taking into consideration the definitions above, we can easily

Coaching Agile teams requires an

It is important to notice when we are coaching agile teams

Why do we need Agile Coaches?

That probably is the real burning question for the entire