 How many of you have been to an Agile Conference before? If you've been to an Agile Conference before, you know what happens when the person nominally leading the session puts their hands up, don't you? Everyone else puts their hands up and stops talking. Kia ora tātou. Good day, folks. Cora Shane Hasty, teni. My name is Shane Hasty. I've got all sorts of things that I do, but one of them is I'm the Director of Agile Learning Programs for the International Consortium for Agile. And this session, we titled the Golden Age of Agile Coaching, but really it's my journey to becoming a coach. So we started with a few questions. I hope you're now sitting next to somebody who you now know that you didn't know before the session started and that you've had a conversation. So what are some of the characteristics? What are some of the things that you concluded makes a great Agile coach? Please call them out. Asking powerful questions. Not giving the solution. Being a good listener. What's the difference between a scrum master and Agile coach? Is that boundary? Does it even exist? Maybe we can explore some of that. Allows people to come with ideas, to bring their own ideas. So there are some key things about coaching and capabilities. And I'm going to go through the coaching as a discipline and then Agile coaching as, oh, is it a subset or a superset of professional coaching? The domains, the competencies and the journey of becoming a coach. Then we'll put it into practice. We're actually going to use powerful questions with each other. I'm not going to use them, you are. And through this, I will talk to my own personal journey of becoming a coach. So first of all, what is coaching? There is a discipline of professional coaching. And there are bodies, one in particularly the International Coach Federation, that has a framework for what coaching is about. And they do distinguish between coaching and other disciplines. And they provide some very explicit guidelines. It's about partnering with clients in that thought-provoking conversation, a creative process and some of the points that came out, the coach doesn't have the answer. The coachee has the answer to maximize the coachee's potential. One of the things that the International Coach Federation in particular focuses on is that coaches need a code of ethics and professional conduct. This is something that, and this is a personal perspective that I strongly believe is missing in the Agile community at the moment, is most of us who call ourselves Agile coaches do not have a commitment to a professional code of ethics and conduct. And this worries me, because coaching can do a lot of harm. Any of the professions that have a code of conduct, almost always their code of conduct starts with the duty to society as a whole and do no harm. How many of us are coaches in the room? How many of us self-identify as a coach in some way? How many of you have signed a code of ethics? How many of you live by a code of ethics? A few. I would encourage those of you who aren't, who haven't gone down the professional coaching journey to think about this is actually where we need to go. The ability to establish trust, the coaching presence, the respect that we pay the coachee by being 100% focused on them and their needs during the coaching engagement. Incredibly important. Facilitating learning. And here's a scary one. The coach takes accountability for results. All too often I see, particularly in the agile community, the agile coach comes in a bit like a seagull. Screams a lot, perhaps all over the place flies out. No. The coach on the ground, and if we think of the sports teams, the coach on the ground is responsible for the team's outcome. The players play the game. But if the players are consistently unsuccessful, the coach gets fired along with everyone else. But in the agile community, we seem to have forgotten that one. No, no, no, we don't take accountability. We care a lot about these people. But obviously when they didn't do it right, they didn't listen to me. That's the coach's mantra, isn't it? So coaching is a partnership. There's a process for discovery. It's a way of exploring options. And it is not giving advice, consulting. It's also not learning from an experienced professional. That's mentoring. Now, consulting and mentoring and facilitation are skill sets that matter. But they're not coaching. So I want us to think carefully about what it means, what coaching is, what it isn't, and what does it mean to me to be a coach? Lisa Adkins in her book, Coaching Agile Teams, has generously given the world this diagram, sometimes called a butterfly, the X-wing, the picture of what are the competencies that we need as an agile coach. So one of them is that professional coaching. So this was the question I sort of asked earlier on, is agile coaching a subset or a superset? We are saying, and Lisa is saying, that professional coaching is one of the competency areas, and she actually does reference the ICF. But then there's others. To be an agile coach, you need to be a strong agile lean practitioner. You need to understand not the mechanics of agile. You need to understand deeply the intent of agile. So whatever framework you have chosen, why do the elements of that framework exist? If we talk about SCRUM, one of the most common practices within organizations that adopt SCRUM as a framework, is the daily stand-up, the SCRUM meeting, in which we stand in front of each other and we ask three questions. What have you done? What will you do? What's in the way? What's the difference between that and a status meeting? And as an agile coach, if you can't answer what's the difference between that and a status meeting, you are not a deep agile practitioner. By the way, the difference? The questions don't matter. The purpose of the daily stand-up is for a group of people who have work that has a dependency upon each other to collaborate effectively in the delivery of that work. Status can and should be achieved through other means. And if your daily stand-ups are focused just on those three questions and status and you're reporting to somebody, then you are not using the SCRUM meeting with the intent of the SCRUM meeting. And if your coach is allowing you to get away with that, they are not a coach. They don't have the deep agile lean practitioner competencies. Then there's the teaching competencies. As an agile coach, yes, we have to be able to teach the practices to explain to people how to use the different practices in the context of their organization. A coach needs to be able to mentor. And the mentor relationship is learning from the skilled professional, from the experience. When in my experience, when I saw this context, this situation, that's what happened with me. I shared experiences. That's mentoring. And then facilitating, taking groups of people to a journey of discovery together, to achieving outcomes in group settings. And then, oh, by the way, on top of that, we also need to have at least one area of deep mastery as a coach. Whether that's technical, if you're working with development teams, can you help those teams implement a DevOps framework? Can you pair with somebody in designing the architecture for a new product? If you've got that deep technical mastery. Or is it about business mastery? Do you understand the end-to-end value stream? Can you empathize and bring the customer voice to the team? Or is it about transformation, working at the enterprise change level and looking at areas of organizational design and bringing structures like holocracy into an organization? This is a scary framework. This doesn't happen with a three-day training class. To become a competent coach with all of those skills requires many, many years of deep, deliberate practice and working with a variety of teams in different contexts. And we need to start as a coach. The area we start closest with is self-management. If you cannot hold the mirror up and know your own strengths and weaknesses, then how can I dare turn to somebody else and say, hey, here's a mirror, look at it? But that's what I've got to do as a coach. And then I can work with individuals and I can start to hold the mirror up there. Then I need to work with teams. And this is maybe where the role that Scrum calls the Scrum Master starts to come into play. Some of the team facilitation skill sets that enable us to work with groups of people and help them achieve their common outcomes. And then moving towards multiple teams looking at coaching at that team and program level. That's the agile coaching. And even at the enterprise level working at the organizational level. And typically we do see this as a progression. I know for myself, I'm not good there. I don't have enterprise transformational experience. I've never worked in those roles. I would not go into a large organization and say, oh, let me coach your executive team. I haven't worked at that space. I don't honestly know whether I want to. On the other hand, at the program and team level, I'm good. I'm your person. I can help there because I've done this a lot. And my personal areas of mastery, not too bad in the technical, but that business mastery, that's where I truly can. So if the problems the team is facing is around understanding customer value and so forth, I'm a really good person and I can bring that expertise in a mentoring perspective. I can also ask powerful questions because I've experienced what's involved at that level. So again, know thyself first and foremost. And there are multiple paths to mastery. Obviously, I work for ICHL. We are a certification organization and we have a pathway for coaching. And it starts with the foundations and then it goes to that team facilitation. And this is a course that we see a lot of take-up in India, the three-day agile coaching. And it's very important. This is agile coaching, not coach. And at the end of that, you probably are a beginner. You're at the level of Shu in the Shu Hari. You understand the key competencies. You know what you don't know. You need to go away and build on that. And now you go and get deliberate practice. You go out and you explore. You work with different teams in different contexts. You find different challenges. And you fail frequently. And it's okay. You can do the failure bow. And you build additional skills. That is not enough. In my own journey, I went on and my strongest competency area in the X-Wing is actually the teaching. So I went deep into learning the teaching competencies. So, for instance, things like training from the back of the room is a way of designing classes. There's some of that in this concept, in the structure of the session, with the connections activity right at the beginning. Then when you get to a point where you consider yourself an experienced practitioner, there's a way of validating that. In the icy agile world, this is a competency-based certification called the icy agile certified expert in agile coaching. You have to have a minimum of two to three years' experience and a wide range of experience. You have to be able to prove that experience through CVs and references. And then you have to provide evidence of competency in two of the skill sets, being facilitation and teaching, and that's done by submitting a video. The panel then looks at those videos and looks at your references and so forth and says, yeah, looks okay. Come and be assessed. And then you go, and it's a face-to-face session done over a video call where a panel of three existing experts puts you through your paces. They test your knowledge, but much more importantly, they assess your competency. In that live session, you are expected to coach somebody on a real issue that they are facing and take them through the coaching arc. And you need to take them through a mentoring arc and you have to be able to show the difference. Live with people, in my case, people like Lisa Adkins was doing the assessment. That's scary. Oh yeah, I failed. The first time through, I failed. I felt I was ready. I'd had all the knowledge. I'd been a professional coach working with teams for four years. So I went up, went into this initial assessment with a level of confidence, dare I say perhaps a little bit of arrogance. I know what I'm doing. And then when I coached a person who had a real challenging issue that I empathized with, I didn't do a good job of coaching. I wasn't able to hold up the mirror and help them come to conclusions. Not too bad. And there is a published rubric that looks at what are the competencies and how well, what do you need to achieve. But the first time through, I failed. And failure's not fun. The feedback from that panel, however, was incredibly powerful. There were very, very explicit things that they said to me, this is where you need to go and build your strengths and go away and work on this. And they took, they gave it to me in writing that I could walk away from and say, okay, here are things I need, I know I need to go and do. And I went away and for another seven months, I put in deliberate practice in those areas. And then in August last year, I sat the assessment again. And this time I passed. 60% of people fail that first assessment. And that's really good because the learning that comes from that failure is really, really important. So there is a pathway. But even at that level, I consider myself maybe an experienced practitioner. I'm hard. I know before read and read comes from many, many years of working with multiple teams with different people with different problems. Addressing adapting practices. But please do not call yourself a coach when you are here. So yeah, there is a published rubric of competencies that looks at the, at these different areas. And if anyone's interested, I'm happy to share it with you. And it's available on the ICHR website. When I went into the first round of assessment, I think you've come across this Dunning Kruger effect before. It was a study that looked at how confident people are in their competencies based around their level of knowledge of a topic. And there's a point very early on just enough to be dangerous. Think of the 17-year-old boy learning to drive. And I'm not sure who authored this that came up with the, the peak of Mount Stupid. I've been teaching a 16-year-old granddaughter to drive lately and we've had a few Mount Stupid moments. And then we get to the valley of despair. Oh no, I realize just how complicated this is, how hard this area is. And I'm at the beginning of building wisdom. And really interesting in the studies that Dunning Kruger did, we never get back to the peak of Mount Stupid. We realize that the more we know about something, the less we actually know about it. And we become wise over time. So one of the promises of this session was you will get an opportunity to do some coaching. Think about one of the specific competencies. And it was mentioned earlier the concept of powerful questions. Powerful questions are ones that do force you to look in the mirror. To explore possibilities together. So examples of things like what would you like to have happen? What may be holding you back? What would the ideal outcome look like? Now, if any of you are going to get some coaching from Deb, I would deeply sincerely encourage it. On Sunday evening, after the coach camp, she and I sat down and she gave me a coaching session. And it was a deep experience and she uses powerful questions phenomenally well. So if you're struggling with something, I would encourage you to take up that offer that she's made. But the more common types of questions we often see are the what's the problem? Can you do that? The advice couched in a question. Why did you do that? Judgment. So let's put this in practice, shall we? Please stand up. Form groups of three. And we're going to do this fairly rapidly. We will have three three-minute sessions in your groups of three. And each person will take a role initially. One will be coach, one will be coach E and third one will be observer. Coach E. You have something that you have been struggling with at work or at home. I'm sure you have. Coach, use the powerful questions and here are some examples. And I'll leave this up on the screen while you're busy. Spend about two minutes asking those powerful questions and exploring this topic with your coach E. Observer, watch what is happening. At the end of two minutes, I will stop you and the observer will then give feedback. And then we cycle. The roles change and we repeat the roles change, we repeat. Does this make sense? So each person will take coach, coach E and observer role and we've got nine minutes. Go. Just experience it. Just the experience of using powerful questions. Yeah. So as the coach the coach E has got something that is struggling with ask the powerful questions and see how it feels and then the observer will watch what is happening. Okay folks, that is the first round. Observer you've got one minute to give feedback. What did you see happening? Think about emotion. Think about interaction. Think about engagement. What did you see happening? And then we'll cycle. Okay, time to cycle. Move, move roles and do it again. So the person who was coach takes a different role, coach, coach E Observer. Another two minutes. The next session needs I was looking, I was just going to say this. Speaking for the next session needs those. All right, that was two minutes. Again one minute of feedback. Observer, please tell your coach and coach E what you saw, what happened. This one would be met with three 10 minute blocks. That's okay. They're still getting the experience. The hands-on piece. Yeah. That's it. Okay. And cycle different coach, coach E and Observer. And then people put half an hour of the practice. And the Observer is really important because it highlights things. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That was two minutes. So a final round of feedback from the Observers, please. Okay, folks. Now this would have been somewhat frustrating. I'm very sad to have to stop to cut you off at this point. But we do have time limits that the conference has imposed upon us. But I would encourage you to think about doing this as practice back in the workplace. And that pairing of coach, coach E and Observer and take the different roles and give each other the Observer role. Really, really important. And yeah. The slide set is all available for download and there are some examples of powerful questions. But if you just do a simple search for powerful questions, you'll find lots of them. So my story I spoke about I would like you to stop and think as we finish up what are you going to do differently? And one of the most important things that I hope you take away from this is that coaching is a journey and becoming a coach takes a long time. It doesn't happen with three days of training or whatever else initial kickoff. But the journey to becoming an effective coach and think also please about that concept of professional ethics and the responsibilities and accountabilities that we should have as agile coaches. There's about one and a half minutes for questions. Imposed by the organization. And as you deal with people and I believe strongly that as agile coaches you do work with people. It's more about people and less about the process at some point in time. So during your Shuhari journey it's more you tend to be more people focused rather than a process focused. And in that journey is it possible that you might just strip away your agile in its classical standard sense and then you start you start empathizing with people to come up with their own frameworks with their own things. The frameworks are like training wheels on a bicycle. They're a beginning point but the mindset of agility and this is the mindset day. That is something that is if you're acting as an agile coach that mindset of agility is incredibly important and knowing the practices and the intent behind any of the practices. Being able to convey that and look at it in terms of the human impact of that. But then as we become more and more coaches it really is about working with the teams and inevitably thinking of software engineering and software development teams. These are people who are professional problem solvers. As a coach my job isn't to give them answers it's to give them here are the questions because they will figure out. Alistair Coburn got his PhD and he was looking at lightweight methods way back in the 1990s and he actually came to the conclusion that left to themselves that if you're a professional problem solvers with a small team with a defined problem the best methodology is no methodology because that team figures it out for themselves as the coach my job is to create that framework of safety for them to do so. Thank you. All the things he's just giving us a question there's no ground reality there and we don't really have an answer and it's a very practical thing that actually happens. How do you use the gap between the developers and the jugglers and make them really understand because when we give them examples of games let's just go to the football team okay they coach them there but we're not playing football those are actually not the exact practical examples that we go to because we do like let's get games with the different examples that's not the difference so how do we use the gap when the team actually has to trust the coach and accept that their question is actually ultimately going to help them So one of the key things there is does the team need coaching or teaching have they got the competency or do I need to help them gain the competency if they're coming to me with a question and the question is we do not know how to do this we've got no idea then coaching and saying what would be a good way to do that it's not necessarily the right approach I might need to change hats and if we go back to that x-wing diagram teacher or mentor might be the better role for me to take in that context so if it truly is there's a lack of knowledge on how to do something then teach the team be open that I am teaching I am not coaching when I am coaching we are exploring something together that you will figure out the answer to I'm also never consulting the consultant role is to come and do it for them but as a teacher I'm pointing them in the right direction as a mentor I'm looking at my own experience and saying I did this there this is what happened would this be applicable to you whereas as the teacher I'm saying here is how you set up the framework for continuous integration using these tools now go and do it as an example does that make sense so it's change the hat you're wearing but be clear with the team this is the mode I am in a different set of interactions I'm going to be around the whole week thank you folks