 I feel pretty serious to me. I don't have the skills I need to really deal with them. Yeah, they insist that I do it as a part-time job. I do my regular job and then I do agile coaching on the side. So that's another thing we hear a lot. A third is, I know how to do agile, but I can't make others do it right. The clowns. And the fourth is this. What's an agile coach good for? A team member might ask this, what's my agile coach supposed to do? Because I don't get it. I don't get what their value is supposed to be. Do you relate to any of these? Yeah, yeah. So this is the state we're in right now with agile coaching. It's just being defined. The coaching agile team's book, which I wrote four years ago, started to define it, but really only at a basic level. And so what we're going to share with you today is a learning path for developing or yourself or your organization's coaching capabilities with several steps. So we specialize in working with coaches. We travel around the world and train them. Sometimes they're managers. Sometimes they're scrum masters. Sometimes they're team leads of some kind. Sometimes they're product owners. And we've trained about 2,000 at this point. So we've heard their stories. We know what challenges they face. We know what skills they have, what skills they maybe don't have and what they feel like they need. We feel their pain all the time. So what Michael and I were asked to do almost, it's coming up on three years now that we've started this journey. About three years ago in June, a group called the International Consortium for Agile asked us to be part of a working group. And the purpose of that working group was to define the learning objectives for what agile coaches should be able to know, do, and be at several levels of development. And so it took us about a year to come up with the learning objectives for the first two levels to get that out for industry peer review and publish that. And in the last year, we have been working on the third level, which is enterprise agile coaching level, which is going to come out in a beta form in the next month or so. And I just want to say the reason that we liked this particular path, we know that there's a huge amount of controversy in the agile world about certifications, the C word, right? Some people like them, some people hate them, some people think they are the work of the devil, and some people don't care. Frankly, we don't care, but we know that some people, it's important to them and their companies, and more we know that it's important, even if you don't get a certification, it's important to know what would you be expected to do. And the reason that we liked working with IC Agile, the International Consortium for Agile, is because the learning path is open source. So it's not just tied to a certification path, it's just this is what you ought to know if you're going to be an agile coach, and you could train yourself in it, you could get mentored in it, we don't care, we don't care if you're certified or not, but we wanted to create some definition and some common understanding together of what it would take. So we started to create that definition and one of the things that we did was just match what was already true in the world, that there really are kind of three levels of people who do agile coaching. One is a team facilitator level, think about this as an iteration manager or a scrum master, a team facilitator is just a more generic term. That's someone who helps the team collaborate, helps them run the ceremonies for one or a handful of teams, that's that level, right? And that's an important level, because that's the person who's on the ground with the team all the time, that's the person seeing the problems, helping the team through the conflict, helping the team learn how to collaborate. And if you were thinking about this from an executive or an organizational point of view, this is who you'd have the most of, you'd have lots of these folks, really close to one per team, certainly from my point of view one per every other team. And then the next level, agile coach, you would have relatively fewer of these. This is someone who works at a multi-team level, a program level. Agile coach would be developing other scrum masters and product owners and helping managers understand how they fit into the agile world, right? Advising managers, working on impediments at the multi-team level. And the top level, which I'm writing a book about right now called Coaching the Agile Enterprise, though after today, I'm going to have to change the title to Coaching Enterprise Agility, because I can't use the term agile anymore, apparently. Okay, message received, Dave. At that level there's really not very many of those needed, but the level of knowledge, as we've created a learning path for this, we've been astounded to think, hmm, I wonder if we could pass it to this test. I wonder if we could know all these things. And it's the kind of person that both understands everything from organizational structure and culture, how that changes things, to how you scale, how you do the importance of technical practices and so forth. And so it's a pretty high bar. And it's somebody that needs to not just be a consulting geek and be able to give executives a lecture or something on Agile, but that it can actually stand eyeball to eyeball with them and challenge them for what they need to do and how they need to change or how they need to say, nah, I'm not going to do this. So do you get that it would be a lot of personal and professional development to be able to hold that kind of presence in an organization? So it takes a while to get to that level. The other thing I want to say is that people at this level, and I suspect that some of you often get drawn into this space because nobody's dealing with it. Do you get drawn into organizational impediments like the performance management system, like facilities, like finance and budget process? Like leaders talking the talk but not walking the talk? Yes, yes. Well, guess what? If you feel like you're out of your depth, you probably are. Because as we've developed the learning objectives and the path all the way up to that we've realized how much there is to know and how much there is to develop one's self to have enough of a presence to work with executives from that kind of perspective. So let's focus on the first two levels because that's where the learning path is most solid right now. So team facilitator level. Oh, there's only 25 things to know here. It's not that bad. Only 25. The message here is that it's not just taking a course in Agile or studying Agile. That's obviously, that's the table stakes if you will to get in. You have to know Agile. But you also have to know a lot of stuff about facilitation and about team boundaries and how teams work. The primary thing that holds self-organization helpful, self-organization back on teams, is their iteration manager or their scrum master. When that person is in the middle of every single meeting in the middle of every single conversation and what you learn when you learn how to facilitate is to step out of the middle of the conversation and design an environment in which the team members can interact with the team members. And this takes a lot of internal maturity to be able to be willing to step out, not be in the spotlight but actually serve a much more important role. Because self-organized teams, helping create a self-organized team is neither about telling them what to do but it's also not about going away and saying, oh, they'll just figure it out themselves. That's not what self-organization means. That's not how you guide or lead teams to self-organization. So it's a more delicate balance and requires this mindset shift that Lisa is talking about. We call it the facilitator's stance. Where do you stand? So the next level up, Agile coach, don't freak out. There's more. There's 80 of them at this level, 80 learning objectives. And it includes the team facilitator ones. It's like a natural maturity path. Because many people progress to high levels in their organization and never learn facilitation skills. So don't make it up that just because you progress to a certain level, you don't need to go back and get that skill. Most people do. So here are many things to know. And we want to give you a way to make sense of all of these things. This is a very useful checklist but it's a little overwhelming. If you were just going to go down this list that would be hard to create your own learning path for. Would you agree? It's a little overwhelming. It is to me. We want to give you a model or a way to categorize things. And this is what we use when we coach and develop Agile coaches. It's what we use in our courses to help people understand the knowledge areas and skills needed to be a really good Agile coach. It's a lot simpler, isn't it? Only eight things on this. This is an Agile coaching competency framework. This is also a creative common. We want you to use it to adapt it to help other people understand Agile coaching through your expression of it. And to think about where you're good in your personally and where maybe in your organization you're strong and where you need some development. So the first thing in this and in the largest part of this is Agilein practitioner. To be an Agile coach you've got to know Agilein. End of story. And you've got to keep up with it. You guys know how fast this world is evolving. You can't even keep up with the blog post on a daily basis. But keeping up with the new practices is really useful. Really being deep in the values and the principles as well. That's what this one's about. Just to tell you how old I am. When I started in Agile, which was in 2001, I could and did every book in the Agile canon. Now nobody could do that unless you have photo reading and you could read it in 20 seconds. You couldn't possibly read all those books. But you ought to have some systematic plan for studying what's going on. So that's a big knowledge area. Now we're going to talk about four skill sets that Agile coaches need to develop in themselves. On this side it's teaching and mentoring. They're very similar. That's why they're on this side together. So as an Agile coach, you certainly teach people things, don't you? You probably teach them the basics of Agile. Oh, I don't know. 100 different times, right? You have to talk. Even if you're just sitting down drawing it on a napkin, you're teaching someone. The basic distinction between teaching and mentoring is usually when you're teaching or training, same difference for us, you have an agenda. You have a set of learning objectives. When we teach, we have a facilitator guide that's about 30 or 40 pages long of how we want to run the class and what we want to do at each place in it. So you have your own thought about what needs to happen. When you're a mentor, you don't so much. The more the person comes to you and pulls whatever is needed out of you. So on this side, in order to teach your mentor, you actually have to know more about the subject area than the people you're teaching or mentoring. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense. We call that that you stand in your content authority. That that's where you derive your benefit to other people. And now it's totally different on the other side. Because on the other side it's actually useful to be a subject matter dummy. Because these skills professional coaching and facilitating do not require you to know the subject matter when you do them surely. Now have you ever had somebody tell you that it was good idea to be a subject matter dummy? How many people? We are. Yes we are. And if you can't be a subject matter dummy that's fine. You will have to learn and refine the skill of self-management knowing when to offer your subject matter expertise on this side and knowing when to boycott it for this side. So in facilitating, sort of similar to teaching, we have a set of deliverables we have an outcome, we have a purpose for a meeting. But I'm not voting on, I say this is the way we're going to create a plan about stories, but I don't say no that should be an eight and that should be a three. That's not my job it's the team's job to do that. So I've sort of got a plan of facilitating. In coaching, professional coaching, I let the other person completely bring the agenda. What do they care about? What's important to them? And how can I somehow help them get what they want? Without, doesn't matter what I want. That's the position that I'm taking in professional coaching. Have you noticed how Agile sometimes creates a bit of a crisis in people? That they have a hard time changing? They have a hard time shifting to this new mindset? These skill sets over here are the two that help them change? Because the change process could start with teaching for instance or training, it's useful to know, but it doesn't end there. Because if you run into resistance, we say will it help to teach louder? I bet you've tried it. Probably not. I bet you found out that it doesn't help, right? I mean it just creates more resistance, right? So this is where professional coaching can come in especially. Okay, so we've got one big knowledge area, four skill sets, and down here we have three specialty areas or like deep disciplines within Agile coaching. So we use the metaphor of being a doctor. Being a doctor, some people are general practitioners. They know a little about everything. And some people, doctors are specialists. They're a specialist in the heart or in the skin or in the feet. So this is more like the specialties. So the very first specialty we saw arise in the Agile coaching world, not surprisingly, is technical. People who were on a path of technical mastery. So think about the signers of the Agile manifesto. I'd say most of them are technical coaches. Think about a lot of the people who you've had talks from here in these last few days. There are many of them on a path of technical mastery. And so when they go into coaching organization, they coach them on technical stuff. And guess what skills they use? Teaching or mentoring, that makes perfect sense, right? Works pretty well. Have you noticed, though, that Agile doesn't want to stay in the technical box? That it wants to move out into the organization? In fact, the very first thing Agile wants to do is it wants to put the business in the driver's seat of the whole process. And what's happened in terms of the evolution of Agile and Lean processes is that you see more and more focus on products and product management on like Lean startup, developing the customer instead of developing the software, on doing experiments. Another person in that area is Don Reinertson, product development flow. Eric Ries and Lean startup, Jeff Patton. So those are the things you would go learn if you want to be a business specialty Agile coach. And we need you to do that. Agile needs you all to develop yourselves as business specialty Agile coaches because there are not enough people who understand how to help the business take up their place in this beautiful thing that could actually be pretty ugly if the business doesn't get in the driver's seat. So, technical business. And the third one is transformation. Just because Agile provokes transformation, whether or not you want it. Now this field is actually not based in Agile or driven by Agile. It's a field that already existed, organization development, leadership development, change management. It's something that gets provoked by Agile. People that try to introduce a transformation need to understand that, right? They need to understand how people change. They need to understand how organizations change or how culture puts a glass ceiling on the ability of Agile to spread. Now here's what we tell Agile coaches who we help train and develop. We tell them, choose. Decide what you're going to be good at and do not think you're going to be good at all eight of these things. In fact, we say on this side, know a reasonable amount about how to teach and mentor people but be really good at one of these because this is your content authority side. Over here, yes, know the basics of professional coaching and facilitating but be really good at one because this is your process authority side. And down here, know a reasonable amount about all three so that you can have a dinner time conversation with someone about it but be really good at one because the world needs you to be really good at one of these things and pair with other people who are good at the others. So instead of eight, that's only four that we suggest that you really focus on. One from each side, the top, and one from the bottom. So here is my truth in advertising profile. See, I would like it if more Agile coaches knew where they were strong and where they weren't so that we could be clear with our organizations about what we're able to do and where we need to pair with other Agile coaches in the areas that we're not able to have depth. So here's mine. Pretty strong Agile practitioner. I've been doing this since 2004 and I'm very best to keep up. Strong in teaching and mentoring. More teaching than mentoring. Really strong in professional coaching. Pretty good in chiseling. And a lot of time developing myself in these four areas. Now I know about all three of these to know when a company's in trouble. So for example, I can talk with leaders of a company and say, you know what, you don't have a continuous integration process. Your teams are not able to actually deliver. You wouldn't hire me to set up the continuous integration servers because I've got nothing else here. That's it. However if you want to transform your organization, if you want to help people change, that's my specialty. And I'm pretty good in helping people in the business side understand their role, their place, their power with Agile. So maybe you can start to think about yourself and where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are and maybe your organization. And where do we use this framework as a way for an organization to take a look at itself, both the individual coaches but also the whole organization and where are we strong and where do we need, because different companies need different levels. And at different times. Like early on in Agile adoption you probably need more teaching. Later on when the teaching is pretty good and you've got a lot of resistance, you need people with more professional coaching and facilitation skill. So think about it for yourself. What do you need? Using a framework like this, where are you already strong? I'm going to show you that again. Where are you already strong? Where are you being called to grow? And if you are hiring or developing internal Agile coaches, maybe you've just found a hole. When people see this framework and we use it in our classes they usually say, oh my gosh, now I get it. Now I get why our transformation has not been successful. We have a big hole over here. So I think let's have them talk to each other. Yeah, sounds good. So we want you to take the hand out. Hopefully you at least have one between two or three of you. And turn to the person next to you or if your partner is in a different part of the room, go join them. And give a little thought to where are you strong, where would you like to develop and just exchange some notes with the person next to you. At the end, we'll raise our hands like this and that means everybody should raise their hand and stop talking, okay? Will you do that? Thank you. You've learned our secret crowd control technique. It works great in a room of 800 people too. So we hope you're starting to figure out some things, huh? Just starting to help in some ways, make sense of the world. Good, because the actual coaching world has been pretty murky up to this point, right? Yeah, great. So we want to show you some ways that other people have used this framework. Because as Michael said, we've taught, he said 2,000 but he doesn't know I did it counting in our student database. It's almost 2,300 people that we've trained so far. And they've gone off and used this framework for many different applications. There are a few of those. There are three short videos of them talking about it in their own words. Okay, here's the first one. How this gentleman, Paul Tevis, developed himself as an Agile Coach, and how he was able to use it in a job interview to explain what he was looking for, what he was strong in, and what they were going to get. So that when he got there he could be sure that the job was the one he wanted and that they really wanted him. It's connected. We tested it before. And the guys have gone. He's there. Top is up. It's all the way up. Are you ready? Hi, my name is Paul Tevis, and I'm a Scrum Master and Coach at Apholio. Today is actually day 18 of me working at Apholio. And what I wanted to share with you today is how the coaching competency framework actually helped me to get this job. When I was going through the interview process, everything in my resume, in my background, sort of streams developer, software engineer, senior software engineer, and I was really looking to make a transition from being sort of a part-time Scrum Master, part-time developer into really a full-time Scrum Master and Coach in role. And when they were sort of asking me in the process what do you have that is going to be useful to us? How do you see the role of a natural coach? I remembered the diagram that Lisa and Michael had put out on the floor in tape when I had taken the coaching at the teams class. And that immediately came to mind. And I turned around, there's a whiteboard behind me, and I just said, you mind if I, and I started to draw the framework up. And I said, you know, where I'm coming from I'm living a lot in this sort of contentful side of this. Doing a lot of teaching and a lot of mentoring because I have that technology background here. But what really attracts me about coaching is really on that other side and that sort of less contentful side, doing facilitation and professional coaching. And they sort of nodded and went, yeah, that's sort of what we need. We've got people who can do the stuff over here. But we really need people to have the skills in this part of the framework. And I said, well, I can do this. These are other skills that I can do. And it helped us to have that conversation and gave us a language to communicate what it was that they needed and what I had to offer. And as a result, as I said, today is day 18 of me working here. This guy's actually from Spain, so you're going to get to enjoy his Spanish Agile Coaching Competency Framework. And it helps him guide him. Draw it, okay? Okay, sure. This coach, in my opinion, is not coaching the teams, it's just pushing the teams. It's pushing teams hard. And he's also, he's in my opinion right because these teams are not the best we could have. But he's not trying to make that team develop. Instead, he's pushing that team because he's a very good technician. He thinks that everyone could be the good technician that he is. But he's not drawing the path of growth for those teams. And actually the thing that I'm trying to do right now is try to develop him a little bit as a coach and as a mentor so we can keep him because he's a very, very good, he has a lot of potential in my opinion. He could be very good. This could be a radar. This could be a radar for me to understand how to strategize in my program, in my strategy for transform the organization. So that's the second story. And the third one is, you know, we didn't intend this to happen but as we've taught people this framework, they've gone into their user groups and their meetups and they've taught other people the framework. And it's created the basis for a lot of really useful conversations among communities of Agile coaches. So these are the reports we've gotten so far around the world of the places where people have already done this. I'm sure there's more but these are the ones we know about. And this next woman, Erin, is someone who has used this framework in her own Agile coaching community in Denver, Colorado. We run an Agile coaching special interest group in Denver and we actually introduced the framework to them just a couple weeks ago and it was amazing how many people out there that are calling themselves coaches or wanting to be coaches or consultants around helping people do work better and changing their beliefs and creating better cultures. They themselves will start admitting that they struggle with what it means or where they've come from and we've been able to have these really robust discussions around this framework about where did I start? Did I start as a trainer? Did I start as a mentor as an expert, you know, technical expert? And where am I going? So those are three of about six videos that are out on YouTube. Those are just small portions of videos that you can find. Lots of stories out there. So two resources. One is our website which has a resources section link over on the right that's organized by this competency framework. So books classes, articles, blogs, etc. that tie to one of those areas. And the other is ICagile.com where those learning objectives are. So go and download those. They're free. You don't have to go to any certification. You can just say individual study list. It could be your reading list. Here's what I ought to think about. Here's why I ought to get better at. Now we have maybe five or ten minutes if it's useful for you to ask some questions, we'd be happy to answer them. Are we having an Agile Coaching Institute? Are we hiring an Agile Coaching Institute? Well, you know, it's funny you say that because Agile Coaching Institute is changing a little bit. So our mission has been and still remains very clearly. We're out to develop Agile Coaches and raise the level of skill in Agile Coaches all over the world, period. We also recognize though that we have to take a special interest in those people who really want to become Enterprise Agile Coaches. Because truthfully I don't know even one person who should really call themselves an Enterprise Agile Coach. Not one. Because as we've developed learning objectives for that we realize how much you really have to know, do, and be. So our vision is to take a special interest in those folks who really want to go to that level and help them know what we know, help us fill in our own gaps in stuff we don't know to be more effective at that level. And then over time I think there will be a small group of very specialized consultants growing out of that. But it's not next week. And it's not today. Yes, back here. Yeah, so here's where I want you to look. I want you to look at those learning objectives because it's not just a list. It's a title. It's a context statement and it's about this much text about each one. It's very specific about what you should be able to know and do. And so there are 25 of those for that first Agile Team Facility Leverent, and 80 for the next level. I think that will point you into a much more specific assessment. The other thing is that at least courses that go through the IC Agile process are independently accredited by them as fulfilling those learning objectives. For a course to get accredited it has to do that. And at least the process at IC Agile is a panel based. So we have a rubric and the part that we're talking about is just learning. It's not competence, it's only learning. So that's one level of things. Another level of things is are you competent at it? So we've instituted with the IC Agile people a process for establishing your competence through a panel of expert Agile coaches that you can do those things in those different areas. You can demonstrate that you have those skills. Let me repeat this. So he's saying the model helps you understanding where you are and where the gaps are but the model doesn't address how do you go about filling the gaps. So what would you do first, for example? It's really funny you say that because we do a day long assessment around this model with an intact group of coaches. So for example if you had all the coaches in a Bangalore meet up, we might do it with them or inside of a company we do it with them. And we guide them through a process of deciding what they're going to learn next and there's not a right answer. There's not like what each person should do next. It's very individualized and it has to do with here's where I look. I look to the situations that I get put in that I feel like I don't have a good skill in. That's where I look. It's also meant as a conversation starter between in a framework for thinking about between you and a mentor for instance or you and a manager or a leader in your organization or whatever and here's what I think I can do. What do you think I can do? Or team, what do you think I can do? And what do we need? What do we need me to be able to do and to develop? Certainly an objective side is possible but also having a conversation and a dialogue and a collaboration around what's needed. Does that make sense? Because what you need is going to be different at different times. What the organization needs is going to be different at different times. It's kind of matching those. So he's referring to our talk a few days ago that there are new breed organizations out there and most of your companies are not it. And so the question, go ahead and repeat the question Michael. Are we making the assumption that people that are in agile coaching are at this what's called the green level which is pluralistic ability to take other people's perspectives and value other people's perspectives kind of a level and also the teal level which is even more systemic and intolerant of differences of different people. And the people they're coaching. So the reality is the vast majority of the people that we agile lists are coaching are not at the teal level. Maybe some of them are at the green level but most of them are at what's called orange which is a very individualistic freedom. It's about freedom. Capitalist. Yeah, it's about success. It's about monetary success specifically. So it's useful to be able to coach someone at that level for you to actually be maybe one level above them. And here's the hard thing. You have to go meet them where they are and talk in terms that they understand. Not talk down to them, not suggesting that. To be able to stand in professional coaching and talk with them in a way that will help them. The difference between people at different levels in this thing, if you're wanting to read about it, look for spiral dynamics. People when they get to the teal level are different than the other people in that they don't think that everybody else is wrong or stupid. People that are at teal believe that all parts of the spiral have value. And so naturally that's the best place to coach from. It's the most flexible. It's the most complex. You're a better person as you develop, but you are more capable and you are able to handle more complexity. So yes, the more complexity, the more ambiguity we can handle as coaches, the more tolerant we can be, the more in touch with our own biases and whatever, the more helpful we will be to other people. But that's not an assumption per se. Yeah, I was hoping someone from this side would speak up. Go ahead. You've got about two more minutes. So did you guys hear this at all? No. Okay. So he needs to hire someone. He wants to use this framework to help him, right? But he's saying, well, how do I know? I'm talking to someone. How do I know if they have this area or not? If you're not an expert in it, don't look at it. And he's not looking at the certification. So you're going to need to enlist the help of people who do know about those things. And if you look on the back of that sheet, there's a starter list of resources for each of those eight areas. So if you're in the position of hiring people, I would say either you or a group of you become familiar with some of those starter resources, and you need to be asking questions from those. What's another idea? A really simple way to do it though would be to print out that list that we showed you and say so tell me about, you know, some of these. Yeah. Tell me about how you maintain neutrality when you have a really strong opinion that you should go a certain way. And if your BS detector is like, you know, a good manager, you'll be able to tell when somebody is BSing you. I think that's about all the time we have. Unless there are social pathocars. Okay, we're going to do one more. Oh, come up here and hold it then. I'm not going to hold it. It is, yeah. Oh, he's telling me what's in my book. This is great. Well, no, but here's the truth. I don't remember. But you're right. So there's a whole chapter on the traits of being a good coach. This man has not been paid by Agile Coaching Institute. Thank you. That's beautiful. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Alright, thank you all for your wonderful attention. This is a beautiful place to be. I've really enjoyed it. Great.