The Agile Coaching DNA
The Agile Coaching DNA
About the Book
This book is an evolutionary work to share ideas and experiences about practices and techniques to catalyse improvements, promote awareness, boost ownership, develop competencies and facilitate barrier removal during the journey of agile adoption. These elements are essential objectives and metaskills for change facilitators. In this book, I put together a set of useful concepts, techniques, stories and examples of how Agile Coaches can catalyse relevant transformation in the organisations.
Reader Testimonials
Albert Waters
Inspirational and essential
Inspirational and essential to everyone who wants to become better Agile Coaches.
Daniel Johnson
A must-read book
The Agile Coaching DNA is a must-read book for everyone involved in Agile Transformations.
Luk Lau
Thank you
Thank you for inspiring me with Agile Coaching DNA
João Cerdeira
Great! Excellent book
Avelar Leão
Acabo de ler o excelente livro do @manoelp parabéns pelo trabalho, amigo
Rob Healy
Useful for agilists and coaches.
Table of Contents
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Release Notes
- Version 7.1 (latest)
- Version 7.0
- Version 6.1
- Version 6.0
- Version 5.0
- Version 4.2
- Version 4.0
- Version 3.0
- Version 2.2
- Version 2.0
- Version 1.0
- Introduction
- Typical challenges during a change journey
-
Who are the clients of Agile Coaching
- Who is the client in Agile contexts?
- Coaching Agile teams requires an integral approach
- Why do we need Agile Coaches?
- You may not need Agile Coaches
- How to avoid fluffy approaches.
- Identifying a reasonable level of coachability
- Non-judgemental approach increases coachability
- The origin of this DNA
-
Introducing the DNA for Agile Coaching
- Catalyse Improvements
- Promote Awareness
- Boost Ownership
- Facilitate Barrier Removal
- Develop Competencies
- How to evolve with this DNA
- Examples of Agile Coaching activities based on this DNA
-
Practices to catalyse improvements
- Agile Coach as Change Facilitator
-
Strategies for change facilitation
- Reduce the friction in organisational changes
- GROWing improvements
-
Ingredients to catalyse organisational improvement
- Change management vs change facilitation
- What are the most important ingredients for change?
-
Extracting a metamodel of ingredients to change
- Clarity and responsibility about why change is necessary
- Desire to collaborate on the change journey
- Low organisational friction and high safety to explore new things
- A continuous review cycle covering all the listed ingredients
- A brief story about this ingredient metamodel
- Takeaway from the ingredients to catalyse improvements
-
Practices to promote awareness
- Key enablers for awareness
-
Driving people’s attention to actionable areas
- Perspectives
- Situations
- Gaps
- Bridges
- Outcomes
-
A few more ideas to increase awareness
- Identity the sources of dissatisfaction using STATIK
- Be aware of interruptions
- Several things I think that help promote awareness
- Visual Thinking
- System thinking to promote awareness
- Takeaway regarding the practices to promote awareness
-
Agile Coaching supported by a data-informed culture
- Why are metrics important?
- Gathering data to feed good retrospectives
-
A few examples of actionable metrics
- Lead Time
- Flow Efficiency
- Health Checks
- Measure outcomes, not a particular practice or technique
- Team Agility Health Check
- Organisational Agility Health Check
- Business Measurements - Focus on the direction, not only on the speed
- Experiments based on data
- Wrapping the learnings
-
Practices to boost ownership
- Psychological Ownership
- The Dude’s law - The key to unlocking ownership
- Fix the system, not the individuals
- Create an organisational exoskeleton to boost the sense of ownership
- Why decentralise the decision-making process?
- A few more ingredients
-
Delegation board: A tool to foster engagement
- Key decision areas
- Factors to weigh
- The seven levels
- The board
- Another brief example of a delegation board
- The main takeaway regarding how to boost ownership
-
Practices to develop competencies
- Introduction
- It’s not only about providing training
-
The KAFE of competencies
- A simple real example
- Designing new competencies
- The boundaries and overlaps between coaching and mentoring
- The everyday learning
- Agile Coach as a Learning Facilitator
- Ingredients to develop competencies
-
Collaborative and emergent learning as a critical element to developing competencies
- Learning 1.0
- Learning 2.0
- Learning 3.0
- The essence of Learning 3.0
- Learning Canvas - A tool to promote collaborative learning
- How to use Learning 3.0 in Agile Teams?
- Cross-pollination of ideas and experiences
- The homework regarding the development of competencies
-
Practices to facilitate barrier removal
-
The most typical barriers
- The AntiValue
- The AntiFlow
- The AntiEvolution
- A few narratives to deal with obstacles
-
Synthesising the typical levers
- Recursive use of the Agile Coaching DNA
- System thinking as the key ingredient
- Improvement Mapping - An example of a tool
- Takeaways about facilitation of barrier removal
-
The most typical barriers
-
Agile Coaching as an activity, not as a role
- A full-time role?
- Is there any solution for this situation?
- Avoiding the kiss of death
- Democratising the Activity of Agile Coaching
- The Great Takeaway
- The general takeaway
- Collaborate to the next versions of this book
- Acknowledgements
- About the author
- Bibliography
Causes Supported

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