The future of agile coaching

“You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I’ve chosen this quote because of the long-term trend I have observed around how the core agile values and principles have played out in what I would call the Agile Consulting Industry. Agile as a mindset for managing complex software application development arose in response to a crisis in the industry, which identified the risks of the “waterfall” method as early as a paper from 1970: MANAGING THE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS by Dr. Winston W. Royce.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, the prevailing waterfall methodology could only guarantee about a 16% possibility of success for a software project. Agile was a response from a broad group of people who saw that the attempts to address the problem through methods like the Rational Unified Process (RUP), Prince 2 and the emerging Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) were keeping the same approach and mindset of Waterfall and increasing the amount of process in an attempt to provide a greater possibility of success.

The Agile movement was a revolution that ran counter to the new waterfall methods. But we now know that this set of values and principles, which rests on empirical process control, applies to all forms of knowledge work.

The industry formed from this initial group of pioneers' work and started gaining traction in 2001 with the signing of the manifesto. Over the last twenty-some years, it has been through its hype cycle and adoption curve.

We are now at a stage where wide-scaled certified training and consulting have changed how we approach knowledge work. It would be hard to find a software development organisation that hasn’t adopted some elements of Agility.

However, the perception of the role of the “pure” Agile roles such as Scrum Master and Agile Coach has come to be viewed in a more cynical light. I assess that this process has started internationally and will begin to manifest shortly in the local tech industry, leading to the elimination of those roles.

If I had to pick a target responsible for this, it would be the traditional consulting companies (like Accenture, Deloitte or McKinsey) who have sold their consulting services while never embracing those values themselves and the emergence of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its rapacious training certification costs.

The website SAFe Delusion provides ample evidence and thought leaders' opinions that SAFe is not Agile. An accumulating number of case studies show prominent failures in applying the framework.

The unfortunate outcome is that all of Agile is now seen in the same light. I believe, however, that Agile still represents a better, more modern, and appropriate approach to managing knowledge work by treating it as a Complex Adaptive System that is best managed through empirical process control. Another critical element is respect for people, both the customers who use the product and the people who build the product. Combine this with the understanding that knowledge workers work best as cross-functional, self-organising, highly collaborative, intrinsically motivated teams with a continuous improvement mindset.