questions and answers

plans created and unfollowed

When I went through training to become an agile coach, one theme came up again and again. Whether I was training to be an agile coach specifically or a professional coach, the message was the same.

Be more curious.

Whenever I start engaging with new coaching clients (in-house or directly), I want to know as much as I can about them before I attempt to support them in any way. I want to understand what makes them happy about their situation and what their greatest pain points are. I want to understand how they would like it to be instead. I want to see their context through their eyes.

Meet them where they are.

This not only gives me the best chance to create a coaching plan that will help them achieve their goals, but it also allows me to understand the impact my interventions are having. True improvement comes from those improving. Great coaching is about supporting that group in developing and executing a plan they’ve created, not about taking a plan that a manager has created and believes is going to achieve greater excellence.

I’ve seen many organisations come up with an agile playbook and then hand it out to their coaches to implement with a team. This lacks the collaboration that we value so highly in agile. It doesn’t give the coach any space to flex and adapt (you know, be agile) while they are supporting the client. It leaves no room to learn, sense, probe, respond, inspect, and adapt to the situation that unveils itself.

To move out of complexity, through complicated, and into simple, we need to be able to dance in the moment and respond to what we learn as we learn it. There may be a plan to go in with; plans are very useful, but this doesn’t mean that the plan is what we will be executing.  This is why we like to have a vision, an understanding of the general end state we’re trying to achieve so that as we turn unknowns into knowns, we can choose the best path to the end goal as we discover the various routes.

I’d like to take a moment here to talk about complex and complicated. Complex is when so many variables interact with each other that it is impossible to know what will happen when any one variable is altered, even when observed. Consider how one person is allergic to a food while others are not. Complicated is when there is the ability to understand the impact of changing a variable; we may not know what the impact will be, but we can understand it if we observe it. Consider how changing the fat or acid used in a recipe will change the flavour of the food. These terms are used interchangeably in the wild, but these are the definitions I and (I hope) the agile community are using.

Curiosity is the most powerful tool in a coach’s work. That is why we spend so long talking about powerful questions and how to respond to answers. The questions we ask will shift how our clients think about a situation, and our responses will tell them whether their answers are valid. We must be careful with both of these gifts we offer so that our impact is as positive as it can be.