The Rightshifting Cause

[Here’s a post that’s been languishing in my “Drafts” folders for ten years now. It dates back to the time when I was just beginning to make my way into Organisational Psychotherapy, as a therapist. Not that I knew it then…]

The Agile Coaching Agenda

I used to to introduce myself to people as an Agile coach. Not anymore. Nowadays, I don’t really know what to introduce myself as. Here’s why.

The term ‘coaching’ is overloaded. There’s sports coaching, agile coaching, life coaching, business coaching and many others. All of them have things in common, but they’re not the same. As well as coaching, there’s mentoring, consulting, advising and whatnot. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes they seem to overlap. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s had trouble differentiating between them.

Lately I’ve studied coaching with Results Coaching Systems. They have a very strict definition for coaching, which says coaching does not have an agenda. In coaching, according to their definition, the goals are always set by the person being coached. I’ve grown to like their definition of coaching.

However, this does raise a conflict. How can anyone (myself included) call themselves an agile coach if coaching shouldn’t have an agenda? Agile is an agenda. Agile is a solution that I – or my clients – are proposing. And coaching shouldn’t have an agenda. Calling anyone an agile coach actually starts to sound very contradictory if you see coaching as not having an agenda.

So I’ve started introducing myself as a software development coach. That’s more honest. Right? Well…

John Seddon has recently thrown more fuel into my existential fire with his talks. John is the father of Vanguard, a systems thinking approach for service organizations. One of his key points is that if the organization as a whole is doing the wrong things the significance of the method(s) used in its software development efforts is very small. He says “Agile is about doing the wrong things faster”. And I think I’m sure he has a point.

The fact that Agile revolves so much around software development has started to feel like a constraint. Like a sub-optimization. I’ve had this feeling for quite a while, but John seems to have reinforced it. This is also a discussion that has been on going in the Agile community for quite a while.

I would like to see myself as someone who looks at the whole. The whole organisation. The whole business. And of that whole, software development is only a small – mostly inconsequential – part. I want to help organizations do the right things with the right methods. Focusing on software development is not enough.

Thanks to John, even ‘software development coach’ feels weird. So what am I suppose to call myself now?

[Spoiler: As you may have noticed, I’ve come to describe myself as an Organisational Psychotherapist.]

– Bob