The Practicing Agilist

The agile community sometimes feels like what the medical community would be like if 95% of doctors were lecturers in medical school, and only 5% were actually practicing medicine, and that those who were actually practicing it were embarrassed by it, as if they were just briefly filling the role until the hospital reached enough maturity to get by without them, and then they could also “move up” to teaching at medical school.

Imagine that, if you had an industry where the career path was focused on being coached and trained in order to become a coach or trainer. Imagine if every expert in an industry were only interested in coaching or training others. Who would actually do the work? It would almost feel like a parallel to some multi-level marketing schemes / scams where building up a business of more salespeople was more important than actually selling the product itself.

People in the field are craving some real agile leadership, someone who can come in and do more than just convey some theory, roll out some standard workshops and trainings and then leave. They need someone who can really take the time to get involved and understand the business, to actually drive things forward, to actually deliver, to get their hands dirty, to make decisions and to take responsibility.

Coaches and trainers shy away from all this, “that’s not coaching”, they say. “You don’t help the coachee by doing his job”. They are right of course, so its obviously not for them, but someone still has to do it.

I am always bemused when a manager asks a question about some agile topic and gets berated by a Coach. “That’s not coaching” the coach says. “A coach would never do that, you need to get yourself some ICF certified Coaches Training!”, without even considering that the person asking the question has no aspirations at all to become a coach. Without even considering that there are any roles out there beyond Scrum Master that could be related to agile leadership.

When companies bought into scrum, they quite rightly expected the scrum masters to do these things, to replace their old-school managers by filling their shoes in an agile way. But they didn’t. “The coaches told us that Scrum Masters are like coaches” they said. “We can’t do all that stuff, that is either evil management, or the developers should do it. If we do it, the developers will never self-organize!”. The developers didn’t do it, because they were busy developing. So the organizations kept their “evil managers” to do all the work that the Scrum Masters didn’t want to do. All the finances, all the risk management, all the planning, all the strategy, all the process improvement, all the interventions, all the impediment resolution. And they wondered why agility hit a wall and never spread beyond the Scrum teams. Some of the Scrum Masters actually wanted to take things further, and grow and develop and help their organization become more agile, but the community told them the next step up was to become a coach or trainer, and coaches aren’t allowed to do anything hands-on, aren’t allowed to do anything except coach. So they put their expertise in processes and methods, technical practices, culture and mindset, continuous improvement, product and innovation or organizational design on the shelf, and became experts in coaching and training instead.

That didn’t help the organizations, who lost all their agile experts to the coaching and training business and also lost development capacity as developers, who after starting families, needed to move up to a scrum master’s salary. But they keep hiring coaches and trainers, because they are the most visible, they were all that was available, and they had been hearing a message like “managing=bad, coaching=good”. They are two different things. Coaches have an expertise in coaching, trainers have an expertise in training, neither are necessarily experts in agile management, in processes and methods, technical practices, culture and mindset, continuous improvement, product and innovation, systems thinking or organizational design.

Why do we see so much disdain expressed by Agile and Scrum coaches and trainers towards the topic of management or the role of agile managers, whether they be agile delivery, project or program managers. You hear them say things like “there are no managers in Scrum”, or “the existence of managers prevents the team from self-organizing”. I have really noticed this only comes from coaches and trainers, not people actually hands on involved in actually delivering things.

Actually it isn’t all bad. There are a lot of practicing agilists out there. As much as there is to criticize about SAFe, it is great to see they have defined a role such as Release Train Engineer. (The name of the role is pretty stupid though, they aren’t much involved in releases or engineering). You might find them called Agile Delivery Managers, or Agile Program Managers, or Agile Project Managers (Coaches and trainers, especially Scrum coaches and trainers hate that last one. “There are no Project Managers in Scrum” they say). Or they might even drop the Agile bit at the beginning and just call themselves Delivery or Program Managers etc. Or perhaps they call themselves Chapter or Guild Leaders. Or Senior Scrum Masters. Essentially they fill the role that most pre-agile managers do, except they manage the work and the system rather than manage people. What they don’t seem to do much of, compared to Coaches and Trainers, is post a lot on Twitter and LinkedIn. You see Coaches and Trainers work temporarily on projects or at different clients for a short amount of time, they need to be continually looking for the next customer so they need to invest a lot in promotion. Practicing Agilists have a more permanent home in the organization and are usually quite busy and have less need to promote themselves. This is perhaps one reason why organizations forget they exist, and strangely tend to hire Agile Coaches to fill permanent management roles.

None of this post is meant to disparage coaches or trainers, they are required, but sometimes I think people forget that for every coach or trainer, the industry should probably require about 10 or even 100 practicing agilists, and I don’t think this ratio matches what we might perceive by browsing LinkedIn or twitter.