Hi Folks

I thought I'd kick the year off with a few thoughts on coaching. I should make it clear at this point that I mean proper coaching - helping people develop themselves and not the "showing people how to to agile" type of coaching that should really be called agile process consulting rather than agile coaching. Over the last couple of years, I have been moving away from "agile" coaching and towards a more developmental style. As I have made that shift, I have seen that typical agile coaching is fundamentally limited. I'm not saying that it has no value, just that it has real value only to a relatively small subset of the population. 

I remember when I first found agile techniques and they felt intuitively right to me. They felt natural. They felt liberating. Many (if not all) of the agile coaches I have spoken to about this had a very similar experience. As coaches, we have all had the experience of an individual, or a team, or even an organisation that just "got it". They got what agile was about and just went for it. But we have all had the opposite (and far more frequent) experience of individuals, teams and organisations that just fail to grasp what agility is about. For whom agility is just following a new set of rules. Having different meetings. Doing standups and retros. When I speak to those people about agility they have a very different reaction to my first reaction. For them, agility is confronting, wrong and even suffocating. Why would that be? Why would people have such diametrically opposed reactions to the same thing?  My journey into developmental coaching has given me a hint of the answer - it’s our relationship with uncertainty and complexity.

Most models of adult development show several distinct stages. I won't dig into the models here because there are many but they all share the same basic features - as someone moves through the various stages of adult development, their relationship to complexity changes. At early levels of development, our ability to deal with, and even recognise, complexity is limited. I have had the experience as a coach of digging into a problem with someone and exposing all this complexity underneath the surface which they not only fail to understand, but reject outright - "no... it’s really very simple. If people just....". It’s not that they are being stupid, or difficult, it’s that the way their brain is wired right now means they are simply not capable of recognising complexity. Their mental model just does not include complexity as a concept. Effect must follow cause and with sufficient analysis, a clear path between cause and effect must exist. To them, we live in essentially a Newtonian clockwork universe. Everything must be able to be reduced to fundamental rules and processes. The idea of a world rooted in uncertainly, where cause and effect can't easily be determined. Where a clear way forward is not obvious, no matter how much analysis you do. Where you have to rely on experimentation and iteration to show you the way forward and not a clear, long tern plan. That just does not come into their mental model of the world.

As we move through the developmental stages, our ability to first, recognise, then understand and then deal with, complexity becomes greater and greater. It is the same with uncertainty. At early stages of development people are very, very uncomfortable with uncertainty. Look at the emphasis people put on tools that supposedly reduce uncertainty, and how hard they cling to them when you try to take them away - estimates, forecasts, design up front, detailed specification. It is only when people move to later stages of development that uncertainty becomes a tool that people can harness. Until then, it must be eliminated. In reality of course, it can’t be eliminated, merely hidden behind a smokescreen of false certainty.  

Agile techniques, at their heart, require people to embrace both uncertainty (the date is fixed but the scope will change) and complexity (we don't know how we will get there but we will experiment and find out). These things are only available to people at later stages of development.

So, typically what percentage of the population is at a developmental stage that will allow them to have a healthy relationship with complexity and uncertainty? Studies vary but the consensus is somewhere around 30-40%, certainly less than 50%. So a clear majority of the population does not have the mental model required to allow them to see the complexity and uncertainty at the heart of agility. For the majority of the population, agility is just a new set of rules and processes to follow. And when those new rules and processes do not do what they expect - hide complexity and uncertainty, but rather highlight them - it is no wonder they feel wrong.

I should pause at this point and point out that terms like "early" and "late" and even "development" are problematic. They imply that the later stages of development are intrinsically better than the early ones. This is not the intent at all. Later is not better, later is just later. Earlier is just earlier. They are named that way because we typically hit those stages later in life as we gain more life experience.  In the olden days, before we had development psychology, we would simply call the process of development “growing in wisdom”. Not everyone goes through all the stages. Some remain at early stages for their whole life. And that's perfectly OK. 

Or I should say, it was perfectly OK. Up until a few decades ago, many people lead lives that were not that complex. Jobs were relatively straightforward. You could be employed in a fulfilling, manual job and could stay with one employer for years. Jobs were often for life. It was only if you moved up into management that complexity ever really touched your life. People lived their whole lives in one town or suburb, with the same people. The only place where complexity touched many people was in relationships and raising families. Even there things were often simplified into "father knows best" (not the best model for healthy families, but an alluringly simple one). The world moved at a pace people could comprehend. It did not overwhelm them. You could live your whole life at an early stage of development and be quite content. The majority of people could understand and deal with the world

But that is not the world today. We live in a 24/7, always on, connected world. We are now bombarded with more information in single day from our devices than most people used to have to deal with in a year. The world moves at a staggering pace. We expect to have multiple employers. In fact it is unusual to have a long term job. We expect to have contract or casual employment. We expect to have to move around for work, breaking social and community bonds. Our world has become a very uncertain and complex place. 

We have reached what I believe is a crisis of development. We have built a world that is no longer able to be understood by the majority. It is too complex, too interconnected and too uncertain for them to deal with. It is no longer OK for someone to be an adult in today's world at an early stage of development. They simply cannot navigate, or even recognise the world any more. 

So people fall back to certainties - strong sounding leaders who have simple solutions for complex problems - it’s not the complex world that has taken your job certainty, it’s the migrants. It’s those evil "others" with their lower labour rates. Blame the greenies, blame the elites (those who can see complexity and therefore exploit and profit from it). We must stop the boats, build the wall, get brexit done. Then all will be well.

Of course we know that it won't all be well. Complex problems do not have simple solutions. 

The only solution is development. Only moving to later stages of development will allow people to see the problems we are facing and be able to solve them. I'll talk about that next time.