Last time, I started talking about complexity and uncertainty, and how the rapid increase in both has made the world a very hostile and confusing place to many people. Why would a rise in these two things cause the world to look hostile? The study of adult development gives us the reason - people only develop the ability to understand and deal with complexity and uncertainty at later stages of adult development. Until people reach those stages, they will seek certainty, or at least the illusion of certainty. 

When that illusion is shattered, as it so often is these days, people need to re-form their illusion of certainty around different things - maybe my job is no longer certain, but at least my family is stable, and so on. When this happens again and again, people feel that their defences against the world are constantly under attack - the the world is against them. Their view of the world, one that might have served them perfectly well in the past, is now constantly under attack. All the old certainties that people used to rely upon - job, family, community, identity - are being continually challenged.

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.

Over the last few posts we have been looking at the key changes I feel are necessary for an organisation to be agile, rather than just do agile. We have looked at distributed decision making, execution efficiency and measuring what matters. It's time now to cover the fourth key change - inspect and adapt.

This is probably the hardest of all the four changes for an organisation to adopt in anything but the most superficial of ways. By adopting inspect and adapt, they are not just adopting the need to continuously improve. They are also adopting a view of the world that is fundamentally non-deterministic. Where uncertainty is not just normal, but accepted and even embraced. Where long term plans give way to rapid experimentation. This may be a step too far for many organisations.