The past year I have had the chance of coaching great teams around the world, helping them become Agile and produce better products, have more fun while doing it and help them rediscover their passion for software development.

I’ve come across a few interesting situations which made me reflect a bit about the correlation between a widely recognised coaching matrix for individuals and how could this be extended to organisations as a whole.

Let’s first start by looking at the goal of an Agile coach:

Your goal is to a grow a productive Agile team that thinks for itself rather than relying on you to lay down the Agile law. “Agile Coaching” by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, 2009 Pragmatic Programmers.

Considering that one of the founding principles of Agile software development is that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” (and also that this seems to be common sense, right?) enabling teams to think for themselves seems like the natural progression.

Now, in large (and small) organisations, the traditional “command and control” method of management has eroded this principle. In particular in software development, the more common approach is to see “development” as one of those steps that happen at the end of a chain of events that starts with clever executives in strategy meetings devising products based on tons of dashboards and metrics, then sending that to a team of business analysts to come up with large functional specification documents, which are then in turn handed over to rooms full of coders to implement them. We have seen over and over again that this mechanistic and believed-to-be-repeatable approach doesn’t work.

So we assume that everyone will be producing better products, delivering more value faster and having more fun doing it just by changing a few things. Constructive-developmental theories, of whatever sort, introduce a few fundamental ideas one of which is that not every change represents development, which is where our job as coaches become very interesting. Change is just the first step towards development 🙂

Getting back to the point I was trying to make, when introducing changes as a coach, there is a model for individuals based on the skills and will of the people being coached, some call it the “High Low Matrix Coaching Model“. This coaching model states that depending on the motivation and skills of the coached person, you should adapt the coaching style to one of either “direct”, “advise”, “motivate” or “delegate”. I heard about this model a few years back from my friend (and my manager at the time) Didier Elzinga while we both worked together at Rising Sun Pictures (awesome VFX studio BTW). It’s very useful when you are working with small teams or individuals. What happens when you are coaching larger teams and you need to have a coaching style based on the organisation level of maturity (skills and will)?

So, I set myself to read more on organisational maturity (yes, CMMI and the like, which I was already somehow familiar with), as well as psychology of coaching. I was trying to find out if there had already been some research on the topic. It’s hard because when you google for “organisational maturity and coaching models” you get (apart from the suggestion on the american spelling of “organizational” 😉 ) quite a few results around the organisational maturity as referred in the CMM models, which is not really what I was after. I couldn’t find any direct correlation that would help me validate this theory of mine.

In the next few engagements, and some of the ongoing ones, I shall be using this line of thinking and report on the findings.

We live in interesting times! Full of opportunity to do things better!