This session is an explanation and demonstration of Deep Democracy, primarily aimed at coaches interested in learning new techniques. Deep Democracy—originated by Arnold Mindell—maintains that a well functioning group is dependent on all the voices, positions and views in the group being heard and valued. We will start with the definition, origins and applications of Deep Democracy, then conduct a Large Group Process in which all can directly experience the power of this approach. In our debrief, we will harvest the wisdom of the group, and explore practical uses in Agile team situations.

As agile coaches, we all face impediments when it comes to making agile transformations happen in an organization. Dealing with corporate bureaucracy is most times the hardest part of the transition. So, what about the federal government and all that red tape? Learn how two coaches have made it happen, leading and coaching an enterprise agile adoption (principally Scrum and FDD) at two agencies within the federal government space. Think you’ve dealt with bureaucracy? Come hear what it’s like to deal with the ultimate in corporate bureaucracy!

Self-organization of human beings is a tricky thing. Agile coaches are constantly challenged with how to motivate/persuade/trick their teams into doing things, without telling them what to do, but there is very little information or training on this topic. Allowing a team to self-organize along the lines of “oh well, they’re all adults, they’ll figure it out” is just as irresponsible as reverting to the command-and control school of management. This tutorial presents an approach utilizing leading-edge research and techniques from social complexity science and team dynamics.

An Intuit process “Agile Done Right” (ADR) was created to ensure agile is used properly to maximize business results & minimize process problems. It requires an agile coach like those used in Intuit’s successful SEI’s Team Software Process (TSP). Coaches ensure the process is “done right” & help fix any problems.

Internal coach training was created to develop project-embedded coaches & to raise the overall level of agile maturity. We look at that training program including the agile syllabus, brief ADR overview, coach’s “dirty dozen” meetings, learning methods, etc.

Human relationships are at the center of the Agile manifesto. Anything we do as coaches to allow humanity expression in our teams directly affects the individuals’ ability to live the manifesto more fully. This immediately translates into better, more astonishing, creation-ability in teams, and a greater sense of accomplishment and fulfillment for the team members. In this session, experienced coaches/trainers Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer will introduce ‘Powerful Questions’ and share their personal experiences of coaching teams and individuals towards a more human-centric way of working.

We’ve spent the past year writing a book about Agile Coaching and that’s given us a great opportunity to reflect on what we do as agile coaches. In this talk, we’ll present our top ten tips for agile coaches. We’ll present this like those TV shows that do a countdown to the Number One tip and illustrate the tips with some personal coaching stories.

We also want to hear from people in the audience what their coaching tips are.

Agile coaches attempt to influence teams in different ways. Our experience is that agile coaches typically work by instinct and intuition. This makes it very hard to explain what coaches do and difficult to teach people how to coach agile teams. Richard Hackman claims in his book “Leading Teams” that there a three basic types of coaching intervention: Motivational, Consultative, Educational. We want to test out that theory and explore about what Agile Coaches really do. We aim to uncover specific coaching interventions that participants have tried and whether these interventions helped.

We talk about collaborating to get great results from Agile, yet so few teams do it well (if they even try it at all). Sure, they cooperate, but collaborate? That’s a different story. My teams couldn’t collaborate, even when they explicitly tried. This failure led to such an epidemic of mediocrity that I turned to a professional for help. I turned to an actor. Come to this session to learn what I learned from the world of theatre and to practice the exercises that helped my teams build their collaboration muscle so that you can do the same with yours.

To enable the Agile Value “Courage”, we have to empower internal coaches, project managers, team leaders, and team members to change the organizations culture. Only a coach (or a manager / executive in his/her role as coach) is in the position to initiate and keep this process alive. Thus a coach has to be able to:

• make human systems transparent
• reduce or adjust complexity
• enforce dialogues and solutions
• set and enact clear goals
• build trust in the team and in the customer collaboration
• focus on sustainable decisions
• clarify conflicts

The use of metaphorical games as a strategy for adopting an agile culture has shown to be weak because most of trainers don’t know the principles of changing beliefs and values of a human mind. The Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Logical Levels of Learning and Change (LLLC) is a powerful framework to be considered when we need to challenge skeptical and analytical minds in traditional software development environments.