• Agile Coach

No baby climbs out of the box in 1 x

Delft. Downtown. Thursday afternoon. Outside, a tour boat with tourists passes by. Inside, people from the Scrum Academy are working back office. Picture it: flipcharts, laptops, sharpies, post-its, Lego and … a box of rompers. Yes, you read correctly: rompers. Black onesies size 68 to be exact. With on them in bright green letters: ‘Born Agile’. If he had tried them on, you would see Gert-Jan Danenberg walking around proudly in them. But now he likes to give these revealing Scrum Academy rompers as gifts. And here’s why.

Nearly 400 courses in the legs. Over 6 years at the helm at Scrum Academy. Positions as consultant, change manager and trainer on his resume. Completed numerous training courses and courses himself. Gert-Jan Danenberg can hardly be called a rookie in the business. But if you ask him where his knowledge of Agile working comes from, you get a surprising answer: “I was born Agile. And so were you. Everyone actually. Experimentation and learning is in our blood.” Sounds rather idealistic, but it’s more apt than you might initially think. “No baby climbs out of the playpen in one go, no toddler cycles away in one go without falling. We learn from an early age by doing,” outlines Gert-Jan. The managing director has made that human trait his expertise. For example, he taught himself to play the guitar as a teenager and set up a company during his first job. Always learning from the feedback on experiments. Although he didn’t know then that it was called Agile .

Agile is in my blood. And entrepreneurship, training and coaching make that blood flow faster

Start and scale

Agile blood flows fast. But Gert-Jan’s heart pumps it around even faster when start-ups and scale-ups knock on his door. Organizations with teams that are so ambitious that they are in danger of losing focus. “That’s when my entrepreneurship surfaces to want to both make a high impact and build a highly driven team. That appeals to my resourcefulness,” Gert-Jan explains. And that it energizes him is not surprising.

Tap disrupt

Some twenty years ago, Gert-Jan himself worked in a start-up: “We wanted to introduce a new service into the existing market. A bit of a disruption, in other words. We couldn’t possibly do that based on a detailed plan. We had to do that experimentally based on a strong vision, short actions and lots of feedback.” And that is where the ambitious young dog is already experiencing that it brings energy, creativity and better cooperation with the customer. So that “touch of disruption” has fortunately never completely gone out in those twenty years either.

I am learning more and more to put my finger on the strong spot, without getting bogged down in one big all-encompassing analysis

Warm bath, safe haven

So Disrupt can the Agile born man. But that certainly does not mean that he goes into everything with a straight leg (as you might expect with this campaign image). In training and coaching sessions, Gert-Jan has another spearhead: creating a safe atmosphere. A safe haven. A warm bath. He does this mainly by being an open book himself, with the necessary humor: “So that everyone feels you can show the back of your tongue and at the same time laugh with each other.” That also works well in Gert-Jan’s favorite Scrum Academy program: the Agile Coach Training. “That one is so full of cool techniques, tools and practical content. A kind of ‘best of’ what we apply ourselves in practice.” Do you have another great example from that practice Gert-Jan?

No one had ever scrummed an exhibition before. But based on Agile principles and with a highly motivated team, we did it. The collaboration with Naturalis remains special to me.

Don’t be flimsy

So even though we are all “born Agile,” that doesn’t mean we can just go Agile with all kinds of actions. At least, not if it is up to Gert-Jan. He likes to give you the following tip: “Link every action to an underlying principle. If you perform actions haphazardly, i.e. not based on an underlying principle, you will create resistance more quickly and your approach will often be wafer-thin. So start by talking about principles. That’s often where the greatest support is.” And speaking of support: has a baby Agile been born in your area recently? Let us know. Send you a nice bodysuit.