• Agile Coach

These are 5 recurring complaints about Agile Coaches

The greatest profession in the world? Agile Coaching, without a doubt. Working every day on agile organizations, happy teams and real impact. That’s what I get out of bed for. Because as an Agile Coach you help teams and organizations respond faster to change, deliver value and solve problems independently. Not by rolling out a framework, but by stimulating a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration. Yet that doesn’t always go well. In this article, I share 5 complaints about Agile Coaches that we regularly hear from teams and organizations.

I think Agile Coaching is the greatest profession there is. But let’s face it: there is also criticism. Agile Coaches are not always perceived as valuable guides, but as process police or preachers of “how things should be done. And there is a grain of truth in that.

Dave Snowden, best known for the Cynefin Framework, is perhaps the fiercest critic. He likes to poke fun at coaches who reduce Agile to a fixed set of rules and processes. His message? We are taming Agile and that’s a problem.

Making Agile wild again

Snowden advocates “rewilding Agile”: returning to Agile as a vibrant, flexible and creative way of working. That means for us Agile Coaches: stop with standard platitudes and become guides again instead of preachers. In this, Snowden challenges us to look beyond fixed methods such as Scrum or SAFe. Because too often we apply the solutions that work in the uncomplicated domain, where clear roadmaps are fine, to complex problems where experimentation and adaptability are actually crucial. But there are certainly other things we can do differently

The 5 pitfalls of Agile Coaches

Snowden is not the only one cracking critical nuts. From teams and organizations, we also hear recurring complaints about Agile Coaches:

1. Lack of practical experience
Coaches who know Scrum or Kanban perfectly by the book, but have little experience with the day-to-day reality of software development, product development or change management. As a result, their advice sometimes remains theoretical and not very applicable.

2. Too much jargon and dogma.
‘This is how a stand-up should be’ or ‘This is not Agile enough,’ rules are preached without looking at the context. That feels more like rigid doctrine than the very flexibility Agile is supposed to bring.

3. Excessive focus on process over results
Coaches who get lost in the perfect retrospective or sprint planning, when the real question is: is the team delivering value? The goal is not a nice backlog, but a product that makes customers happy.

4. One-size-fits-all approach
Every team and every organization is different. Yet you sometimes see coaches rolling out a standard Agile blueprint without considering culture, context and unique challenges. Agile is precisely about customization.

5. Too much cheerleader, not enough depth
Energy and enthusiasm are good, but without substantive guidance on complex problems (such as technical debt or team dynamics), it remains superficial. An Agile Coach must also dare to have difficult conversations.

Are you in? Less standard, more customization!

So Agile is not a set recipe, but a living process that requires adaptability, guts and systems knowledge. Snowden’s vision may be confrontational, but it also offers an opportunity: as Agile Coaches, let’s prove our true worth. Less dogma, more nuance. Less standard processes, more customization. In this article we give you some pointers with input from the 7 stances of the best Agile Coaches. Will you join us? Then I’d love to spar with you about it: schedule a non-binding appointment with me here.