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Coaching is an interesting journey. For a coaching engagement that stays the course, it can often take both coach and coachee to very unexpected positive outcomes and places. However, there are also many cases where coachees don’t follow through with their own processes and end the coaching engagement. One very common reason for this is that the change required (which the coachee thought they wanted in the first place) is too hard, or to use a coaching maxim: the current situation did not hurt enough for the change to happen.

When coaching we work from a number of fundamental premises. One centers around the premise that the coach/coachee relationship needs to be voluntary on both sides and some pairings don’t work well together, so the relationship ends and hopefully the coachee finds a coach they can work with.

Another fundamental premise reads: If someone does not want to change from their current state (or is not truly ready to change at that point in time), no amount of coaching can make them change. At some stage the engagement ends.  Sometimes coachees go away for a while and return when they are ready for change and end up seeing the coaching engagement through. Many coachees however never return, the change they are hoping to make is too hard for them to accept.

I find a similar phenomenon inside organisations attempting to transition to Agile, and must confess that for me it is one of the hardest things to deal with as an Agile coach.

Organisation X hears about Agile, and decides to implement it. They get everyone on training in “doing” Agile, and then get going with it. Very soon they start struggling with some aspects of “doing” Agile, and decide to call in an Agile coach. When the Agile coach arrives, he or she starts to suggest changes, facilitate alternative thinking and ideas to approach these problems, and then the organisation ends up rejecting these ideas, stating that Agile does not work for them.

Interestingly, the latest Chaos report lists “Executive support” as the first factor in the list of factors needed for Agile to be successful. Using that as a platform to start from, perhaps the Agile coach should first determine the appetite for this level of support among the executives of the organisation.

So, here are some real coaching questions for these organisations (it is also useful for organisations who are successful in their Agile journey to constantly consider these as well):

• Why are you adopting Agile, what is the underlying business reason, how will you know when the desired end-state has been reached?
• As an organisation, why would you say you want help, and then act (and react) in ways rejecting the help given/offered, what aspects of change could be so disruptive that you are not prepared to make them, even to get the benefits of Agile adoption?
• And, why would you want to blame Agile instead of looking for the real reasons why your organization is struggling with change or not getting the results you hoped for?
• If your organisation was serious enough to invest in starting with Agile, why is it not serious enough about seeing through the consequences of the initial decision and investment?
• If the initial commitment to Agile was serious enough to invest in, what has changed inside the organisation to negate this commitment?
• Are there any competing initiatives in the organisation that may dilute the appetite for the agile adoption/ transformation?

If you find the organisation thrashing and changing direction about the Agile adoption then it can be good to return to the original reasons as to why this journey was started. You will need to determine if these are still valid. If you find the original reasons (or vision) is not valid any more, then it is time to re-assess before you continue.

Another phenomenon I have seen is that organisations expect immediate results or a higher level of Agile maturity right from the start. The quest to Agile maturity remains a journey, no matter how good your people are. The truth of the matter is that it takes time to build high performing Agile teams, and many organisations keep forgetting this months into an Agile adoption initiative, resulting in disillusionment.

Many leading Agilists, blogs and publications talk about “doing” Agile as being simple, but “being” Agile as being very hard. Along this line, I must confess that it remains difficult for teams and organisations to keep this vision alive if they are stuck knee-deep in confrontational daily standups, missed sprint commitments, general toxic political faction battles and diverging organizational visions.

If you are currently struggling with adopting Agile, or have adopted it, but are struggling to get it right, perhaps you need to see if your priorities changed as an organization; As with the quote at the start of this article, changed priorities will impact your maturity in Agile.

Post by Aldo Rall