Ten Years in Agile Leadership
This year, we celebrate the 10-year anniversary of our Agile Leadership Journey™curriculum. In December 2011, I introduced a new workshop titled Leading and Coaching Agile Organizations at the Certified Scrum Coaching Retreat in Boulder, Colorado. Since then, we have educated thousands of leaders across the globe. Today, over 40 ALJ Guides teach the curriculum and contribute in our community of creative trainers, coaches, and leaders on the journey to be, and help develop, better leaders.
I am honored to share my experiences in why the original program was developed, how it has changed over the years, the formation of the Agile Leadership Journey, and what we can look forward to in the near future.
A Humble Beginning
My own agile leadership journey started well before ‘agile” became a buzzword. In the early 1990’s as an engineering lead, I led the exploration of a number of techniques to improve software development including Rapid Application Development (RAD), Joint Application Development (JAD) and Design Thinking. I joined Rational Software from 1995-2001 to develop products supporting the Rational Unified Process (RUP). From 2001 - 2005 I led a startup engineering team to learn and apply Scrum.
In all my early exploration, I tended to be the primary instigator of a “better” way forward. Yet in each case, I found that process effectiveness came down to a human capacity, focus, and resolve. While the processes were helpful, the human element was instrumental. In other words, it was hard! And when I say “it”, I mean developing products AND leading organizations who develop products.
I can still recall a most memorable statement by Ken Schwaber, co-developer of Scrum, reminding us that software development is not a technology problem, it is a people problem. As an engineer who dedicated my career to solving the technical side of process effectiveness, that was hard to hear — and humbling too!
As an engineer, it was humbling to learn that process effectiveness had little to do with the process itself and mostly to do with the people leading and implementing the process.
Patterns of Success and Failure
Due to my personal leadership struggles with process improvement, even as a process expert, I knew that everyday leaders were going to struggle and need help. I started my consulting firm Trail Ridge, thus beginning my agile educating and coaching career in 2005. I was approved as a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) by the Scrum Alliance in 2006.
In those early years, from 2006 to 2010, I was fortunate to engage with a few amazing companies and people including Salesforce.com, GE Healthcare, Google, Staples (formerly Corporate Express), JDA Software, a Big 5 Consultancy, and more. As I was watching my own success and failure patterns, I was also watching others in the industry. I couldn’t help but see a common pattern of success only when experts were engaged, then followed quickly by a significant drop off. I began to explore what separated those that sustained agility from the rest.
A couple of key patterns began to emerge - the leaders’ resolve to improve, and the organizational culture and systems to enable and sustain that improvement. As I began to explore these areas further, my learning journey led me down many paths, essentially navigating a personal MBA program in Organizational Development and Culture, Leadership Development, and Professional Coaching. I joined OD Networks and Conferences. I connected and collaborated with leadership gurus like Peter Block, Bill Joiner, and David Rock. During this time I helped develop and grow the Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coaching® (CEC) Program and helped shape the ICAgile Enterprise Coaching Track.
Today’s Agile Leadership Journey™ models and curriculum solidified during this time of exploration and were further tested with clients. The two key focal lenses continued to evolve - developing leadership mindset and behavior, and developing cultural awareness and alignment towards more agile ways of working.
Two key patterns of sustained agility emerged — the leaders’ resolve to improve and the organizational culture and systems to enable and sustain that improvement.
Learning Agile Leadership by Doing
I have always found most value in learning through experimentation. As an engineer, I would learn faster by coding, testing and refactoring than writing and reviewing requirements and designs. I found this to be true in developing a new leadership and coaching program as well. I was fortunate to have clients who trusted me to prototype these models and teaching techniques with their leaders.
From 2011 to 2016, I only delivered the Leading and Coaching Agile Organizations Workshop a few times in public. However, privately I used the materials every day with every client. Sometimes in formal education sessions, but mostly as in-practice usage and coaching. This provided real-world application and feedback and also began to build our library of case studies.
Agile Leadership Journey has been built on 15 years of practice with clients engaged in a journey to improve. And so while the curriculum is only 10 years from the first delivery, its foundation started much earlier in the labs of real corporations, projects and programs.
Certified Agile Leadership
In 2016, the Scrum Alliance asked me to lead an initiative to develop a program on agile leadership - stating it was the number one requested learning they didn’t have a program to address. Together with other industry leaders, we put forth the foundations for the Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) Program.
The CAL program was heavily influenced by my early agile leadership testing and program development. However, for the Scrum Alliance, we abstracted the learning modules to allow trainers flexibility in the models they choose to leverage in their programs. This has one major advantage and one major disadvantage. The major advantage is that it provides incredible diversity to explore this emerging space and allows trainers flexibility to bring their expertise forward. The major disadvantage is that there is no common model or framework to center on and clients may be left puzzled. Scrum was successful in its growth because it leveraged a framework and rules - allowing consistency of practice with variability of teaching the practice. So while I am proud of the broad program and diversity in delivery we developed for the Scrum Alliance, I am torn with the fact that organizations and leaders require a more concrete solution.
Certified Agile Leadership programs have a key flaw — they are all built on different models and frameworks aligned to a set of principles. Asking for agile leadership training is like asking for agile training — which flavor do you want? Scrum? Kanban? SAFe? Agile Leadership Journey seeks to solve that by aligning a global community of educators and coaches in sharing one framework.
During this time I was personally at a pivot point - it was time for me to let go of teaching and coaching Scrum. I was finding that my focus on leadership and culture was all-encompassing and much more valuable to the success or failure of any Scrum or Agile adoption. Teaching Scrum (or other agile methods) is necessary, but not sufficient for effective organizational agility. And there were enough Scrum Trainers in the world servicing that industry. It was time for me to go all-in on leadership.
A Visual Turning Point
From 2016 through 2018, with a maniacal focus on agile leadership, the program's success began to build upon itself and quickly grew past my capacity to deliver. I began to collaborate with other trainers and coaches interested in this curriculum and looking to expand their own offerings.
During this time, I held an instrumental public class in Kiev, Ukraine with a partner, Kirill Klimov. During this workshop I noticed some participants, like Kirill and Lina Shishkina creating amazingly beautiful flip charts during our breakout exercises. They shared their practice with me, which led me down a new path to leverage visualization to enhance learning. Two years later, I had visualized every aspect of our learning and teaching. The results of which are unparalleled in any education area. You have to see it to believe it. Below is a historical sampling of the visual evolution of one concept we teach on management trends…
In our in-person sessions, participants are awed by the visual exploration of the learning through graphic facilitation and an entire learning journey illustrated on the walls. For remote learning adapted during COVID, we transitioned this visual exploration through graphical, interactive collaboration tools.
Agile Leadership Journey
In 2018, we formed a retreat of collaborating trainers and coaches in Cologne, Germany. During this retreat, we developed the foundation of our community today. We also explored the naming of such a program and community. Agile Leadership Journey emerged.
Agile Leadership Journey’s mission is to develop better leaders. It is built on the foundation that organizational transformation will not occur without leadership transformation. It is also built on the foundation that while outside advisory and council is valuable, outside transformation through consultancy is not sustainable.
Agile Leadership Journey operates in an ecosystem with process frameworks like Scrum and Kanban, agile scaling frameworks like Scaled Agile and Large Scale Scrum, tooling and measuring sticks, and sister communities like Lean-Agile Procurement and Business Agility Institute. We are fiercely independent of agile frameworks and tools and believe that any of them will work. We are also maniacally focused on leadership because we believe none of them will work without effective leadership and a supportive culture.
(Re)Learning Leadership
We continue to evolve our own learning, teaching and coaching. And while we are proud that our curriculum has stood the test of time, we also know that we must remain alert and adaptive to new learning and discovery. In service of this, I host a podcast (Re)Learning Leadership to bring forward leadership stories and leadership development experts to help us all remain curious and on a journey of “better”.
And because we know that we are only one part of a broader ecosystem to improve the world of work, we support our key partners including
Lean-Agile Procurement who are re-inventing the procurement process through an agile lens, the
Business Agility Institute who are bringing research and case studies on the challenges and benefits from more agile ways of working, and
Comparative Agility who are helping organizations measure and build more effective agile ways of working through metrics.
What’s Next?
Thank you to all of our collaborators, client leaders, educators and coaches, partners and team dedicated to improving the world of work and building better leaders! We appreciate your support and co-creativity.
We have a place for you:
- Trainers and Coaches focused on agility and/or leadership, we want to hear from you. A number of our trainers and coaches had programs on their own, yet found our shared curriculum and community through becoming an ALJ Guide adds value to their services and their clients.
- HR Leaders responsible for organizational culture and/or leadership development, we want to hear from you. We provide a complement to your suite of leadership and culture courses and tools that will help your leaders be more self-aware and real-time adaptive to operate more effectively amid complexity, uncertainty and rapid change. We can also help your leaders align.
- Agile Transformation Leaders responsible for changing the organization systems and processes to enable a more effective organizational delivery engine, we want to hear from you. We complement all agile ways of working from Scrum to Kanban to Scaled Agile Framework. All agile methods and frameworks will benefit from leaders who “get it” and a culture that “supports it”.
- Leaders and anyone seeking to have more effective influence in an organization, we want to hear from you. Our programs help anyone become better at whatever they do. You do not need to be a formal managing leader to benefit from our programs. Our programs develop awareness and competencies that benefit your professional AND personal lives.
Our journey continues….
About the Author
Pete Behrens, founder of Agile Leadership Journey, has over 30 years experience as a leader himself and through educating and coaching other leaders on their journey.
Pete is a Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) Educator, Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) and a former Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with the Scrum Alliance. For the Scrum Alliance, Pete developed the CEC Program in 2007 and the CAL Program in 2016. He further served on the board of Directors from 2016-2018.
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