Agile Peer Coaching: the Peerview Experience

agilePRAXIS starts a new season with more ideas, and more conversations.
Dr Bernhard Sterchi is a Thought Sorter, and an Opportunities Room Cleaner. But first of all, he is a good mate.
Peerview is a new app-based method for peer coaching. It uses Oblique Strategies designed explicitly for leadership, change management, and Agile.
In this session, Bernhard, creator of Peerview, shows us some of the app’s theory and experiences, and how you can use it for yourself or your team. But more importantly, we get to try out the method in peer coaching sessions right away.
So if you are currently working on challenging topics (who isn’t?), get ready to find extra profit by uncovering novel points of view and approaches in this session!
And of course, unlimited access to the app is complimentary for all session participants.

This event was a crossover event between agilePRAXIS and agile studio CH.

Recording from the event

Chat conversation

18:10:11 From Bernhard Sterchi : You were working on an issue and you were stuck. How did you get unstuck?
18:10:37 From Nicole Helmerich : I stopped and went for a walk
18:10:46 From Ville Reijonen : Talked with a mate
18:10:52 From Elsa Wormeck : I said to myself think it different
18:10:53 From Mun-Wai Chung : Do something else and come back to it
18:10:54 From Manolo Lopez : A nap
18:11:00 From Virginia Anderson : Adapted to the environment and didn’t push the person
18:11:23 From Pierre Neis : napping during a walk
18:11:32 From Mun-Wai Chung : Reacted to “napping during a wal…” with 🤣
18:12:23 From Virginia Anderson : new perspective and released stress
18:12:31 From Nicole Helmerich : a fresh mind – a refreshed body and spirit
18:12:41 From Elsa Wormeck : New connections in my brain
18:13:07 From Pierre Neis : my neurone has only one connection
18:13:07 From Bernhard Sterchi : New options for tough problems
18:13:13 From Ville Reijonen : Time for subcontinious mind to work on the issue
18:14:40 From Bernhard Sterchi : Occasional
18:16:22 From Bernhard Sterchi : Contextual
18:17:50 From Bernhard Sterchi : How could a technical tool contribute to “new options for tough problems”?
18:17:59 From Nicole Helmerich : I am back in 2mins
18:22:37 From Mun-Wai Chung : What they study and what they actually do are 2 different things most of the time…
18:23:03 From Manolo Lopez : https://www.humu.com/
18:24:07 From Bernhard Sterchi : Not deliver the solution, but trigger, enhance, augment your solution building process.
18:24:47 From Bernhard Sterchi : Peerview
18:25:40 From Bernhard Sterchi : N3XCQ9
18:27:28 From Nicole Helmerich : Peerview
N3XCQ9
18:28:23 From Elmontasser : I am sorry i dont see the link
18:28:31 From Nicole Helmerich : it is not a link
18:28:41 From Nicole Helmerich : the name of the app is called peerview
18:28:51 From Nicole Helmerich : you can find it on your phone in the app store
18:28:53 From Pierre Neis : download the Peerview app on Appstore or
18:28:59 From Nicole Helmerich : you download and enter the code
18:31:29 From Elmontasser : Thanks
18:31:45 From Pierre Neis : 😃
18:36:16 From Mun-Wai Chung To Pierre Neis(privately) : Sorry Pierre, I need to run. It was nice seeing you again 🙂
18:37:22 From Nicole Helmerich : LS Troika consulting and LS wise crowds would be a beatiful add on to this…
18:40:00 From Elmontasser : I am sorry i dont have a camera
18:40:08 From Elmontasser : my pc is intel machine
18:40:48 From Elsa Wormeck : Founding a new company with friends
18:42:42 From Luc Gerardin : I am on the road so won’t really gonna able to take part in the interactive session unfortunately
19:14:38 From Nicole Helmerich : chat has a bug again
19:14:47 From Nicole Helmerich : my chat disappeared
19:14:57 From Nicole Helmerich : anybody saved the chat?
19:15:18 From Pierre Neis : the whole session will be recorded so the chat will be saved too
19:17:10 From Nicole Helmerich : the system at work
19:35:50 From Elmontasser : Elmontasser Aboulfadl

agilePRAXIS events to learn and share

#1agilePRAXIS kick off
#2 agilePRAXIS How Kotter change model helped me to make changes in 2 big companies (by Marina Arefieva, www. 21time.ru )
#3 agilePRAXIS Deep Listening (Holger Nauheimer, https://www.hnauheimer.ne)
#4 agilePRAXIS How to map networks (Ulises Aguila, https://yunikon.academy)
#5 agilePRAXIS Agile structures, agile behaviour and the nature of help (Bernhard Sterchi, https://www.palladio.net)
#6 agilePRAXIS Expending your coaching skills (Virginia Anderson, http://matrix.lu)

You want to attend one of our on-site/on-line events, feel free to join our MeetUp group here.

You want to propose a topic, here is the link.

agile coach program & certification

3 years ago I started t work on a program distilling the necessary skills allowing the students to work effectively as an agile coach. Through the interactions, a program has been created on several layers:

  • to register
  • to get the documents
  • to attend the 5 days class an experiment collective learning
  • to get 10 hours of coaching individual and in a team, on-site and virtual
  • to get the certification by achieving the first level (yellow belt)
  • to reach the next level (blue), you have to work on a project with the support of one coach of our group. In a period of 6 months, once you are ready, you have to attend a Play14 event and propose a review session to demonstrate what you have learned in front of other coaches. What will be measured is not your proficiency in theory or tooling, it´s about how you behave, what you discovered, what you experimented. At the end of that session, the decision is taken in public, it´s all about the gut.
  • the next step is mastery (black belt). Like previously, you have to work on a project during a maximum of one year with a master coach. This project, in particular, it is called your masterpiece. Your masterpiece is the part of you that you bring into the agile coaching program corpus. And again, you will have to demonstrate it during an hour session during a Play14.

To keep the discussion running, a bi-weekly online/onsite Meetup has been set up to share, to get inspired, agilePRAXIS.

agile coaching certification levels

5 days, 5 knowledge areas

If you are interested or if you want more details, please contact me : pierre.neis@agilesqr.com

Agile coaching in 21st century world

Agile sounds to be on everyone’s plates nowadays and I have the feeling that you can put “agile” in front of everything you are on the wave. Unfortunately, this is not possible.

Try this out: Sales → agile sales (but it is always about the same sale), Marketing → agile Marketing, and so on. Even agile manufacturing, the source of the word agile, is almost manufacturing but the game changer is how you handle it.

Since Agile has become a noun grouping a lot of methodologies, tools and techniques and even a couple of manifestos, Agile hasn´t been clearly defined yet.

My thesis, as an agile coach and trainer, is to return to the source of agile or agility, which is agile manufacturing (AM). The core high level purpose of AM was to move from a robust structure to a responsive one. As an evolution of Lean Manufacturing, AM was a proposal to adjust leaned organisations to such adaptability to threads, risks or opportunities in a world where product lifecycles are getting really shorter.

From the 90´s eXtreme Programming, a new role emerged in software development, the role of the agile coach. At that time, this role has to support the development team towards engineering mastery. And that was an awesome idea. 2009, Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley came with Agile Coaching Book.

Then Agile evolved to project management, product development, startups, finance and a lot more and we needed new insights. In her book Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Atkins came in 2010 and enhanced the first idea by explaining how to coach agile teams. This approach introduced the concept of multiple hats for an agile coach like a mentor, consultant, coach, teacher, a facilitator with a deep understanding of Agile.

The expansion of agile is so exponential that now agile coaches are transforming whole organizations, whole enterprises and, indeed, the skills of an agile coach are no longer based on engineering mastery only.

Nowadays, agile coaching addresses mostly 3 important pillars:

  • Board coaching using techniques from Family coaching taking roots in Satir Model because an enterprise behaves like a family
  • Systemic coaching: how does a system of multiples systems behaving towards the Enterprise purpose or True North.
  • and Personal development coaching (incl. Executive coaching): how I interact with the system I´m involved with and how I can find myself in such a system.
The level of agile coaching

Considering that the whole organization has to move to agility (adjective), this imposes to think that Agile is no longer a methodology, nor a mindset.

Like manufacturing moving from paternalistic command-and-control (mass production) to system thinking (mass customisation), Agile has to be considered as an evolution of system thinking like lean where the purpose is no longer to reduce the variability in such system but to increase the diversity in that system allowing the collection of a bigger amount of data for better decision making. That system becomes agile even if a part of it doesn´t have an “agile mindset”.

Even if you are a systemic coach, the “agile spice” is in the dynamics in that system.

Agile systems dynamic model

The Agile System Dynamic Model is inspired by the learning dynamics in the Cynefin model (D. Snowden).

Since 2018, a new program has been introduced to address the evolution of agile coaching and a new set of skills are necessary to understand the challenges of working in agile systems:

  • understand Agile towards the nature of work
  • get some genuine agile techniques like Scrum or Kanban
  • understand Agile Organisation models (https://myao.blog)
  • managing and leading change
  • facilitation and communication techniques

Such programs an actually running in Western Europe to sharpen the skills of coaches and takes usually 5 days in a row + 10 hours of group coaching.

For information, feel free to contact me: pierre.neis@agilesqr.com.

Pierre E. Neis