Coaching structures in Tampere
Last week I presented a talk at Tampere Goes Agile 2017, a free, fun and friendly agile conference by Agile Finland. It was titled Don’t be random! Tools for structured team development.
The Coaching Card is a simple but powerful template for ScrumMasters, line managers and Agile Coaches who are interested in coaching their teams to become more mature. (If you’re not interested in that, you’re probably in the wrong job.)
The Coaching Card is both a thinking model and a template. It gives some backbone to the coaching work, helps people choose the right interventions and gives a degree of measurability to the work. It also lets several people collaborate around one team and helps junior coaches get mentoring and advice from more experienced coaches. It’s one of those simple things that people don’t know they are missing, but look so obvious in hindsight.
Coaching Cards are based on the OODA loop (inspect and adapt) and on Karl Tomm’s coaching model. It very specifically uses observations, hypotheses, goals, metrics and interventions. The Coaching Card concept has been developed over the last 5-6 years by agile42, by doing it and helping others do it. It’s our own solution to a common practical problem, and it is unique because there are literally no other solutions to this problem out there.