Agile Divas

Exploring the different requirements for collaboration in agile transformations when they are complex and complicated efforts.

Jay Stanton Goldstein

May 29, 2020 • 9 min read

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Coaching & Mentoring

Collaboration

Transformation

Managing Change

Agile Adoption

Summary

Jay Stanton Goldstein figures out the answer to the dilemma of whether Agile coaches could actually team up and work on a project. He describes how he joined a large agile consulting company working on agile transformations within a major US insurance company and he suggested to his coach to join forces with the other lead coaches of the value streams. However, the coach noted that agile coaches are way too much of divas to be able to work together. Read the article for more insights and understand why agile ways of working are a particularly good approach for the "VUCA" world we inhabit--a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous one.

Takeaways

A complex problem, like discovering ways to delight clients, is best solved by a cognitively diverse group of people that is given the responsibility for solving the problem, self-organize, and working together to solve it.
Agility is designed to mitigate the inherent risks of speculating in an uncertain space with methods such as discovering requirements by progressive elaboration rather than by pretending you can know all requirements upfront.
That will never work, agile coaches are way too much of divas to be able to work together.