Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox, with Geof Ellingham

Alexis:

Geof, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Geof:

I've had a very varied background. I started life after school as a programmer, then went off to do a music degree, became an elementary school teacher for five years, and went back into IT working for one of the big-five consultancies. I had children and decided to move into a more flexible role, so I worked as head of IT in local government for about ten years. About five to seven years ago I started training as a coach, initially as a professional coach.

I trained in agile back in the 1990s. In local government we started delivering digital services, so I brought those agile practices back in. I've only been working as an agile coach for the last five years or so. Most recently I got really interested in what drives people to be the people they are, and did some more training. I'm now practicing as a psychotherapeutic counselor, so I'm interested in the full spectrum of human experience, especially internal experience and how it plays out in groups and organizations.

Alexis:

My mind got stuck on the elementary school teacher part — I sometimes feel I should have those skills to capture the attention of people in a room who aren't necessarily highly motivated to engage.

Geof:

They weren't chosen to be there. I loved teaching — five years full time, then three years part time as a music specialist. Doing big shows with kids and whole-school singing assemblies was very intense. I decided there was no way I'd keep that intensity up for another forty years. Either I'd leave a career I loved, or watch myself fade. I went out while I still loved it. Holding the attention of people who haven't chosen to be with you is a real challenge.

Alexis:

When you first shared your article on Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was surprised by the 'human-centric' part. The Agile Manifesto already starts with individuals and interactions over processes and tools. So can you tell us about the model and the why behind it?

Geof:

Two parts to that. First, more generally — why human-centric, when as you say it's already the first line of the Agile Manifesto values? Because we haven't really lived up to that value. I spend a lot of time at conferences, and processes and tools remain the driving force for much of the agile economy. A lot of the focus on agile initiatives is on business outcomes, speed, or cost.

What I'm interested in is what's going on within the group of people doing the work — improving their internal communication, their ability to achieve more together than as separate individuals. My outcome with teams is the team's ability to be its best. Many agile coaches absolutely adhere to that, but as a community we haven't really lived up to it. I see myself as one of many trying to come back to that basic value.

The second part — the model itself didn't come from me wanting to create a model. It came out of research I did as part of a Master's in coaching. We have great literature on what coaches should do — Lyssa Adkins' book and so on — but not much on what's really going on moment by moment inside an agile coach. I sat down with coaches for 90-minute in-depth interviews, no structure, just 'tell me what's going on for you when you're working with a team.' The model emerged from paradoxes that came up in that research.

Alexis:

Those paradoxes really resonated with me. Can you tell us more?

Geof:

There were other tensions, but two came through most strongly. The first I call the expert paradox. It's there in the name 'agile coach' — clients hire us as agile experts. But those of us who've trained as professional coaches have a strong idea that as a coach we bring a lens, a mirror, a set of tools to help people frame their problems — we don't bring solutions. We come to clients as whole human beings who possess everything they need.

Put those together and you get a paradox: how can I both stand back from my own expertise and walk with my client, and at the same time bring expertise about how to make this agile stuff work? Every coach I interviewed felt themselves pulled almost viscerally in both directions. When they spotted an opportunity to improve a process, the expert wanted to step in — but a part of them recognized that the more they stepped back and let clients be in control of their own destiny, the better the overall outcomes.

Existing models — like the Lyssa Adkins / Coaches Institute cross drawn on the floor — don't really capture the embodied challenge of moving between those two poles. Inhabiting the expert and inhabiting the coach are so different that we need to understand more about what we need as agile coaches to do that for our clients.

The second is the ideology paradox. Agile as an ideology — almost a cult of magnificence — 'we are the truth, we know how to make the world a better place.' I try to hold that lightly, but I know it's there. When transforming an organization we're trying to uproot an existing cultural model and replace it with new values. There's a shortcut: ideology. Get everyone walking the same walk, talking the same language, 'agile is our way.' That makes transformation easier.

The problem is that if you use ideology to transform, you're left with an ideology. And if your root value is to keep being flexible, to inspect and adapt at every level, then ideology is just something else that freezes you. You end up trapped in ways of doing things that are just as hard to escape as the culture you started with.

Alexis:

Those paradoxes really resonate with me. I once worked with a small startup growing fast. The CTO wanted to hire managers who would hire their teams. I said, 'Let's focus on the people who'll do the work, in small teams that deliver end-to-end value.' He kept asking, 'But what's the target organization? Draw me how it ends up.' I said, 'I can't, because I don't know — we'll design it along the way.' He kept pushing: 'I'm pretty sure you know but you don't want to tell me.' I told him, 'I really don't.'

Geof:

That's exactly one of the situations the model tries to address. Let me bring it out of the box.

The model is organized into columns based on a long line of research going back to Piaget on child development. The terminology I use comes from Bill Joiner, who writes about leadership agility. The basic idea: as adults we go through stages of development, just as children do. Laloux's Reinventing Organizations and Spiral Dynamics build on the same principle.

The first column is what Bill Joiner calls expert — I title it machine. It's all about skill, performing tasks really well, seeing the world mechanistically. If we put the parts together right, it all fits. As a manager I tell others how to be expert. Bill Joiner reckons something like 35% of managers are still locked into this expert mode. The CTO you described had that view — he wants to see the organization as a machine: 'show me the blueprint.'

The second column is family — Joiner's achiever. Here we recognize that organizations have complicated power structures, in-groups and out-groups, daily struggles and conflicts that mix work and personal life. Power in a family isn't really held by the 'head of the household.' It's slippery. So we stop being so focused on what people are doing and start focusing on what they're achieving — we step back and say, 'Here's what I want to happen, you organize yourselves.'

The third column is living system — Joiner's catalyst. People here see that the team is a system, each person is a system of thoughts and desires, teams interact systemically, and the organization is part of a wider world. Maybe 5% of managers are in this column. They get agility in a completely different way — immediately understanding we're working with a system and helping the team see its own systemic processes.

The fourth column I call wonderland — almost post-agile. Curious about everything, out of silos, open to experience, allowing different value systems to coexist, treating conflict as information.

A key concept is 'transcend and include' — every time you move through a level you keep all the previous capabilities. As I move into living system, I can still step into expert deliberately, with permission: 'I think there's something I know that might help here. Can I put a different hat on?' Then I can step back. What I want to help coaches do is find the learning edge of their clients and meet them there. If a client is in expert/machine, meet them with process and machine — but pull them toward the next stage. We're not going to get them into systems thinking straight away.

This is why both paradoxes exist: agile coaches constantly have to move between these columns, in a way that professional coaches usually don't.

Alexis:

How do you deal with teams where individuals are in different columns?

Geof:

Individuals within teams are rarely in the same column, in my experience. The model helps me ask: where's the centre of gravity? What does that mean for the outliers? If the centre of gravity is family, the experts will struggle: 'My job is to write this code,' while the team is having very different conversations about collaboration.

I'm doing some work with Caitlin Walker on systemic modeling. She worked for years with disenfranchised teenagers, and realized that giving people the language to understand each other's model of the world is critical. So with a heterogeneous group I might bring in that systemic-modeling language: 'When you say this, this is what I'm making up about what you mean — now you tell me what you really mean.'

My biggest challenge to my own model is that it's hard to use without putting people in boxes. People don't inhabit boxes — and teams certainly don't. If there's a way to evolve the model to be less boxy, that's what I'd want to do next. But the columns help you understand where people are in relation to each other, where the tensions might lie, and what choices and levers you have.

Alexis:

You can think of them as scales rather than boxes. Are you actually using this with teams?

Geof:

At the moment the model is in its early iterations, and COVID has interrupted a lot of things. I haven't been using it explicitly with clients — I have mixed feelings about sharing it, and that comes back to the danger of putting people in boxes and assessing them. So right now I use it as part of my reflective practice.

There's a tension though. My coaching practice says: if I'm using a model to think about my clients, I should be open and share it with them. There's a danger of doing violence to clients by modeling them without their knowledge. So at the moment I use it for reflection, but I wouldn't yet advocate using it transparently with teams in its current form.

What I might do is invite people to use their own metaphors: 'When you're in your team working with your team, that's like what?' One person might say it's like a watch with intricate cogs; another, like pebbles in the ocean. I'd test my reflective thoughts against the team's own words.

Alexis:

When I first read Laloux I was excited to explain the stages to everyone. I started doing it in what was clearly a machine/orange organization, basically telling them, 'You're not good, this is not how you should be.' I had to escape that conversation — exactly the wrong thing to do.

Geof:

Exactly. And not only do we risk harm by exposing the model — even if we keep it to ourselves, once we've made that determination there's a risk we're holding the organization in contempt because of our hierarchical view of what a 'good' organization looks like. Used well, models can warn us about our own internal biases. 'If I think this organization is machine/orange, what does that mean about how I'm going to think about the people in it? What care do I need to take to see every human being as a fully competent human being?'

Alexis:

In mechanistic organizations some people are comfortable with their position and others are suffering. How do you support all of them?

Geof:

One way organizations subvert agility is by saying to someone comfortable in expert/orange, 'You can still be like that — I'm just giving you a new process, a new machine.' There's comfort in that, and danger.

Alexis:

Yes — using Scrum as an ideology. Some teams after two or three iterations start to reconsider the framework itself. Others run Scrum by the book for months, and you can tell something's broken. The framework was meant to be a starting point, not a new permanent way of working.

Geof:

Yeah — your new machine.

Alexis:

When we look at columns and tables, it can feel a bit like a maturity model being sold. But listening to you explain it, it changes everything — I'm now totally with you on calling it a Human-Centric approach. Anything else you'd like to share today?

Geof:

This model is very much a first iteration. I know my personal bias is to work in a bubble for longer than is helpful, so I want to invite people to join a conversation. If there's value in this, what next? How do we try the ideas in practice, get feedback, see what the next version looks like? It's published under Creative Commons. My intention is that if there's value in it, I'd like the world to do something with it. Don't treat it as finished. Come at it with skepticism and curiosity, intend to iterate and collaborate. Anyone who wants to collaborate, please get in touch.

Alexis:

And to contact you — LinkedIn?

Geof:

LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. My email is geof.ellingham@gmail.com — Geof is G-E-O-F, slightly strange spelling — but LinkedIn is easiest.

Alexis:

Thank you, Geof, for joining the podcast today. That was really amazing. I've learned a lot, and I bet listeners will too.

Geof:

You're very welcome. Every time I have a conversation about the model I learn new stuff about what might happen next. These conversations are so valuable.

Alexis:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and to find more tips to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. Until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.