James King

We are in lockdown at the moment and I am eves dropping on my daughter’s (online) class while I work beside her. The teacher is explaining a new activity to a group of 9 and 10 year-olds. It is a complex new topic (It sounds like graphic design and history of Sydney combined but I…

I am gradually reading through a great book called “The power of making thinking visible.” It is meant to be a guide for teachers who want to improve thinking in the classroom, but it is also a great guide for structures that coaches can use for the same purpose at work. What follows is me…

I sometimes question whether I should focus more on coaching the team or changing the environment to unleash the team. Choosing between the two can be a real dilemma for me. However, there are some coaching tools that are useful in both helping the team grow AND creating space to support that growth in the…

A while ago now, I was listening to a great presentation by Pat Reed, who is an excellent agile coach. (Editor’s note – if you are interested, you can learn more about Pat by watching this video, which is one of a series of interviews with women who have had a big impact on the…

In agile teams, people give each other feedback all the time. Sometimes it is feedback about things that can be done better and often it is about expressing gratitude or pointing out something that was done well. In fact I would say that good feedback is one of the things that drives agile teams forward.…

I was collating my thoughts about feedback recently and I started to think about whether people listen to feedback. I like to think that my keen observations are helping people see things that they had been missing and, equipped with this new knowledge, that they will reflect on it and find improvements in their lives.…

Here is a conversation that I claim I was once in. I will let you determine whether this is a real thing or just made up. Apprentice coach We keep telling the teams that they should measure and learn from their work so they keep learning. Should we also measure the impact of our coaching?…

When coaching teams, I find that I have a natural bias for teaching them to take charge of the world and apply better techniques to getting their work done. I find, however, that teaching the team is often not enough. As much as they are empowered and keen to improve, they are always part of…

I came across this sign some time ago, while walking down a street in Queensland, Australia. I thought it was a great ad for a gym or a personal trainer and I also think it is a great motto for an agile coach. Say a team is told to use something like Scrum, but have…

One of the challenges of an agile coach, on the surface, is to get people to behave differently. But why? There are many reasons that getting people to change the way they behave is hard and there are many solutions. In fact one of the reasons I think that coaches like “Shu Ha Ri” is…