Agile coaching

Preface Ahmed Sidky (Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, USA)
Adrie Dolman's book is a true gift to the agile coaching community. Years of insights and experiences coaching individuals, teams, and organizations are curated into this amazing book. There are countless practical tips, tricks, learnings, models, and tools that will enhance any agile coach and accelerate their growth and skill development.

Adrie's focus on Agile as a mindset and how to coach to that mindset is brilliant.

This book is truly a great addition to any Agile coach's library. If you are an aspiring agile coach this is a must-read.

Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D.
President of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile)
Head of Business Agility at Riot Games

Preface Andrea Fryrear (Colorado, USA)
There are no shortage of resources on Agile coaching in the world, but many of them assume that you’re doing two things: developing software and using Scrum exclusively. What Adrie has created here, however, is a deeply practical guide for any and all Agile coaches, leaving such unhelpful assumptions at the door.

Adrie is diligent in avoiding prescription and leaning into description, but I can guarantee that the following pages will nonetheless be enormously practical for agilists looking to build up their coaching capabilities. Despite having spent many years of my own in the trenches working with Agile marketing teams, I found myself highlighting entire sections for reference. I’m already looking forward to sharing the illuminating charts and diagrams with my own team of coaches to help guide their individual growth.

And yet this book isn’t just a simple how-to or a compilation of exercises. Adrie shows us the full arc of Agile’s evolution, tracing its origins far beyond twentieth century software development and back into the minds of pioneers of the scientific method hundreds of years ago. He skillfully connects this history to how coaches need to show up for their teams, freeing them from dogmatic adherence to practices that may or may not apply to the kinds of work their teams are doing.

From Francis Bacon to Steve Denning, Adrie deftly tracks how Agile came to be the defining method for getting stuff done in the twenty-first century. What’s more, he plucks out important takeaways from all its phases to guide Agile coaches whose working life is far more complex, uncertain, and ambiguous than the one Bacon found himself in.

Being an Agile coach is one of the most severely challenging and deeply rewarding jobs on the planet. Sometimes it feels like both of those things in the course of a single meeting. At times being an Agile coach is akin to trudging through the desert with no supplies, trying to reach an uncertain destination while herding a reluctant pack of cats. Resources like this one are an oasis on this difficult journey.

If you’re an experienced Agile coach, rejoice. Here’s a careful, considerate fellow practitioner who’s opening his toolkit to share ideas with you.

If you’re looking to start on your Agile coaching journey, great news. Someone who’s spent years traversing that path has come back to offer guidance.

Agile coaches of all kinds will find value in these pages. For those, like me, who spend our days bringing Agile outside the realms of software development or IT, you won’t encounter overwhelming references to releases, demos, bugs, or code bases. Anyone who tries to nurture the Agile mindset and its corresponding ways of working should stop messing around with my introduction, and dig into this outstanding resource right away.

Andrea Fryrear
Agile Marketing Coach & Trainer, Co-Founder AgileSherpas

Preface Michael K Sahota (North York, Canada)
When Adrie Dolman reached out to me to see if I would write a forword, I wondered to myself: Who is this guy? How can he contribute to such a crowded field? How does his work relate to the work I am bringing to the world? Agile Coaching is a complex, broad topic: there are many valuable, distinct and even contradictory views.

What this book delivers is a practical, human in-the-trenches view of what it takes day in and day out to operate as an agent of change. The book is full of many useful tools and models that will help anyone aspiring to be an effective Agile Coach.

The part of the book that resonated the most with my own views is the importance of your own development. He says “Your most important tool is you, and you have to master that tool properly before you start using it.” This is a point that often gets missed and is actually the foundation of one’s effectiveness.

What may happen as you dive into the practices of this book is that you discover your own leadership and how to make local change to culture without talking about it. My hope for you is that you begin to model the shift of what Agile is really all about.

I hope you enjoy it.

Michael K Sahota
Certified Enterprise Coach, Author, Trainer and Consultant

Preface John Cass (Washington, USA)
In 2008 when I became aware of agile for marketers. The Dutch were ahead of the curve with the practice. So I was excited to learn when Adrie Dolman had written his new book "Agile Coaching - The Dutch Way".
His book is all about how agile coaches approach agile coaching. This book is a how-to for coaches. What stood out for me was the thorough review of how to become an agile coach for an organization; from maturity models, to toolboxes, to personal insights from Adrie on what to expect. Great stuff for the team member wanting to become an agile coach the Dutch way!

John Cass
Organizer, Boston Agile Marketing Meetup
Podcaster, A Deep Dive into Agile Marketing with John Cass

Preface André Felippa (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Do you aspire to become an Agile Coach? Or maybe you are already an experienced agilist looking for new inspiration, examples and practical tools?

For a long time I've been searching for great practical recommendations for Agile Coaches like myself. And there are already plenty of books in the market which cover the Agile frameworks, team-forming and scaling-up, but Adrie's book is quite unique.

Adrie skillfully draws from his own extensive coaching experience to offer us a structured pathway to become a great Agile Coach, covering all aspects of this delightful job, whilst also sharing a wealth of helpful and practical examples, tools and techniques, which can easily inspire and be applied by any agile enthusiast, regardless of your own agile maturity level.

I hope that you may enjoy the reading and extract as much value from this great book as I did.

André Felippa
C-Level Agile Coach and MD at Adventures Inc. / Brazil

Preface Evan Leybourn (Victoria, Australia)
At the time of writing this preface, the Agile Manifesto is just about to turn 20 years old. And yet, as Adrie makes clear in his book, agile is much older than that. This is nowhere clearer than in Æsop's Fables, a collection of stories and fables from ancient Greece over 2500 years ago (between 620–564 BCE). Let me share with you the fable of the Oak and the Reed (translated by George Fyler Townsend in 1887)

A very large Oak was uprooted by the wind and thrown across a stream. It fell among some Reeds, which it thus addressed: "I wonder how you, who are so light and weak, are not entirely crushed by these strong winds." They replied, "You fight and contend with the wind, and consequently you are destroyed; while we on the contrary bend before the least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken, and escape."

This remains one of the best descriptions of agility today. So the question must be asked, if agility has been valued for millenia, why is it that we have so many Oaks in modern business? The simple answer is that agility is harder to achieve and maintain than rigidity; and when the winds are calm no one values agility. But, to extend the metaphor, the winds aren't calm. Just take a look back at the last decade, from 2010 to 2020, to see how volatile and unpredictable the world we live in is.

Which is where agile coaching comes in. Whether in a marketing team, product development, or across an entire organization, agile coaching helps people who aspire to agility, achieve it. And for any aspiring coach, Adrie's book is a must-read, and practical, guide to the craft.

Evan Leybourn
CEO, Business Agility Institute

5 stars review Dr. Arnold Brouwer (Apeldoorn, Netherlands)
Agile coaching reads like a sincere book that radiates the writer's passion. He takes you along many models and his own practical examples. That gives image and sound to the still quite abstract concept: "agile". And that makes the writer Adrie Dolman an inspiring and experienced agile coach.

The writer focuses on agile coaching from a mental framework. He makes concrete and clear what is initially expected of the agile coach himself. The lessons that the author presents to us are valuable for those who are open to them to grow and develop themselves as a person. This makes the writer's lessons and experiences a valuable message which the reader can continue to refer often and easily in daily practice.

In addition to offering the writer a mental framework, he also pays attention to the area in which the agile coach works: the organization. It is explained how the systems approach can help to intervene at the different levels in the organization. In a nutshell: the agile coach himself, the individual, the team and the organization as a whole. In this way the writer makes it clear which images and patterns deserve the right attention at what level. This makes the book a practical guide for both the agile coach and the entrepreneur who is eagerly looking for ways to keep up with the ever-changing world.

All this means that the book has a lot to offer for various target groups. And that may also be the book's potential pitfall. The author has so much to say that they are in fact several books in one. For readability, a series of "agile" would certainly be in order. By dividing the content of the book into separate parts and elaborating it further, the writer does more justice to his own story.

All in all, Adrie Dolman has written a practical guide that clarifies the necessity and usefulness of the field "agile".

Dr. Arnold Brouwer
CEO RCEC

Adrie Dolman is Master of Science in Management and Organization. He has a background as an entrepreneur in database marketing and was one of the first business agility coaches in the Netherlands. He is an agile coach, mentor, and trainer, mainly for management teams, product owners, scrum masters and agile coaches in larger organizations. His book Agile Marketing was published in 2016. It was nominated for the Marketing Literature Prize in the Netherlands and for Marketing Book of the Year in Belgium.