I’ve been practicing “agile stuff” since about 1996—so for ~24 years. For ~20 of those years, I’ve been actively coaching agile notions at the team, group, organization, and company levels. In 2012 I received my CEC with the Scrum Alliance as an indication of how invested, serious, and (hopefully) skilled I was in the craft and practice of agile coaching.

In other words, I’m a relatively long-time agile coach who’s seen and experienced quite a bit over that time.

I participated in the Scrum Alliance – Guides Open Space sessions on Friday, October 23rd. I was in one session where we explored the CTC & CEC coaching tracks. The focus of the session was on formalized mentoring & training, but we didn’t explore that. Instead, the discussion ambled around the lack of clarity of what it meant to be an “agile coach”.

As I was listening and engaging in the discussion, I was scribbling down notes and ideas around the topic. I created a flow if you will of things that I’d develop or require if I were creating my own vision for developing agile coaches. And I worked on it after I left the session and into the evening.

The session was cathartic for me in a way. And I took the perspective of—