The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel (ACGW) is the central model for the coaching stances used in the book.

As of this posting in September 2022, it’s gone through 3 major iterations:

• v1 - the original open source/creative commons work. The diagram for the wheel, in this case, is usually green in color and can be found here.

• v2.01 - was the version I referenced when writing the book. It’s an evolutionary variant I captured from the Scrum Alliance-sponsored community effort to improve the original Wheel. Because the effort was ongoing, I used this snapshot from October-December 2021 and anchored on it to publish the book.

• v3.1 - was released in June 2022 and is the latest formal version of the Wheel. That being said, the working group is still evolving it. The Leading and Advising competencies are still very much a work-in-progress.

• If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d imagine that the Wheel will somewhat stabilize in 2023. But that being said, it’s not evolving so quickly that we can’t effectively reference & anchor to it now and in the future.

On the ACGW website, you’ll want to reference the site for the history but the v3.1 reference materials for the current working version of the reference model. Mark Summers has put this reference site up as THE central reference for the Wheel. I’d recommend you bookmark it as your first reference point and keep up with real-time changes.

Mark Summers has been my primary historical guide for the Wheel. I also referenced some reactions to it in this blog post.

Scrum Alliance Sponsorship

In January 2022, a Scrum Alliance-sponsored working group released a publicly sponsored copy of the Wheel. It’s a remarkable step for the alliance because they are now aligning their coaching certifications with a clearly defined and accepted model.

The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel on the Scrum Alliance

General Wheel Description

The Wheel is depicted as concentric rings surrounding the foundation skill of “Self-Mastery” (no hyphen). Think of the Wheel as having eight solid wedges or slices bounded by the outer circle (or tire) of Domain Knowledge.

• Immediately surrounding Self Mastery is an inner circle of agile coaching competency areas:

  • Five (green text) are stances of effective coaching, also called core skills.

  • Three (black text) are mastery areas an effective coach must understand and use.

• These are overlapping, interlocking competency areas that can and should be used simultaneously: a coach may use their Advising stance in Serving the Team with their Agile/Lean Practitioner mastery. Mastery = what I have/know; stance = how I use it. In that sense, the inner circle is a single, unified base of competency required to be an effective coach.

• Surrounding the inner circle (in green wedges) is an outer circle of competencies associated with each competency area. For example, the Agile/Lean Practitioner competency includes competency in agile/lean principles and agile frameworks, methods, and practices.

  • Competencies are not separate from their competency area; they are part of it. 

  • The competencies shown in the Wheel are not an exhaustive list. Role modeling, for instance, is a valuable skill in the Guiding Learning competency, but it isn’t in the Wheel.

• The dark outer ring represents domain knowledge that supports the coaching practice: knowledge of the team’s work, the business domain, and the organizational context. The outer ring can be considered a tire that helps the coach gain traction in an engagement.

Other Resources

Joel Bancroft-Connors wrote an excellent piece about the Wheel on the Applied Frameworks blog. Joel is one of the core volunteers lead on the Scrum Alliance working group, which is defining and evolving the Wheel, so a voice worth listening to!

And here is a video entitled Measuring Yourself as an Agile Coach where Joel and Bob explore the Wheel in an Applied Frameworks-sponsored webinar.