One of the things I love about what I do is that it’s real. “Real, what’s real?” you may be asking, “that is such a broad generalised statement to make.”

Yes I agree, and one of the things I love about what I do is that it’s real 🙂

I’m not sure if it’s by nature or by design that people who are involved in Agile coaching have decided to challenge so-called accepted ways of working and being to help teams collaborate and achieve great things through the power of “we”.

You can recognise an Agile coach by the amounts of “we” in their conversation. This is what makes this community such an awesome one be a part of. Yes, we do travel around the world working and learning and we challenge the status quo of eschewing offices. Most of our bases are at home. If we’re not at a client we’re at our home offices.

Some people call us hippies and this is their need to order their reality by putting people in boxes. We don’t believe in boxes. We believe in people. People don’t fit in boxes because we are not box-shaped. We are all sizes and not all sizes fits all.

Agile is slowly starting to become more used – I’m reluctant to say “mainstream” because this would mean trying to put it in a box where it is supposed to be better than other ways of working which are not “mainstream”. Who and what determines that something is mainstream or not. And if something is not mainstream does it mean that it is not good or effective or “hippie-like”?

Take the conference I’m at the moment. It’s an unconference using Open Space Technology. We, the participants, are the ones to determine the conference programme. Anyone can propose a session and host it. It’s about what I want to learn and share with the community.

It’s a place where I can experiment with coaching techniques I’ve been thinking of applying. I know that I will get good feedback and a space to improve it.

I read an article today that reported that the US government is widely adopting Agile software development methods. This gladdens my Agile coach heart.

Two of my colleagues at this conference have brought their 2 cute kids to the conference – a months old baby and a little girl of about 4 years old. They are in the conference room with us and there is no need for them to whisper because they are part of their parent’s system – so it’s important to acknowledge this. Once organisations start seeing their people as systems, part of a bigger system that transcends the nine to five (and not as resources on their clock to move around at will) our workplaces will become much happier places. Happy people make happy workplaces make happy families make happy societies. Happy societies have more empathy.

Imagine what we could do with more empathy in the world. The possibilities are endless. So I go back to what I said at the beginning of this article – one of the things I love about what I do is that it’s real. And these are some of the things that make it real for me.

Thanks for reading.