The Pathway to Beneficial Agile
Published by Austin Macauley Publishers · ISBN 9781398402539
Coaching an agile team is not the same as helping an organisation become agile. The Agile Coach’s Cookbook bridges that gap — providing experienced Scrum Masters and Product Owners with the recipes, tools, and techniques they need to build agile capability at the organisational level, not just within their own teams. It is the book Jon Ward uses to train coaches, and it reflects thirty years of change management practice across manufacturing, financial services, telecoms, and infrastructure.
What this book is about
The Cookbook is structured as a practical reference — a set of recipes rather than a linear argument. Each recipe addresses a specific coaching challenge: from diagnosing the current state of an organisation’s agility to facilitating a difficult retrospective; from coaching a senior leader who is resistant to change to designing a team structure that supports autonomous working.
The philosophy throughout is contextual agility: the conviction that no single framework — not Scrum, not SAFe, not Disciplined Agile — is the right answer in every situation. Coaches who can read context and blend approaches produce better outcomes than coaches who apply one method regardless of what the organisation actually needs.
Key themes
- What distinguishes a team-level agile coach from an enterprise agility coach
- A toolkit of facilitation techniques, diagnostic tools, and coaching recipes
- How to coach senior leaders who have not experienced agile working themselves
- Contextual agile: blending frameworks to match the organisation’s situation
- How to sustain agile capability after the coach exits
- Building a coaching culture — not a coaching dependency
Who it’s for
Written for practising agile coaches, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners who want to move beyond team-level facilitation into genuine organisational change work. It is also relevant to HR leaders and learning and development professionals building internal coaching capability.
Jon has used this material to train more than 150 experienced Scrum Masters and Product Owners to operate at enterprise coaching level.
Related services
- Culture Canvas & Intent-Based Leadership Coaching
- Stakeholder Mobilisation: The Volunteer Army Sprint
- Enterprise Agility Blueprint Diagnostic
Buy the book
Buy on Amazon UK | Buy from Austin Macauley Publishers | Also available as an eBook.