“What do you call a group of agile coaches?” Like, say, a flock of birds, a herd of sheep. Let’s come back to that later.
Adaptiveness guides are catalytic change agents. They are post-Agile. I had a go at guessing what Agile Values might look like in 2026 if the living and well people from the 2001 Agile Manifesto gang somehow got together again. In essence, I guessed that a key difference might be the continuous attention to improving value realization, capabilities, insights, and people empowerment.
In my current role, we’re looking for change agents, but not the usual agility coach, product coach, or lean coach. We’re really looking for adaptiveness guides or catalytic change agents.
In my current role, we’re looking for change agents, but not the usual agility coach, product coach, or lean coach. We’re really looking for adaptiveness guides or catalytic change agents.
In many ways, a typical agility coach, product coach, or lean coach has a lot of unlearning to do before becoming an adaptiveness guide. And the learning curve is steep. Adaptiveness is about systemic responsiveness to market needs, ideally in a coherent direction.
Those who practiced the “industrial complex” often have a tougher unlearning journey. The unlearning is so great that I’m often more open to working with people who have qualities that are difficult to learn, such as humility, curiosity, non-micro-management, and openness to feedback, to the extent they seek it. I say this because I believe that many of the qualities are learnable.
Unlearning is much more difficult than learning. Attitude, aptitude, and proven ability to learn are probably not a bad place to start. Change agents could learn on the job, supported by a strong mentor and an education program such as those offered by https://evolved.institute or the University of Westminster mini-MBA.
People grow up with certain dispositions, then acquire practices and stances, and, hopefully, demonstrate a track record (including learning from and adapting to failure). But people often gain experience without learning. I consider experience overrated. Continuous learning over fewer years can often be more effective. But learning without improvement is a waste; the ideal is experience with continuous improvement.
I had a go at pulling together the qualities of an adaptiveness guide. I received some early input from Damien Bilal Alawiye, Ian Sharp, Karl Scotland, Nader Talai, Michael Huynh, Ralph Jocham, and Thibault Lefèvre. It ended up more like the qualities of a change agent, as many of them could apply to different types of change agents. It’s a start, and it will evolve. It’s contextual; for example, it assumes there are (digital) teams. It’s possible I missed some qualities, and some may be in the wrong place. It is an opinion. It is something I strive for as an adaptiveness guide, and it is what I look for signs of across the groups of change agents. I struggle to find change agents like this. It’s important to find change agents who will handle and share the burden, work together, play to each other’s strengths, and, when they disagree, do so constructively and healthily.
People grow up with certain dispositions, then acquire practices and stances, and, hopefully, demonstrate a track record (including learning from and adapting to failure). But people often gain experience without learning. I consider experience overrated. Continuous learning over fewer years can often be more effective. But learning without improvement is a waste; the ideal is experience with continuous improvement.
I had a go at pulling together the qualities of an adaptiveness guide. I received some early input from Damien Bilal Alawiye, Ian Sharp, Karl Scotland, Nader Talai, Michael Huynh, Ralph Jocham, and Thibault Lefèvre. It ended up more like the qualities of a change agent, as many of them could apply to different types of change agents. It’s a start, and it will evolve. It’s contextual; for example, it assumes there are (digital) teams. It’s possible I missed some qualities, and some may be in the wrong place. It is an opinion. It is something I strive for as an adaptiveness guide, and it is what I look for signs of across the groups of change agents. I struggle to find change agents like this. It’s important to find change agents who will handle and share the burden, work together, play to each other’s strengths, and, when they disagree, do so constructively and healthily.
What do you think? What did I miss? What would you change?
Oh, “What do you call a group of agile coaches?” A disagreement. Thank you, Ian Sharp, for that joke.
To see the related Venn Diagram, click here.
Catalytic Change Agent Center - Full Integration
These qualities connect all four dimensions. They demonstrate the highest level of change agency, in which predispositions, practices, skills, and impact fully integrate.
Adaptiveness Accelerator
All Dimensions Converge
TLDR: Enables faster learning cycles and pivots based on real evidence.
TLDR: Enables faster learning cycles and pivots based on real evidence.
Key takeaways: Effective change agency means (1) accelerating adaptation by enabling teams to tighten feedback loops and pivot faster based on evidence (adaptiveness), (2) fostering sustainable change through sensing, responding, and adapting with minimal friction (sustainability), and (3) multiplying capabilities by turning iterative improvements into significant, ongoing progress and value realization.
For example, a product team that releases small updates weekly and measures user engagement can quickly identify what resonates, then pivot their priorities based on real user feedback, rather than relying on long-term forecasts. In another scenario, a change agent helps an operations team introduce short, regular retrospectives that surface friction points early, enable collaborative process adaptation, and maintain a sustainable pace of change. Finally, by encouraging teams to experiment with workflow improvements and share the results, small gains compound over time, turning iterative adjustments into major leaps in business value and team capability.
Fosters Psychological Safety
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Fosters environments where truth is safe, mistakes are taught, and honest challenge is welcomed.
TLDR: Fosters environments where truth is safe, mistakes are taught, and honest challenge is welcomed.
Psychological safety grounds genuine organizational change. It creates an environment in which people speak up, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, and suggest new ideas. Without psychological safety, transparency breaks down, and people may hide problems, provide inaccurate estimates, or distort metrics. Change agents build climates where curiosity matters more than false certainty and begin discovery by admitting what is not known. They foster productive conflict and prioritize courage zones for wise risk-taking over comfort zones for avoidance.
Outcomes Over Outputs
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Shifts focus from “busyness” or “delivering stuff” to achieving real business and customer results.
TLDR: Shifts focus from “busyness” or “delivering stuff” to achieving real business and customer results.
Key takeaways: 1) Shift focus from tasks and outputs to broader impact and value (outcomes). 2) Distinguish outputs from outcomes (meaningful effects) by questioning the relationship of work to purpose. 3) Measure success with clear outcome metrics such as business KPIs, or relevant behavioral and satisfaction indicators—not just activity levels. 4) Validate approaches empirically through rapid experiments rather than debate. 5) Adopt an outcome-oriented approach for true stakeholder value (stakeholder, including but not limited to customer/user), using a transparent measurement approach to connect change efforts to business and customer results.
Context-Sensitive
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Tailors change to how work gets done, the unique culture, constraints, and history of each organization.
TLDR: Tailors change to how work gets done, the unique culture, constraints, and history of each organization.
Key takeaways: 1) Context sensitivity means no single solution fits all. 2) Change agents assess culture, politics, constraints, market dynamics, and regulations before acting. 3) They learn about how the work works, history, real limits, and current goals, and tailor their approach accordingly. 4) This is about thoughtful, adaptive use of principles, not abandoning them.
Fosters Transparency and Openness
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Makes reality visible, admits uncertainty, and models desired transparent and open behaviors.
TLDR: Makes reality visible, admits uncertainty, and models desired transparent and open behaviors.
Key takeaways: Transparency accurately shows reality and makes work visible. Openness means sharing uncertainty, admitting mistakes, and welcoming inquiry. These practices support informed decisions. Change agents build trust, transparency, and evidence-based practice by openly sharing both successes and failures, modeling desired behaviors, and ensuring information stays accessible.
People-Smart
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Sees change as human, reads dynamics, and values resistance as useful feedback.
TLDR: Sees change as human, reads dynamics, and values resistance as useful feedback.
People-smart means understanding social dynamics, motivations, and organizational politics while building alliances. Change agents treat change as a human challenge, meet people where they are, and align organizational needs with individual aspirations. They recognize valid concerns, structure change for momentum, and use resistance to expose underlying issues and refine solutions.
People-smart change agents build genuine relationships based on mutual respect, invest time in understanding stakeholder concerns, and create the space for people to discover insights for themselves rather than having solutions imposed upon them.
Complexity Sensemaker
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Excels at sensemaking to navigate complexity in systems beyond personal relationships.
TLDR: Excels at sensemaking to navigate complexity in systems beyond personal relationships.
Additionally, mastering complexity sensemaking enables the catalytic center to navigate uncertain environments. This progression follows naturally from a human-centric approach to addressing organizational complexity. Effective change agents use complexity thinking to understand situations. They recognize the difference between complicated problems (with many parts but a predictable outcome) and complex problems (unpredictable, with emergent behavior).
Frameworks like Cynefin help identify if a problem/opportunity is simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic. In complex environments, safe-to-fail trials and learning from outcomes let patterns emerge. Complexity sensemaking guides effective action in uncertain systems.
As a concrete starting point, a team might map its key challenges using the Cynefin framework to identify which issues fall into the complex domain at that time, recognizing that situations evolve. From there, they can design and run a small, safe-to-fail experiment focused on one challenge, observing outcomes closely and adapting as they emerge. This approach helps make the principles of complexity thinking actionable from the start.
Well-Read and Well-Practiced on People & Change
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Blends deep theory and extensive hands-on experience driving organizational change.
TLDR: Blends deep theory and extensive hands-on experience driving organizational change.
Effective change agents are lifelong learners who combine theory with hands-on experience. They study psychology, sociology, systems thinking, and complexity science to understand resistance, culture, feedback, and habit formation. The key takeaway: Change agents integrate these insights to drive meaningful change. Despite their breadth and depth, they understand the need for a steep, urgent learning curve, starting with them, across the business, technical, and change-agency domains, etc.
Critical Thinking Catalyst
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Builds merit-based cultures by teaching critical thinking, questioning, and modeling open-mindedness.
TLDR: Builds merit-based cultures by teaching critical thinking, questioning, and modeling open-mindedness.
Change agents promote critical thinking, enabling teams to challenge assumptions, assess evidence, and problem-solve complex issues. They create cultures that encourage inquiry and evidence-based change of viewpoint. Instead of accepting trends or common wisdom, they encourage skepticism and intellectual rigor. This includes distinguishing correlation from causation, identifying cognitive biases, distinguishing signal from noise, seeking disconfirming evidence, and adapting views in light of new information. By ensuring diverse perspectives, making reasoning explicit, and rewarding constructive critique, they guard against groupthink. They shift positions with new evidence, admit uncertainty, and uphold intellectual honesty. The goal is an organization where merit drives ideas. But they also support Rory Sutherland-inspired creativity and counterintuitive experiments.
Sports Coach Like Accountability
Catalytic Center
TLDR: Holds teams and themselves accountable through discipline, prioritizing outcomes, and is informed by evidence like a sports coach.
TLDR: Holds teams and themselves accountable through discipline, prioritizing outcomes, and is informed by evidence like a sports coach.
Change agents, like sports coaches, hold themselves and teams accountable. They use evidence, show up for their teams, and build strong habits. Coaches set goals, monitor progress, and give honest feedback. They help teams recover without micromanaging and keep focus on valuable outcomes. Good coaches reveal blind spots, celebrate real gains, and push through slowdowns. They support teams in breaking bad promises (promises that should never have been made or, in hindsight, are informed by evidence and unwise to keep) and guide them toward lasting success. Their go-to behavior is to show evidence to support their arguments. That said, a key difference from a sports coach is that an adaptiveness guide does not hire and fire.
Predispositions - Natural Tendencies
TLDR: Innate qualities and tendencies that effective change agents naturally possess—curiosity and pattern recognition that can’t easily be taught.
Voraciously Curious
Predispositions
TLDR: Possesses an insatiable appetite for understanding how things work across domains while balancing inquiry with tact.
TLDR: Possesses an insatiable appetite for understanding how things work across domains while balancing inquiry with tact.
Effective change agents strive to understand how things work, why things function as they do, and how they might change. Their curiosity spans many domains, not limited to: complexity science, systems thinking, organizational psychology, product thinking, human behavior, change dynamics, and technology trends. They ask why, balancing persistent inquiry with tact, ensuring discussions about who, what, how, when, and where are timely and thoughtful. This approach strengthens collaboration and avoids interrogation. They engage with diverse perspectives, pursue continual learning, and treat every interaction as an opportunity for insight. Sustained curiosity keeps their approaches adaptive, helps identify patterns, and is an intrinsic trait—not just a professional obligation.
Pattern Recognition
Predispositions
TLDR: Sees connections and recurring dynamics across contexts using rich thinking models to inform hypothesis generation.
TLDR: Sees connections and recurring dynamics across contexts using rich thinking models to inform hypothesis generation.
Pattern recognition enables change agents to see connections and recurring dynamics across contexts. Experienced change agents develop thinking models to quickly assess situations, identify potential dysfunctions, and hypothesize second-order effects. They know that no model is perfect, but contextually useful ones are useful. They recognize familiar patterns and organizational antipatterns, articulating both symptoms and underlying causes. This skill involves maintaining a repertoire of models and antidotes to inform hypotheses, while being open to novel situations. It leverages experience not by repeating past solutions, but by learning from similar dynamics.
Practiced Stance - Deliberate Approaches
TLDR: Deliberately cultivated stances and approaches—fostering principles over practices and knowing when to step back.
Principles Over Practices
Practiced Stance
TLDR: Teaches underlying principles even over practices, enabling teams to generate context-appropriate solutions.
TLDR: Teaches underlying principles even over practices, enabling teams to generate context-appropriate solutions.
Effective change agents understand the crucial distinction between principles (universal guiding truths) and practices (e.g., specific actions or methods). They help organizations grasp underlying principles—such as empiricism, transparency, adaptation, focus, and respect—rather than settling for prescribed practices. When teams ask, “Should we do daily meetings?” the answer isn’t yes or no, but “What problem are you trying to solve, and would a daily synchronization help?” This approach allows teams to generate context-appropriate practices from solid principles, metaphorically teaching people to fish rather than providing them with fish. This reduces the risk of cargo culting—mechanically following practices without understanding their purpose—and builds resilience, so teams can adapt intelligently when practices fail to deliver value, rather than either abandoning everything or doubling down dogmatically. If the team does not know enough, they might need some practices to get going; a great adaptiveness guide would get the balance right.
Gets Out of the Way
Practiced Stance
TLDR: Builds capability in others, then deliberately removes themselves from the critical path to create sustainability.
TLDR: Builds capability in others, then deliberately removes themselves from the critical path to create sustainability.
The best change agents know when to step back and let teams figure things out. They resist the temptation to be the smartest person in the room, to solve every problem, or to become indispensable. Instead, they create conditions for teams to succeed and then deliberately remove themselves from the critical path. This means building others' capability, distributing decision-making authority, and accepting that teams might choose different approaches than you would. Getting out of the way is harder than it sounds—it requires ego management, trust in others’ abilities, and tolerance for different working styles. But it’s essential for sustainability. Change agents who can’t get out of the way create dependency; those who can, create capability. But they don’t step out of the way in negative chaos, where timing of action is crucial.
Learnable Skills - Developable Capabilities
TLDR: Skills that can be developed through study and practice—technical credibility, facilitation mastery, domain knowledge, and staying current with technology.
Technical Credibility
Learnable
TLDR: Earns respect from technical teams through a genuine understanding of engineering principles and practices.
TLDR: Earns respect from technical teams through a genuine understanding of engineering principles and practices.
While change agents don’t need to be the most technically skilled people in the room, they need sufficient technical credibility to be taken seriously by technical teams. This means, for a digital product team, for example, the change agent understands software development practices, architecture trade-offs, testing strategies, deployment pipelines, and technical debt. Technical credibility enables change agents to speak the language of engineers, understand their constraints, distinguish between genuine technical limitations and convenient excuses, and recognize when proposed solutions are technically sound versus technically suspect. It’s earned through genuine engagement with technical topics—writing code, deploying systems, debugging problems—not just reading about them. Technical credibility doesn’t mean knowing every framework or language; it means understanding principles of good software engineering.
Facilitation Mastery
Learnable
TLDR: Designs and guides conversations that surface diverse perspectives, build shared understanding, and enable timely decisions.
TLDR: Designs and guides conversations that surface diverse perspectives, build shared understanding, and enable timely decisions.
Facilitation is the art of helping groups think and act together effectively. Skilled facilitators design and guide conversations that surface diverse perspectives, build shared understanding, enable decision-making, and generate commitment to action. They know when to diverge (explore possibilities) and when to converge (make decisions), how to manage group dynamics and power imbalances, and how to create conditions where the quietest voices can be heard alongside the loudest. Great facilitators can facilitate on the fly, adapting in real-time to emerging needs and unexpected dynamics without losing the room. Great facilitators also foster well-functioning self-organized facilitation, building the capacity for groups to facilitate themselves effectively. Facilitation excellence includes knowing dozens of techniques (e.g., liberating structures, visual facilitation, decision-making frameworks, conflict resolution approaches) and having the judgment to select the right approach/tool for each situation. Great facilitators make it look effortless, but behind that ease lies deep preparation, careful observation, and constant real-time adaptation to emerging group needs.
Business Domain Credibility
Learnable
TLDR: Develops deep industry knowledge to speak the business language and recognize domain-specific antipatterns.
TLDR: Develops deep industry knowledge to speak the business language and recognize domain-specific antipatterns.
Effective change agents develop credibility in the business domains they serve—whether biopharma, digital products, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, or other industries. This domain knowledge allows them to understand the unique constraints, regulations, competitive dynamics, and customer needs that shape how work gets done. In biopharma, this might mean understanding FDA regulations, clinical trial processes, drug development lifecycles, and time-sensitive opportunities. In digital, it means grasping platform economics, user acquisition dynamics, and software-as-a-service business models. Business domain credibility enables change agents to speak the language of the business, to recognize industry-specific antipatterns, and to tailor their interventions to domain realities. It’s earned through deliberate study, immersion in domain literature, building relationships with domain experts, and accumulated experience across multiple organizations in the sector. Domain credibility transforms change agents from generic consultants into trusted advisors who understand both how to change and what needs to change, given the industry context.
AI-Informed
Learnable
TLDR: Stays current with AI change to guide thoughtful adoption and help organizations navigate strategic implications.
TLDR: Stays current with AI change to guide thoughtful adoption and help organizations navigate strategic implications.
Modern change agents must be ready and credible for the current and next revolutions, such as AI. This means staying current with how AI tools are changing knowledge work, helping organizations navigate the strategic and ethical implications of AI adoption. Being AI-informed isn’t about becoming an AI expert—it’s about understanding enough to ask good questions, to distinguish hype from reality, and to help teams adopt AI thoughtfully rather than reactively. It includes understanding how AI changes the nature of certain work, what new skills become valuable, and how to maintain human judgment in AI-augmented processes, and how to experiment with AI capabilities while managing risks. As AI becomes increasingly central to product development and organizational capability, change agents must be informed guides rather than passive observers of technological evolution. Great change agents create opportunities so that AI does not create larger downstream bottlenecks, and humans remain accountable for what AI produces.
To become AI-informed and credible, change agents can take several practical steps:
- Regularly follow AI industry news and reputable technology publications to stay updated on trends and breakthroughs.
- Pilot at least one AI-powered tool relevant to their organization's context, gaining firsthand experience with its strengths and limitations.
- Join peer groups, communities of practice, or online forums focused on AI in the workplace to exchange insights and learn from others' experiences.
- Enroll in introductory online courses or attend webinars covering the basics of AI and its practical implications for knowledge work.
- Schedule periodic conversations with technical colleagues or AI subject matter experts to discuss recent advancements and implications for organizational strategy.
These actions help move beyond theory, build real credibility, and enable thoughtful guidance in the rapidly evolving world of AI.
Demonstrated Impact - Proven Results
TLDR: Measurable outcomes that validate effectiveness—improved flow, inspired colleagues, and tangible organizational improvement.
Improved Flow
Demonstrated Impact
TLDR: Measurably reduces work item age, eliminates or alleviates bottlenecks, improves the flow of value realization, and knows when to optimize for value, speed, or capability-building.
TLDR: Measurably reduces work item age, eliminates or alleviates bottlenecks, improves the flow of value realization, and knows when to optimize for value, speed, or capability-building.
Effective change agents leave organizations with measurably improved flow—reduced work item age (with some exceptions), fewer handoffs, less work-in-progress, faster feedback loops, and smoother value delivery. They help teams identify and eliminate flow bottlenecks: unnecessary dependencies, information silos, approval chains, batch-and-queue processes, and context-switching overhead. Crucially, they know when it’s the right time to optimize for different outcomes—when to be faster, when to be more predictable, and when slowing down to speed up (investing in capability) creates better long-term flow. Improving flow requires systems thinking to understand how work moves through the organization, empiricism to measure the current state, pragmatism to adopt incremental improvements, and complexity to avoid negative chaos. The focus is on throughput of valuable outcomes, not individual knowledge-worker utilization. Depending on perspectives, improved flow can be both a means (enabling faster learning) and an end (delivering value sooner). Although the real end is normally the value itself, with minimal side effects.
Inspires Others
Demonstrated Impact
TLDR: Ignites passion for continuous improvement and demonstrates that individuals can influence organizational direction.
TLDR: Ignites passion for continuous improvement and demonstrates that individuals can influence organizational direction.
The truest measure of a change agent’s impact is whether they inspire others to become change agents themselves. This goes beyond transferring skills or knowledge—it’s about igniting passion for continuous improvement, modeling the courage to challenge the status quo, and demonstrating that individual contributors can influence organizational direction. Inspiring change agents create “pull.” People seek them out for advice, replicate their approaches in new contexts, and advocate for the principles they’ve learned. However, in certain situations, such as when using culture bubbles/islands, or when complexity sensemaking is required, waiting for people to ask for help isn’t always the best option; proactive guidance may be needed. Inspiration comes from authenticity, visible results, generosity with time and knowledge, and treating people with genuine respect regardless of title or tenure. When someone says, “I want to do what you do” or “you changed how I think about my work,” that’s a form of validation of change agency effectiveness. To inspire, change agents need to be inspired themselves, and to achieve that, they sometimes need to put wellbeing before work.
Two-Way Intersections - Combined Capabilities
TLDR: Qualities emerging from the overlap of two dimensions—qualities that include product thinking, balanced confidence, idea contagion, and establishing beachheads.
Product-Minded
Predispositions + Learnable
TLDR: Thinks like a world-class product manager, understanding user needs and connecting work to customer outcomes through discovery practices, result feedback, user feedback, and product-telemetry-related insights.
TLDR: Thinks like a world-class product manager, understanding user needs and connecting work to customer outcomes through discovery practices, result feedback, user feedback, and product-telemetry-related insights.
Being product-minded means thinking like a product manager—understanding user needs, organizational and market dynamics, competitive positioning, and value propositions. It’s partly a natural curiosity about customer problems and partly a learned skill (e.g., user research techniques, outcome-oriented roadmap prioritization, metric selection). Product-minded change agents help teams connect their work to customer outcomes, challenge features that lack clear value hypotheses, and advocate for discovery practices that validate assumptions. They understand the difference between value realization, product delivery (shipping features), product discovery (learning what customers/users actually need), product strategy, and the problem/opportunity space. This quality helps change agents ensure that improved ways of working translate into improved products and customer satisfaction.
Humble Yet Confident
Predispositions + Practiced
TLDR: Balances deep confidence in principles with genuine humility about specific adoption paths for the context.
TLDR: Balances deep confidence in principles with genuine humility about specific adoption paths for the context.
The most effective change agents balance deep confidence in principles with genuine humility about adoption. They’re generally confident that psychological safety matters and that outcomes are often valued even over outputs; they’re open about the specific path to achieve these, recognizing that their proposed approach might not be optimal for this particular context. They understand the chicken-and-egg relationship between outputs and outcomes, the need to deliver outputs sooner (even if they’re not perfect), and the need for research when evidence is lacking, but maintain a bias toward getting release feedback on outputs to learn what creates valuable outcomes. This combination minimizes wishy-washy relativism (“whatever works”) and rigid dogmatism (“my way or the highway”). Humble yet confident change agents might say, depending on the context, “I’m certain as I can be that we need faster feedback loops, but I’m uncertain whether daily deployment is the right target for your context—let’s discover that together.” They bring strong opinions loosely held, have evidence-informed debates without ego attachment, and the credibility that comes from admitting what they don’t know.
Contagion of Ideas
Practiced + Impact
TLDR: Makes ideas spread organically through narrative/storytelling, early adopters, visible success, and removing barriers to adoption.
TLDR: Makes ideas spread organically through narrative/storytelling, early adopters, visible success, and removing barriers to adoption.
Ideas spread like viruses—some die quickly while others become endemic. Effective change agents create contagion conditions: making ideas sticky through storytelling and metaphors, finding early adopters who amplify messages, creating visible success that attracts imitators, and removing barriers to adoption. They understand that mandating change rarely works; creating attractive alternatives that spread organically is more effective. Contagion of ideas requires both practiced skill (how to communicate compellingly) and demonstrated impact (success stories that prove the ideas can work). When teams voluntarily adopt practices they observed elsewhere, or when language from one engagement appears in other parts of the organization, that’s evidence of successful idea contagion. However, great change agents also try to act as a vaccine against the contagion of anti-patterns, and have antidote options to experiment with.
Fosters Beachheads
Practiced + Impact
TLDR: Establishes pockets of excellence that demonstrate what’s possible and create pull-based scaling through attraction.
TLDR: Establishes pockets of excellence that demonstrate what’s possible and create pull-based scaling through attraction.
Rather than attempting organization-wide change simultaneously, effective change agents establish beachheads—pockets of excellence that demonstrate what’s possible and create proof points for broader change. They identify willing teams, invest deeply in their success, celebrate and publicize their achievements, and use these wins to attract others to the new ways of working. Fostering beachheads requires practiced judgment about which teams are ready for change and proven impact that makes the beachheads compelling exemplars. It’s a pull-based approach to scaling change: create something so attractive that others want to replicate it, rather than pushing change onto unwilling recipients. Great change agents identify and address “lip service” quickly and openly.
Three-Way Intersections - Advanced Synthesis
TLDR: Advanced capabilities from combining three dimensions—capabilities that include practicing what you learn, seeking feedback proactively, and creating catalyzed change that endures.
Practices What They Learn
TLDR: Applies the same principles to their own work that they advocate for teams, creating authenticity and empathy.
Credible change agents close the gap between what they teach and how they work. They apply the same principles to their own practice that they advocate for teams: they work iteratively, seek feedback, adapt informed by evidence, make their work visible, and continuously improve. This means not just fostering transparency but also sharing their forecasts, progress, challenges, and obstacles. It means not just teaching about retrospectives but conducting them on their own interventions. It means not just catalyzing a focus on outcomes over outputs but measuring their own impact in terms of organizational results rather than activities completed. Practicing what they learn creates authenticity, because people can sense when someone lives their values versus merely espouses them. It also creates empathy, as change agents who actually do the work they recommend understand its real challenges and can offer pragmatic guidance rather than theoretical advice.
To support authentic growth and continuous self-improvement, consider the following self-reflection prompts:
- Am I consistently applying the principles I encourage in others to my own work?
- When was the last time I sought honest feedback on my own interventions—and how did I respond to it?
- Do I make my decision-making processes and learning visible to others?
- How am I measuring my own impact beyond activities completed?
- Where might there be a gap between what I teach and what I do?
Regularly reflecting on these questions can help change agents stay aligned with their values, adapt their approaches, and deepen the authenticity and effectiveness of their practice.
Seeks Feedback Proactively
TLDR: Actively hunts for input through multiple channels, responds non-defensively, and visibly acts on feedback received.
While many people say they welcome feedback, effective change agents actively seek it out. They create multiple channels for input: regular check-ins with stakeholders, anonymous feedback mechanisms, direct requests for critical assessment, and observation of how people respond to their suggestions. They ask nuanced questions that go beyond simple frameworks, probing for specific examples, seeking to understand both what’s working and what could be better, and exploring the context around feedback. They create a safe environment for others to be honest by responding to feedback non-defensively, thanking critics genuinely, and visibly acting on received input. Proactive feedback-seeking serves multiple purposes—it models the behavior they want teams to adopt, genuinely improves their effectiveness, and demonstrates humility and a learning orientation. The best change agents treat every intervention as an experiment and actively seek signals about whether it’s working as intended.
Catalyzed Change
TLDR: Creates lasting change that persists beyond direct intervention as teams internalize new ways of thinking and working.
The ultimate validation of change agency is catalyzed change that persists and spreads beyond direct intervention. This means organizations don’t just adopt changes while the change agent is present—they internalize new ways of thinking and working that continue evolving after engagement ends. Catalyzed change shows up in multiple forms: teams solving new problems using principles they've learned, practices spreading organically to adjacent areas, resistance to reverting to old dysfunctions, and the development of organizational antibodies or antipatterns. Leadership, as a verb demonstrated by those showing up as leaders (as described at scrumexpansion.org), becomes distributed throughout the organization rather than concentrated in titles. It’s earned through depth of impact rather than breadth of activity—changing how people think rather than just what they do. Catalyzed change requires patience to build sustainable capability, wisdom to sometimes work with the grain of the organization, and discipline to resist quick fixes in favor of lasting change.
Range
TLDR: Brings diverse experience and learning from multiple domains, enabling creative problem-solving through cross-pollination of ideas.
Inspired by David Epstein’s book “Range,” effective change agents benefit from broad experience across multiple domains, disciplines, and contexts rather than hyper-specialization in a single approach. This range enables them to draw analogies from diverse fields, recognize patterns across different organizational types, and avoid the limitations of single-framework thinking. Change agents with range might have worked in startups and enterprises, software and hardware, B2B and B2C, or across different industries entirely. They bring lessons from sports coaching to organizational design, insights from complexity science to team dynamics, or relevant principles from manufacturing to knowledge work. Range creates adaptability—when one approach doesn’t fit, they have others to try. It also builds empathy for diverse perspectives and resistance to dogmatic thinking. The breadth of experience creates a richer toolkit and more nuanced judgment about when to apply which principles.
Knowing When to Quit or Switch
TLDR: Recognizes when persistence becomes stubbornness and helps teams pivot from failing approaches before excessive investment.
Inspired by Annie Duke’s book “Quit,” effective change agents understand that knowing when to quit or switch approaches is as important as knowing when to persist. They help organizations distinguish between productive persistence (continuing with something difficult but worthwhile) and unproductive stubbornness (doubling down on failing approaches). This means establishing clear criteria for success and failure before starting initiatives, creating checkpoints to honestly assess progress, and making it safe to abandon approaches that aren’t working. Change agents skilled at knowing when to quit help teams avoid the sunk cost fallacy, treat pivots as learning rather than failure, and pivot from doomed efforts to promising ones (or kill doomed efforts). They understand that organizational adaptiveness comes partly from the ability to stop doing things that no longer serve desired outcomes or “struggling moments.” This isn’t about giving up easily—it’s about having the wisdom to recognize when continued investment won’t yield returns and the courage to change course despite having already invested effort. Great change agents understand that grit is overrated.
Professionalism
TLDR: Strives for excellence while working together to deliver value in a respectful, transparent, and accountable way—taking full accountability for change outcomes from start to finish.
According to https://scrumexpansion.org, professionalism is about striving for excellence and working together to deliver value in a respectful, transparent, and accountable way. Being professional means that one will always do certain things and others never, regardless of circumstances. Professional change agents take full accountability for outcomes, from the cradle to the grave, throughout the entire lifecycle of their work. This means maintaining ethical standards even when it is convenient to compromise, delivering honest assessments even when uncomfortable, and focusing on sustainable value delivery as well as quick wins. They understand that professionalism extends beyond technical competence to include how they collaborate, communicate, and contribute to organizational health. Professional change agents respect stakeholder time and effort, maintain confidentiality when appropriate, admit mistakes openly, and help others grow in their practice. They balance serving immediate needs with building long-term capability, and they refuse to take shortcuts that compromise quality or sustainability. Professionalism in change work means bringing discipline, integrity, and excellence to every interaction while remaining humble about what one doesn’t know.
Additional Central Qualities
TLDR: Essential catalytic qualities that complement the core framework—team delivery focus, fast pivoting, daily catalysis, aligned autonomy, and evidence-based decision-making.
AI-Augmented Dev
Effective change agents understand the capabilities and limitations of AI tools. They ensure AI augments rather than replaces product developer judgment. Modern development is increasingly AI-augmented, with tools helping write code, suggest solutions, detect bugs, and generate tests; effective change agents help teams adopt them thoughtfully while maintaining code quality, security, and understanding.
Teams Deliver
The fundamental unit of delivery is the team or network of teams, not the individual. Effective change agents optimize for network-of-teams or organizational success—sustainable pace, collective ownership, knowledge sharing, and complementary skills. They resist and eradicate hero culture, local sub-optimization, and individual heroics in favor of resilient value realization.
Failing is a Problem, but failing and pivoting fast are not.
Failure itself isn’t the goal—learning and adaptation are. Effective change agents create environments where teams can fail fast (discover what doesn’t work quickly), pivot based on learning, and avoid prolonged investment in doomed approaches. The key is velocity of learning and improvement, not velocity of failure.
Catalyst for Every Day
Change doesn’t happen only in workshops or special events. Effective change agents catalyze daily improvement—helping teams reflect on and improve their regular work, not just their special change initiatives. They make continuous improvement a habit, not an event.
Practices Genchi Genbutsu (goes to the source to get the facts)
Drawing from the Toyota principle of “go and see for yourself,” effective change agents don’t rely solely on reports, dashboards, or second-hand accounts. They go to the actual place where work happens (the gemba) to observe reality firsthand, talk to the people doing the work, and understand problems at their source. Genchi Genbutsu prevents the distortion that occurs when information passes through multiple layers, reveals context that doesn’t make it into reports, and builds credibility through direct experience. It also demonstrates respect for those doing the work and creates opportunities for insights to emerge. Change agents who practice Genchi Genbutsu make better decisions because they base them on reality rather than abstractions, and they build stronger relationships by showing up where the work actually happens. In software development, the change agent considers source code the gemba, but with in-person teams, they are open to treating the direct work area as the gemba.
Fosters Aligned Autonomy
Teams need both autonomy (the freedom to make decisions) and alignment (a shared understanding of goals and constraints). Effective change agents create conditions where teams can make independent decisions that naturally align with organizational objectives, avoiding both micromanagement and chaos.
Fosters Taking Solution Option Credibility Into Account
Not all ideas are created equal, and effective decision-making requires weighing solution options based on their credibility—the evidence supporting them, the expertise behind them, the track record of similar approaches, and the degree to which they’ve been validated in relevant contexts. Change agents foster this capability by teaching teams to ask, “What evidence do we have that this will work?” and “Who has tried this before and what did they learn?” They help organizations move beyond deciding based on who argues most persuasively or who holds the highest title, toward making decisions based on empirical evidence and reasoned analysis. This includes building appreciation for experimentation over debate, for looking at data over trusting intuition, for updating beliefs when evidence contradicts them, and for being informed by data rather than driven by it. Importantly, it’s acceptable to tackle low-credibility solutions as long as one is forewarned about the risks and approaches them as deliberate experiments. Taking solution option credibility into account prevents both analysis paralysis and reckless decision-making—it’s about making well-informed bets.
Anti-Patterns - What to Avoid
These are the behaviors that undermine effective change agency.
Framework Zealot
They believe their chosen framework is the answer to all problems and rigidly apply it regardless of context or evidence.
Training = Change
Confuses delivering training sessions with achieving organizational change, measuring success by the number of classes taught rather than the behaviors changed.
Death by 1000 Questions
Overwhelms people with endless questioning without providing guidance, creating analysis paralysis rather than enabling action.
Know-It-All Expert
Has all the answers before understanding the questions, dismissing local knowledge and context in favor of prepackaged solutions.
Rigid Thinker
Cannot adapt their thinking models or approaches to new information or changing circumstances.
Confirmation Seeker
They only see evidence that supports their existing beliefs, ignoring or dismissing data that challenges their assumptions.
Silver Bullet Seeker
Chases the latest trend or tool as a magical solution, never investing enough to make anything work before moving to the next shiny object.
Ivory Tower Consultant
Provides advice without understanding the reality on the ground, remaining disconnected from the actual challenges teams face daily.
Stuck in 2010
Refuses to update their knowledge or practices, teaching outdated approaches while ignoring the latest tools, techniques, and understanding.
Anti-Technology Stance
Dismisses or resists technological advancement, treating tools and automation as threats rather than enablers of better ways of working. Some “change agents” are “no change agents” or “double agents.”
Refuses to Evolve
Clings to methods that worked in the past, unwilling to experiment with new approaches, even when incumbent methods clearly aren’t working.
New Shiny Ball Syndrome
Constantly chases the latest fad without depth, advocating for tool after tool without building genuine expertise in any.
Meeting Addict
Believes every problem requires another meeting, filling calendars with interactions, events, and discussions while avoiding actual work.
Certification Obsessed
Values credentials over capability, collecting certificates while lacking the practical wisdom to apply knowledge effectively in context. Often lacks the required attitude, aptitude, or qualities.
Best Practices Zealot
Insists on “best practices” or recipes without considering context, treating practices as universally applicable rather than context-dependent.
Command & Control
Micromanages teams and dictates solutions, undermining autonomy and preventing teams from developing their own problem-solving capabilities.
Process Police
Enforces process compliance rigidly without understanding the purpose, valuing adherence to rules over achieving outcomes.
Hides Information
They hoard knowledge and restrict information flow, using information asymmetry as a form of power rather than enabling distributed decision-making.
Hero Complex
Creates dependency by being the solver of all problems, preventing teams from building their own capability and becoming self-sufficient.
Copy-Paste Solutions
Transplants solutions from one context to another without adaptation, ignoring the unique constraints and dynamics of each situation.
Change Theater
Stages visible change activities without substance, creating the appearance of change while nothing fundamentally shifts.
Activity Theater
Confuses busyness with productivity, celebrating how much is happening rather than what value is being created.
Vanity Metrics Focused
Tracks and celebrates metrics that look good but don’t indicate real progress, optimizing for measurements that don’t drive outcomes.
Story Points Lover
Obsesses over estimation mechanics and velocity optimization while ignoring whether teams are actually delivering valuable outcomes.
Takes All the Credit
Claims successes as personal achievements rather than team victories, undermining morale and motivation while building resentment.
Blames the Team
Attributes failures to team deficiencies rather than examining systemic issues or their own contribution to problems.
Winning Arguments Over Helping
Prioritizes being right and winning debates over actually helping teams succeed, using logic as a weapon rather than a tool for understanding.
The Team’s Friend to a fault
While friendliness is to be encouraged, a change agent is not expected to be the team’s friend. This anti-pattern describes change agents who prioritize being liked over being effective, avoiding difficult conversations and accountability to maintain personal relationships. They confuse being supportive with being permissive, failing to provide the honest feedback and healthy challenge that teams need to grow. A good friend would tell what needs to be heard, to be fair, but I hope you get the point.
The Manager’s Friend to a fault
Change agents who prioritize maintaining good relationships with management over organizational effectiveness. They avoid speaking truth to power about systemic issues, shield leaders from uncomfortable realities about organizational dysfunctions, and fail to surface the impediments that managers need to address. While psychological safety requires creating safe ways to discuss system issues, managers’ friends choose harmony with authority over genuine improvement, ultimately failing both the organization and the leaders they’re trying to protect from reality. A good friend would tell what needs to be heard, to be fair, but I hope you get the point.
Lazy
Takes shortcuts, avoids the deep work required for genuine change, and chooses easy answers over thoughtful solutions. Lazy change agents don’t invest in understanding context, skip the hard conversations, copy templates without adaptation, and fail to follow through on commitments. They want the title and recognition without putting in the effort required to create a meaningful impact. They might have “done many transformations.” Great change agents recognize why the words in that phrase raise questions.
Fosters Autonomy Without Responsibility (a Holiday Camp)
Creates an environment of autonomy without responsibility, where teams have freedom but lack accountability for outcomes. These change agents confuse self-organization with abdication, promoting independence without ensuring teams can navigate uncertainty effectively. They celebrate team autonomy while avoiding difficult conversations about performance, allow teams to ignore organizational constraints in the name of empowerment, and fail to establish clear expectations or feedback loops. “Holiday camp facilitators” prioritize making teams feel good over helping them deliver results, creating a false sense of progress while actual value delivery suffers. True autonomy requires capability, context, and accountability, not just permission to do whatever feels comfortable.
To restore accountability alongside autonomy, great change agents foster clear expectations for what teams are responsible for achieving and establish regular feedback loops to monitor progress. Provide teams with transparent alignment to organizational goals, and create opportunities for honest conversations about both performance and challenges. They also ensure that autonomy is paired with the necessary support, context, and accountability structures so that teams are empowered to make decisions and are also responsible for outcomes. This balance enables teams to be both independent and focused on delivering real value.
I’m Having Fun, and That’s All That Matters
Treats organizational change as a personal playground for interesting ideas rather than serious work with real consequences. These change agents prioritize their own intellectual enjoyment and experimentation over actual organizational improvement. They introduce novel practices because they’re exciting rather than because they solve real problems, chase shiny new approaches for their own amusement, and fail to ground their work in the organization's legitimate needs and constraints. While passion and enthusiasm are valuable, this anti-pattern puts personal entertainment above professional responsibility.
One addition: Detached
Many change agents fall on this one... The change agent sees obstacles clearly but behaves as if a neutral observer rather than an accountable actor, remaining cognitively engaged while emotionally and practically distant. They position themselves as unable to move until “prerequisites” are met by others, framing progress as contingent on conditions outside their control rather than on their own agency.
Typical symptoms
- Offers “input” on slides, charters, or designs, then later behaves as if they never saw or endorsed them.
- Talks about “raising the bar” or “being a catalyst” but rarely initiates or sponsors concrete, time-bound interventions.
- Frequently explains inaction via missing sponsorship, poor communication, or unresolved dependencies, while not working to improve any of those conditions.
- Appears calm and reasonable but gives dissenting signals at the wrong time or in the wrong forum (e.g., undercutting decisions in side conversations, withholding support in unsafe forums).
- The change agent is perceived by sponsors as “not really with us,” even when actively part of the change network.
Impact on change
This pattern quietly undermines momentum: people notice that the designated change agent is not really taking risks, modeling commitment, or removing obstacles, so they infer that the change is optional or unsafe. Sponsors experience a mismatch between what is said (support, alignment) and what is modeled (distance, delay), which erodes trust and reduces their willingness to invest political capital in future initiatives. Over time, the broader system normalizes low ownership and passive resistance, making subsequent change efforts harder and feeding change fatigue and cynicism.
What a healthy opposite looks like
By contrast, an effective change agent treats ambiguity and missing prerequisites as part of the work, not as exemptions from it: they proactively help sponsors clarify expectations, shape communication, and address resistance. They surface dissent early and in the right forums, pair critique with alternatives, and make their own support—or non-support—visible in ways that help sponsors, not surprise them.
Share:
Adaptiveness Guide - Qualities of Change Agents Who 'Raise the Bar'
Adaptive Guide - Alternative Narrative (Short Version)