Qualities of Change Agents Who 'Raise the Bar' “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 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. 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.