About
For years I thought I was a failed agile coach.
I kept finding myself in teams that, as I now understand, could not have succeeded. One “team” had members who each worked on a different project. Another was a department that learned midway through a transformation that half its people would lose their jobs. I took every case personally.
It took me years to recognise the pattern. The system had been set up to fail before I arrived, and better facilitation alone could not change that. Once I stopped interpreting those years as personal failure and began treating them as data, they became my most valuable source of insight.
Today, recognising that pattern is my profession. I help leaders stuck in firefighting mode understand how their organisation actually works and reshape it so that problems surface early, while they are still small enough to be boring.
I trained as a computer scientist and completed a PhD, then spent two decades working on change programmes across logistics, brewing, banking and automotive. I learned the Toyota Production System where it is practised rather than taught, and I am a certified coach. In the market, those capabilities usually come from two different people. Bringing them together is my core advantage. It is also why I describe myself as a thinking partner rather than a coach.
Coaching is a tool in my kit, not my identity.
“If one person tells you you’re drunk, you can laugh it off. If a second says it, you should probably count the bottles. When a third says it, just go home.”
This comes from my conference talk, The Failed Agile Coach, about the question I kept returning to: were the circumstances to blame, or was I? The answer turned out to be both.
How I work in four sentences
I watch before I advise.
I spend hours in your actual meetings rather than conducting a round of interviews about what people believe happens. The gap between the two is usually where the problem lies.
I write things down.
I document what I saw, what follows from it and what to do first. You can challenge it, share it or choose not to act on it — and that decision is on the record.
I say the uncomfortable thing — and explain what to do about it.
A diagnosis without a next step is just a complaint with a slide deck.
I agree the exit before I agree to the work.
We agree the mission, success criteria and exit criteria in writing at the outset. I have been sent in too many times to “make the team work better” without anyone defining what better meant.
Not neutral about
Five things I will always push back on.
It is worth knowing these before we work together. They are not preferences; they are behaviours that quietly keep a broken system running.
- Making a problem smaller than it is, because naming it in full would be awkward.
- Optimism that ignores the evidence in front of it.
- “I’ll take care of it” from someone with neither the mandate nor the means to do so.
- Taking credit for what someone else — or luck — did.
- Defending the current setup long after everyone can see that it has stopped working.
Where the experience comes from
Twenty years across four industries, mostly in organisations large enough for the gap between the plan and the work to be visible from space.
A team made up of two competing suppliers
The team brought together two vendors that competed everywhere else, while a Japanese head office reviewed European progress reports. Translating between those worlds was most of the job.
Delivery models that had to cross borders
Ways of working designed in one country and expected to operate across five countries. Where they succeeded, it was because local leaders had rebuilt them rather than simply received them.
The ticket data disagreed with everyone
Everyone in the room had a theory about where capacity was going. An analysis of several thousand work items produced a different answer, and it changed what the leadership team did next.
Polish, English, Dutch
That matters more than it may seem. In a merged organisation, half the conflict comes down to two groups using the same word to mean different things, while nobody stops to check.
Named clients and references are available on request; the write-ups here are deliberately anonymised.
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