Lyssa Adkins

This book is good and bad for the same reasons. Depending on what is your experience and your expectations you may love it (5 stars) or hate it (1 star). I do both equally, so hearing it (I listened to the audiobook version) was a rollercoaster of emotions.

Breadth vs Depth
This book covers an insane collection of topics, ideas, and themes. Not only defines and describes agile coaching but goes into life coaching, mindfulness, personal development, NVC, EQ, behavioral psychology, marriage counseling, martial arts, music, and many more. On the one hand side, it gives readers multiple references and directions to explore on their own. On the other hand side, it doesn't go deep on any of those subjects, feeling sometimes like a number of 5-bullet points summaries of different books glued together without any original thought or insight from the author.

Context vs Content
There is a lot about "why, what, when, and who" of agile coaching, which can be interesting and be used to build a strong mindset, especially if some is new to agile. However, "how" is rather weak. Examples are either missing or so generic they do not provide much value (straightforward solutions devoided of any nuance), so it is hard to get specific about the agile coaching toolset and skills. It's kind of in line with a principle of not being very prescriptive and leaving space for own discovery, but I'd love to hear more about the specific and pragmatic experiences of the author.

Personal vs Systemic
The book focuses on interpersonal issues and implementing agile on a team level. It's very valuable, but far from being comprehensive. There is a mention about working with multiple teams (although not recommended) or managers of team members (but only for sake of the team members), but very little on working with the organization as a whole. I missed this perspective a lot and found myself disengaging when the book was turning into a self-help guide.

Perfect agile is the silver bullet
The author presents a very idealistic depicture of agile - a belief that if only we could do agile right then all of our problems will go away. That the agile way is the only way to get work done and be happy, anything non-agile is most probably misguided or pathological. There is a lot of ideas in this book that I find really great and I agree that we should strive to implement them well in our workplaces, but I'm far from being so agile-radical and disregard everything else.

Technical notes
1. There are noticeable differences in audio quality and the author's narration between different parts of the audiobook. Some parts are much harder to go through because of a narrator's flat tone or static noise in the background.
2. For an audiobook published in 2020 I was surprised that there was no comment on remote work. I understand why the author was dismissive about remote setup (to the point of raising doubts if agile coaching over the distance can be effective at all) in 2010, but it sounds very strange in 2020 when F2F interactions are sparse or even prohibited.

Overall, I didn't enjoy this book much and it felt much longer than it actually was BUT I found something fascinating in every chapter. One sentence, question, or quote that resonated strongly and forced me to reflect or reconsider my defaults. Not always in line with the intentions of the author ;) but still made this book valuable to me. I'd recommend it to people who have some experience in agile but are new to agile leadership or teaching agile, especially if they come from traditionally non-agile environments.… (plus d'informations)