Join Us: We are an Expert Tribe of Coaches for Group, Team and Organizational Interventions
OD is a Team Effort
Thank you for your interest in our tribe at Agile Organization Development. My name is Takeshi and I lead the tribe.
In my journey in becoming an Organization Development (“OD”) professional, I have come to realize the following:
- OD is a practice of interventions; specifically, learning interventions.
- OD is ineffective unless approached as a multifaceted practice:
- Learning interventions come in many modalities — e.g. coaching, training, facilitation and advising.
- Specifically for coaching, I find a hybrid approach between classic behavioral coaching (e.g. International Coaching Federation (ICF) style executive coaching) and process coaching (e.g. Agile Scrum, Design Thinking, Lean) to be most effective.
- OD is too complex to run as a solo practice:
- The client need behind the group, team or organizational intervention is intricate and complex. The scare of falling into Maslow’s hammer trap (familiar methodology trap — “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”) nudges us to explore intervention alternatives wide and deep. Tapping into the collective wisdom, intelligence and experience of peer professionals is powerful and prudent.
- Learning the skills of group, team and organizational interventions is not something that can be easily learned in a training course. Real learning comes from practicing it, and the best way to learn the trade is to band together and learn from each other.
Our tribe emerged organically; initially from my own needs to learn from peer coaches and deliver together. Our track record of intervention success is growing, proving that our tribal model for serving accelerating client needs is working.
Clients and Assignments
Our tribe is a community of independent practitioners and while we each enjoy working with individuals, startups, SMEs and NPOs, our main focus for coming together at Agile Organization Development is to collectively work on group, team and organizational interventions with large organizations — typically multinational corporations, regional large companies and public sector organizations.
Here are examples of assignments served in 2020:
- FMCG MNC, IT organization agile transformation — reboot
- Financial services, cross-regional executive leadership team intervention
- Petrochemical, middle management activation
- Pharmaceutical, innovation pilot for non-drug psychiatric treatment solution development, Design Sprint
- Food MNC, future proofing pilot, Agile Scrum with cross-functional team
- Natural resources major, HR organization digital transformation, leadership team focused agile coaching
- Specialized consulting company, organization wide leadership development programme for N0 to N-2 leaders
- Market regulating body (government agency), long-range future proofing strategy formulation facilitation for executive team
- E-commerce, innovation challenge, facilitation
How We Work Together
We operate as a “learning organization” ourselves; we invest a significant amount of our time sharing our knowledge and training each other, particularly in complimentary areas where we are short on skills and expertise either on the behavioral coaching or process coaching side of things.
We regularly meet (virtually — we are a truly globally diverse tribe) and speak with each other to exchange latest activities and to share opportunities. If it is an early stage opportunity, tribe members will often chip in on tips for how to increase the “delta” (client interest, probability of success), and for later in the funnel opportunities where it’s make it or break it timing to make an intervention proposal, the client relationship holder can enlist the help of tribe members to support the pitch.
Once we are in delivery mode, usually we will have the tribe coach that was instrumental in designing the intervention assume the role of programme director and lead coach, and around the lead a small delivery team of typically two to six coaches will be formed, depending on the intervention requirement.
How to Join the Tribe
We are a purpose driven tribe of coaches for delivering group, team and organizational interventions, therefore such needs will be the first criteria for joining the tribe. Our coaches typically find straight-forward value in joining the tribe because of their own disappointing experiences of such opportunities missed in the past.
As we are an expert tribe, naturally there is a competency component for consideration in joining. In our business experience counts, so we do have a preference to invite coaches who are current practitioners with a good run rate of delivery. However, aptitude also counts, so don’t be discouraged to knock on our door even if you only have a few years of experience under your belly. Regardless, we all have to upskill consistently so what matters most is the learning attitude.
The world needs more coaches that can deliver group, team and organizational interventions of real impact. Join our tribe — contact us at engage@agile-od.com.
