Most Agile Coaches occasionally think: “Am I doing enough?”

So we act, always with best intentions but not always with the best preparation.

Early in my Agile journey, I was determined to prove my worth.

But people didn’t confide more because the retro was fun. Workshops on best practices failed, because we didn’t know which practices were bad. The problem wasn’t lack of action, it was rushing people to solve a problem without understanding it, just because I was worried I wasn’t doing enough.

In this talk, I’ll share three real situations that taught me how superficial, partial, and deep understanding lead to very different outcomes. Participants will be shown the importance of deep understanding, and ways to recognize recurring signals, and move from reactive facilitation to deliberate intervention.

Superficial Understanding

I once chose a famous Liberating Structures format for addressing collaboration issues in a group of people I worked closely with. So, when cross-group collaboration issues popped up, I used the same approach. This time, I had only surface knowledge of the second group constraints and history. I expected equally strong results regardless of who participated or how well prepared I was, but instead, I discovered that what worked for A, won’t work for B.

Partial Understanding

A scaling challenges workshop was set up in a way that encouraged two task force teams to form: to work on our Architecture and on our documentation.

A year later, despite their best intentions and my pushing, progress stalled. I had correctly identified importance, but not how much was actually within the tribe’s influence. I discovered well-thought formats can yield both the truth and great results, but post-workshop success is shaped by real-world constraints.

Deep Understanding

Tension between developers and testers appeared consistently in retros. Testers felt overloaded and undervalued. Dedicated sessions revealed a cultural pattern: testers perceived themselves as less important than developers.

Instead of rushing in, I watched patterns repeat, compared perspectives, and assessed readiness. I facilitated an Event Storming session and stepped back. We got clarity and ownership of solutions that the people (not me) came up with.

Looking back, the difference wasn’t the format or the facilitation. It was the depth of my understanding.

Superficial levels created a false sense of confidence.
Partial levels produced short-lived progress.
Deep understanding led to shared ownership of realistic expectations.

How do we deepen our understanding? We wait, and we notice:
– What keeps repeating
– Where decisions stall
– Where silence appears
– What never becomes an action item

And then it’s time to intervene, fancy formats and all.
Anxiety pushes us to intervene quickly to show our value.

But for me, our value as Coaches is not measured by how much we facilitate, or how busy we look. Our value lies in calculated restraint: take time to observe, let patterns repeat, validate assumptions, and wait for people’s readiness before acting.

Sometimes, restraint is the most impactful coaching decision of all.