Wheel of Change: Its Application in Agile Way of Working
How to use this powerful life coaching tool in our Agile Transformation.
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Join For FreeI am sure many of you have read about or used a very powerful tool "The Wheel of Change" created by award-winning coach Marshall Goldsmith in your personal/life coaching journey. However, have you heard or used it in your Agile Coaching journey?
Let me describe my experience in using the Wheel of Change tool in Agile Transformation to bring about an effective result.
Background
The Wheel of Change consists of two major axes:
- Keep/Change
- Positive/Negative
These two axes divide the wheel into four major quadrants, with two sub-quadrants in each of them as described below
| Quadrant | Sub Quadrant 1 | Sub Quadrant 2 |
| Creating | Adding | Inventing |
| Eliminating | Eradicating | Reducing |
| Accepting | Delaying | Making Peace |
| Preserving | Maintaining | Improving |
The way this is represented in a Wheel of change is shown below:
Usage of Wheel of Change In Agile Transformation
Now let me describe how I can leverage this very famous tool as a part of the Agile Transformation journey. As Agile Coaches, we interact with multiple stakeholders and capture our observations and findings in our notes. One such way of capturing these observations is displayed below
| Coaching Observations | |
| Code | Description |
| A | All teams are doing retrospective just for the sake of it |
| B | Teams have a plan in place for automating Test Cases |
| C | No event related to Scrum of Scrum found |
| D | Observed that 2 out 3 Scrum Teams have got a large number of stories as spillovers from the sprint |
| E | All teams are doing an individual demo |
| F | Team members are being given tasks rather than selecting themselves |
| G | Overall the Daily Scrum Meeting turns into a Status meeting and gets extended by 10 to 12 minutes on a regular basis |
| H | Definition of Ready exists but rarely revisited |
| I | Estimates are done by the team members |
| J | Product Owner not available for meetings |
| K | Product Owner not empowered to take decisions |
My first task as a coach is to plot these observations on a "Wheel of Change." First, I plot these observations on the axis of Positive/Negative. Next, I segregate them into Keep/Change.
Once I do this, I get a Wheel of Change populated a below
The next step would be to brainstorm and segregate my observations into the respective sub-quadrant.
As a coach, I need to brainstorm and prioritize these items and there could be some interesting situations where a Coaching Observation might be an anti-pattern (Negative), yet as a Coach, I accept it for the time being and make peace with the item (E).
The major benefits of using this Coaching model are:
- Helps a greater degree of visibility of Coaching observations/items
- Aids in prioritization of Coaching items
- Helps create a Coaching Roadmap to identify observations that need an immediate attention
- Helps coaches in identifying a Coaching Style/strategy to be adapted
Do share your views on this model.
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