text: Initially there was disappointment regarding the team-leads. It felt like the team’s autonomy had been undermined, the leads did not protect it. Later frustration and denial took over. Colleagues started to argue that the proposed idea did not make sense and that we would have to create a completely different approach ourselves. In my perception this was mainly based on emotional resistance, not so much on validity of the proposal.
  Slowly we began to discuss possibilities within the presented idea. Within clusters a closer collaboration with the head-of-group could be established. Smaller teams of agile coaches could be formed, making sure that there is enough room for supervision and support. As we started to like the idea of reorganization, retentions and sympathy within the agile coach team became more important. Hidden conflicts had to be addressed. The team had to face it’s own problems, people had to leave their comfort zones. In the end it took almost two weeks to stabilize the situation. Finally the team came up with a solution on how to work within clusters.
  During that process communication with the head-ofs was reduced with colleagues outside of the agile coach team a lot. Psychological safety was needed for our process. Relationships within the agile coach team were much stronger than between agile coaches and head-ofs. Hence our results were invisible to others. Once again people being affected, i.e. the head-ofs, had not been involved in the process. As you might imagine voices from the head-of-group started to reject (aspects of) our solution.
  All of this happened more than three month ago. We continued with the change and are now working as small teams of agile coaches within clusters. Still the change is not supported by everyone.
  What do we learn from this? Basically this is just another example showing the importance of involving people who are affected by changes into the design process. Even though this is good practice, it is hard to do. Sometimes it might be impossible. In our case I do see two main drivers that prevented us from involving each other in the first place: