The Gut Feeling Agile Coach

The Gut Feeling Agile Coach (or Scrum Master) 🤔

In my career, I’ve been involved in various Agile-related change initiatives, ranging from large-scale company-wide Agile transformations to introducing Scrum for a few teams.

I wasn’t fully aware of it back then, but in hindsight, I’m surprised how many decisions were made based mostly on gut feeling. I’m not talking about small choices like the type of sticky notes.

I mean big decisions like:
✅ Redesigning departments with 100+ teams
✅ Hiring multiple Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches
✅ Sending dozens of employees to a specific training
✅ Remove a coach or Scrum Master from a team
✅ Merge teams because they seemed too small separately

These decisions affect employees personally, are costly, and impact team and organizational effectiveness. So, you would expect a thorough analysis before jumping to conclusions, right?

This happens in some organizations. But I’ve also witnessed ‘professional’ organizations offering ‘professional’ services make big decisions based on the gut feelings of the Agile coach/consultant or Scrum Master.

Gut feelings and intuition might be spot on, but they can be fraught with biases, personal preferences, and wrong heuristics. ❌

What I found most worrying is the trust the organization places in the gut feelings of an *external* coach or consultant.

👉 Assignments start with a home-made ‘maturity assessment’
👉 Teams complete a short survey — assessing their maturity
👉 Interviews with various team members and managers are conducted
👉 The outcome is captured in a nice report with a few recommendations
👉 Recommendations often heavily influenced by the coaches’ gut feelings
👉 The report is presented to management, and a decision is made
👉 Especially if the recommendation already matched the gut feeling of the decision-maker him/herself.

These decisions sometimes impact the entire organization, meaning people may have to switch to an entirely new role or even lose their jobs. It might even be considered unethical.

In hindsight, I would have felt more comfortable if we had used a more data-informed, evidence-based, and scientifically validated approach. This approach ensures Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters make decisions grounded in real-world insights and measurable outcomes rather than assumptions. By applying proven techniques backed by research, coaches can identify what works, continuously improve, and drive team- and organizational effectiveness.

Unsurprisingly, this is precisely the path we’re taking nowadays. By building Columinity, we offer coaches and consultants a product to improve team and organizational effectiveness based on evidence-based feedback and scientific insights.

Luckily, we — and others using a similar approach — are gaining much traction and heading in a promising direction. Let me know if you want to join this path and collaboratively move forward! 🚀

What do you think about this? Any thoughts or experiences you want to share?

Input from our community

Mario Huard:

“Intuition, while valuable, has significant limitations in decision-making, particularly in complex contexts such as organizational transformation.

Intuition can also lead us to ignore conflicting data or overvalue information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias.

Intuition is difficult to communicate and justify to stakeholders, which can compromise buy-in and effective implementation of decisions. For these reasons, it is crucial to complement intuition with rigorous data analysis, critical reflection, and empirical validation, especially when the stakes are high, and decisions significantly impact individuals and the organization.

My approach is to transform my intuition into a hypothesis to be validated, which is an effective method that combines the benefits of intuition with the rigor of the scientific approach. By treating your intuitions as hypotheses rather than certainties, you capitalize on your experience while protecting yourself from cognitive biases.”