"I'm no longer about what to do. I'm about how to help others succeed." No slides, just a concrete field report straight from the trenches. Together with Patricia ROUOT, we coached Guillaume THIEBAUT and Nicolas Bruneau through this shift over 18 months.
Guillaume, RTE of a 100-person collective in telecommunications. 10 years in IT, moving from developer to product owner to facilitator. That sentence captures a pivot that nobody ever films.
Nicolas had 15 years of development team management behind him. His own line: "I had to unlearn that the truth doesn't only come from me." Guillaume had to unlearn bringing solutions too quickly. Letting the collective build its own answers when your 10-year reflex tells you to solve it yourself is physically uncomfortable.
What we found under the carpet was anything but theoretical. Siloed teams with direct dependencies that never talked to each other. Duplicate deliverables that nobody noticed because nobody was looking at the system level. Defensive managers pointing at the team across the hall instead of asking "how can I help?" Executive sponsorship absent from quarterly seminars, and teams that never escalated their delays because nobody at the top seemed to care.
The tipping point for Guillaume: at the last quarterly seminar, the teams coordinated on their own. All he had to do was watch. For Nicolas: two people who never spoke to each other came to him and said "we talked it through, here's what we're going to do." When that happens, the framework has taken hold. Facilitation has done its job.
The four of us talk about it openly in this replay. Conversation format, no slides. Real experiences, real friction, including how we built a collective of managers who help each other when they used to protect their own turf, and why that was the lever that changed everything.
If your team rituals look like status meetings where nobody dares say "I'm behind, I need help," this field report is for you. Full replay in the comments.
Thanks to IAF France for the platform and for allowing us to share this experience!
An engineer's value is no longer measured in hours worked. It's measured in their mastery of AI systems. I'm an external agile x AI consultant. Currently offboarding from a scope in full transformation!
My role: to leave. To leave behind something solid enough for the RTE and the Core Team to continue transforming autonomously without me!
This week, I produced with orchestrated agents:
- Prioritized workstreams with their inter-train x portfolio dependencies
- Charts showing dependencies between workstreams along with an indicative timeline
- Multi-phase trajectories
--> It's coherent, smart, and exactly what I had in mind.
This deliverable didn't exist 6 months ago. Not because of lack of time. Structurally too heavy to produce for a single coach on a scope of roughly 500 people (3 ARTs + 1 LPM). This isn't just an acceleration of what I was doing before -- I now produce what was previously impossible.
I've been helping organizations with agility for years. What I see today in my engagements convinces me of one thing: the AI transformation of organizations won't happen without people who have a foot in both worlds.
These field experiences led me to formalize IAgile: when agility meets artificial intelligence.