Certified Agile Leader’s Journey
Completing Scrum Alliance’s Certified Agile Leadership Program
Finally got my Certified Agile Leader Level II (CAL II) credential!!! This was the last requirement of Certified Agile Leadership Program with Scrum Alliance, a learning journey I started in November 2017.
Completing the CAL II course was no easy feat. It took 19 months — from December 2020 to July 2022, multiple revisions of 3 experience reports, numerous peer reviews, and extensive amount of time spent working with 5 fellow leaders + 1 coach spread across 4 different time zones.
It was difficult, challenging, and sometimes frustrating! But the hardship also meant a lot of learning opportunities, gained insights on agility in other organizations, and that sense of accomplishment as you see yourself grow within and outside your organization.
Through this story, I hope I could give a concise account of what this Agile Leadership program meant to me…
CAL II Course: Our Group
Stuart Turner, our Certified Agile Leadership Educator and the “knowledgeable other”, brought us together. Our cohort is comprised of members located in Asia and Europe. Sessions would have to be done virtually on a time agreed by all, subject to change during daylight saving time or whenever a new time zone has to be considered. In our first Zoom call, Stuart described our group as our “safe space” — our practice space as we go through our journey of being an Agile Leader.
We have to work together so we can achieve our shared goals for the program, our personal goals, and our individual goals for our respective organizations. How we make that happen is entirely up to us. No defined course topic per session. Rules were created, revised, dropped. What we agreed to talk about on a week-by-week basis also evolved after each coaching feedback. I lost count of how many times we changed our course requirements as we try to define what the program completion meant for all of us.
There was constant back-and-forth between our learning sessions, actually applying it to our organizations, and going back to our group to share what we were able to validate. It was a challenge to share (as well as listen to) a redacted story without losing much context and be able to sift through the support given.
All of these while the world around us continuously changed. Our first meeting was on December 11, 2020 — 2 weeks before Christmas. Most of us had to redefine what holiday celebrations look like in a global pandemic. The check-ins for our succeeding meetings would usually revolve around what level of lockdown is being implemented in our country, what the COVID-19 response looks like in our part of the world, and how have our lives changed.
In our 19 months together, a lot has happened outside the requirements of the course. Some of us dealt with loss and grief. Some moved countries and/or organization. Some shared wonderful milestones worth celebrating. Our personal priorities shifted and we had to continuously adapt our ways of working to continuously support each other.
Extra Adventure
It was also quite an adventure for me as I took the CAL program with my forever learning partner, my husband Ealden Escañan. Our conversations about that day’s topic would carry on beyond Zoom calls. We’d deliberate about course recommendations over dinner, over weekend plans, and sometimes even while we’re doing house chores.
Once we’re back in the group though, we’d be our own unique individuals. We respect our differences enough that we can have distinct learning objectives and complete a course without much influence on each other.
I’m slipping this information in so it would make sense once I start using “we” / “us” instead of “I” / “me” in my stories.
CAL Program Requirements
The first requirement of the CAL Program is getting the Level I credential. For us, this was a 2-day training in Manila with a small group of Filipino practitioners. Stuart was also our trainer in that November 2017 course.
The second and last requirement is the Level II credential. Unlike the first one, this is more or less a year-long journey and have 3 components — Advanced Education, Validated Practice, and Peer Workshop.
There were limited offerings of Level II back then and we didn’t have as much information on what’s required. Ealden and I took a break from CAL program and decided to further our leadership skills by attending the following trainings and workshops:
- Team Coaching by David Clutterbuck in Singapore, October 2018
- Cynefin Practitioner Foundations by Zhen Goh in Hong Kong, November 2018
- Coaching Beyond the Team by Don Gray & Esther Derby in Singapore, March 2019
- Problem Solving Leadership by Esther Derby & Don Gray in Thailand, February 2020
These decisions proved worthwhile as we were more equipped for the CAL II educational requirements or “Advanced Education” focused on these 3 categories:
- Leadership in an Agile Context
- The Agile Organization
- Agile Approaches to Change
These are the same learning categories that require a documentation thru Experience Reports — under the Validated Practice component. Our group agreed not to prescribe a single format for the experience reports. This allowed everyone to get creative in sharing their learning and leadership journey. The only requirement is that it should be easily accessible ahead of the Peer Review — a dedicated session for each member meant for analysis and feedback sharing.
I spent countless hours working on my experience reports. It was very challenging to identify which experience to share and how it all connects to what I’ve learned while participating in CAL II. I was able to refine my report when I decided to go with the theme:
Becoming an Effective Agile Leader in a Complex & Rapidly Changing Environment
This was inspired by Peter Green’s statement in this Why Become an Agile Leader video from Scrum Alliance.
Even more hours were spent preparing for and attending my groupmates’ peer review— there was a specific instruction to focus our feedback on the leadership growth aspect of the experience and not to scrutinize the situation per se. This proved to be difficult and we had to be constantly reminded.
More about CAL II requirements in this Scrum Alliance link: https://www.scrumalliance.org/get-certified/agile-leadership/cal-certification
Why Join a Certified Agile Leadership Program?
The decision to join the CAL Program should not be made in haste. This requires commitment and time, lots of both. But would I advise you to challenge yourself and push through with it? Definitely!
Here’s my elevator pitch for you:
“Through this program, I learned and experienced what it really meant to be part of a team.”
Stuart’s welcome email gave much hint but only made sense to me when I was already summarizing my learnings for the course:
“The programme is run using the approaches included in the CAL programme, so we’ll be making decisions as a team, designing games to guide progress, dealing with any conflicts, competing objectives, new members joining/leaving, etc. all using freely available protocols, explicit agreements, etc. The frequency of sessions, content, ways of communicating, etc. will all be up to you, as a team.”
The experience of being a team member makes a lot of difference in an Agile Coach’s approaches to leadership and change. “You’d know if you know.” I know it’s easy to just create a new team in your own organization and be done with it. But there’s definitely value in being vulnerable with people outside your organization — people who can you learn from or people who may learn from you. There’s just a bigger world out there!
What’s Next?
This certification was of course a huge accomplishment but it was never the end goal. The challenge really is in the relentless pursuit for Agile Leadership in a world that continuously shifts right before our eyes. Year 2020 and COVID-19 taught us enough of that already.
Here’s my personal backlog of topics to explore further. We studied these in CAL II but I definitely need to brush up on the application and the study behind these models.
- Good Game Design
- Clear Goals
- Clear Rules
- Sense of Progress (thru Tracking / Feedback loops)
- Opt-in (Voluntary) Participation
2. Co-Active Leadership: Five Ways to Lead
3. SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others
4. Eight Patterns of Open Business Agility
Acknowledgements
Thank you to our CAL II Educator Stuart Turner! Thank you to my CAL II groupmates: Ealden Escañan, Victor Locke, Abigail Victa Broman, Jasper Fortuin, and Dominic Cahill.
Thank you for sharing your time and wisdom in this leadership journey. What an amazing adventure it has been!
Whoever comes is the right people.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
When it’s over, it’s over.
