Research Spotlight: Designing Agile Change That Outlasts the Coach

That post-exit challenge is the focus of “Sustaining Agility: How Agile Coaches Ensure Changes Endure,” by Ehikioya Obode, Peggy Gregory, Derek Somerville, and Advait Deshpande. The article examines how agile coaches understand what happens after an engagement ends, and how they prepare teams and organizations for continuity.

We spoke with corresponding author Ehikioya Obode of the University of Glasgow to learn more about sustainment work, professional identity, ownership transfer, and cultural alignment. The study reframes successful coaching as the deliberate design of conditions that allow the coach to become less necessary over time.

Organizations often invest heavily in transformation while treating the end of a coaching engagement as an administrative event. This research shows why exit planning is part of the intervention itself. Without ownership, routines, and cultural legitimacy, visible progress may depend on the continued presence of a particular coach.

The study also adds nuance to claims about long-term impact. Coaches usually have partial and indirect knowledge of what happens after they leave, so the paper distinguishes their interpretations and intended strategies from direct evidence of sustained organizational outcomes.

Ehikioya Obode reflected on the broader significance of the study: “The most important implication is that sustainment should be designed from the beginning, rather than treated as something to consider only when the coaching engagement is ending. For coaches, this means progressively transferring ownership and building internal capability; for organizational leaders, it means creating the conditions — such as support, stability, and alignment with organizational purpose — that allow those capabilities to endure after the coach leaves.”

The article brings the interview themes together into three domains of sustainment work.

• Embedding Practices creates structural continuity. Coaches described building routines, artifacts, retrospectives, improvement practices, and other ways of working into everyday organizational life, so that agility does not depend on informal memory or an individual champion.
• Enabling Ownership reduces dependency. Coaches framed success in terms of developing internal champions, rotating facilitation, transferring responsibility, and helping teams become self-sustaining. Post-exit trajectories ranged from autonomy to stagnation or regression, depending partly on how ownership had been transferred.
• Aligning Culture makes agility meaningful rather than ritual. Coaches emphasized connecting agile values with leadership language, business priorities, and organizational purpose. Practices were seen as more durable when people understood why they mattered, rather than simply reproducing ceremonies.

Looking back on the findings, Ehikioya said: “What stood out most was how strongly coaches associated success with becoming less necessary over time. Rather than viewing continued reliance on the coach as evidence of value, many described success in terms of teams being able to facilitate, reflect, improve, and adapt independently. That shifts the measure of coaching success from visible activity while the coach is present to the capability that remains afterwards.”

The study used a qualitative interview design. Sixteen professional agile coaches, nine women and seven men, participated across six European countries and the United States. Participants represented varied technical and business backgrounds, internal and external coaching roles, multiple agile frameworks, and two to fourteen years of coaching experience.

Semi-structured interviews lasted approximately 45 to 70 minutes and explored perceived impact, post-exit outcomes, and strategies for lasting change. The researchers used Braun and Clarke’s inductive thematic analysis. The first author conducted line-by-line coding, developed subthemes iteratively, and worked with the research team to refine six overarching themes and synthesize them into the Agile Sustainment Work Model.

After the manual thematic analysis was complete, anonymized transcripts were uploaded to Evidano, then known as AILYZE, to generate an independent thematic overview. The researchers compared the tool’s output with the manually developed themes as a form of analytic triangulation.

Evidano surfaced clusters that overlapped with the existing structure, including ideas around self-sustaining teams and post-exit relationships. Where it suggested different groupings or emphases, the team returned to the underlying data and discussed whether the alternative interpretation was sufficiently supported.

No changes were made to the final thematic structure, because the differences were either already captured in subthemes or lacked robust support across participants. The article describes the tool as a supplementary check and stimulus for reflexive discussion, not the primary analytical tool.

Ehikioya also noted how AI tools can support careful research workflows when used responsibly: “Evidano gave us an independent thematic overview after the manual analysis was complete. We did not use it to determine the final themes; instead, we compared its groupings with our own and returned to the transcripts where there were differences. For researchers, the key point is that AI-generated themes should be treated as prompts for reflexive scrutiny rather than as analytic truth. Any interpretation still needs to be grounded in the data and judged in relation to the research question and analytic approach.”

For agile coaches, the practical message is to plan for handover early. Mentoring internal champions, distributing facilitation, building shared responsibility for improvement, and treating redundancy as a mark of success can shift attention from continued delivery to capability building.

For organizations, durable agility requires more than hiring an external expert. Leadership support, internal coaching capability, stable teams, governance, and language that connects agile values to business priorities all affect whether practices remain legitimate after a coach exits.

For researchers, the article creates a foundation for longitudinal and multi-stakeholder studies. Direct observation of teams, leaders, and clients after coaching could test how the proposed mechanisms operate over time and distinguish intended sustainment strategies from actual outcomes.

Ehikioya offered this takeaway for practitioners and researchers: “The main message is that sustainable agile change is not about making a coach indispensable. It is about leaving behind stronger routines, distributed ownership, and a shared understanding of why agile ways of working matter. When those conditions are embedded, teams and organizations are better able to continue learning, adapting, and improving after the coach has gone.”

The article ultimately suggests that a coach’s lasting contribution is not continued dependence, but a stronger organizational capacity to learn, adapt, and carry agile practices forward independently.