As I returned from Agile 2011 and witnessed the founding fathers (yes, they were all men) return for their 10-year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, I couldn’t help notice how it happened. Inspired by a couple of industry leaders – Bob Martin and Alistair Cockburn, a small group of smart innovative people spent 2 ½ days at a retreat in Snowbird, Utah discussing and collaborating to create a Manifesto. The rest is history, our shared history.

While some might say that our work is done, that agile has crossed the chasm and become mainstream, I believe our work is just beginning. I believe that while many companies are seeing benefits from agility, more companies are challenged with sustaining and growing agility, and others reverting back to more traditional leadership approaches and structured methods.

As members of the Scrum Alliance, our mission is to transform the world of work. As leaders in our Scrum community - the coaches, trainers, senior practitioners and change agents working inside or as external consultants – our job is to explore the unknown and highlight paths of success for others to follow.

The Scrum Coaching Retreat is a call to those leaders within our Scrum Alliance community who are transforming their world of work and who wish to collaborate with peers in sharing patterns of success and failure from which we can continue to learn and upon which we can continue to build. Our theme for this conference is “Sustaining Agility beyond the coaching engagement” – helping build sustaining agile leadership, organizations, and culture.

The Scrum Coaching Retreat is modeled after that original Snowbird retreat 10 years ago. We are looking to draw a small collection (75 people) of smart and motivated Scrum leaders who are engaged in fostering agility either as an internal agent or external consultant. We will form teams focused on goals supporting our theme of sustaining agility. We will provide plenty of free space and tools for learning, discussing, collaborating, eating, playing, working, and sharing.

By joining this retreat, you will be committing to participate in pre-retreat planning discussions to help focus our goals and identify working teams. As this is a new model of collaboration and engagement, our expectation is that you will be an expander (and) of ideas and thoughts to help us not only create great results but in self-organizing through the retreat structure to help us best understand how it can work. Just as in Scrum, we plan to learn through doing.

If you are interested in joining this retreat, you would be wise to book early as we will likely reach capacity (75) in September. To register, please visit and log into the retreat website – http://scrumcoachretreat2011.crowdvine.com. If you have questions about the retreat, please feel free to send me an email. 

Pete Behrens

Scrum Coaching Retreat Coordinator

pete at trailridgeconsulting dot com