CST Systemic Team Coaching 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In systemic team coaching, what does the term 'system' primarily refer to?
- The software tools the team uses
- The interconnected relationships, patterns, and dynamics within and around the team (Correct answer)
- The organizational hierarchy above the team
- The Scrum framework processes the team follows
Correct answer: The interconnected relationships, patterns, and dynamics within and around the team
A system in team coaching refers to the web of interdependencies, relationships, and emergent patterns that shape team behavior beyond any single individual.
Question 2: A Scrum Trainer notices that a team always defers to the most senior developer when making technical decisions, even during retrospectives. This is best described as:
- A healthy respect for expertise
- A systemic pattern that may be suppressing collective intelligence (Correct answer)
- A sign the team is well-organized
- A role clarification issue that the Scrum Master should resolve
Correct answer: A systemic pattern that may be suppressing collective intelligence
Repeated deference to one individual is a systemic pattern — a recurring dynamic that constrains the team's ability to self-organize and tap distributed knowledge.
Question 3: Which coaching stance involves the coach sharing an observation about the team's dynamic without interpreting or judging it?
- Advising
- Mirroring (Correct answer)
- Mentoring
- Directing
Correct answer: Mirroring
Mirroring is reflecting what the coach observes — behavior, language, or energy — back to the team without adding evaluation, allowing the team to make its own meaning.
Question 4: A team's velocity has been consistent for six sprints but stakeholders are unsatisfied with outcomes. A systemic team coach would most likely explore:
- How to increase the team's velocity metric
- Whether the team's output is aligned with what the broader system actually needs (Correct answer)
- How to improve the team's estimation accuracy
- Whether the Product Owner is writing better user stories
Correct answer: Whether the team's output is aligned with what the broader system actually needs
Systemic coaching looks beyond internal team metrics to whether the team's work creates value within the larger organizational system.
Question 5: The concept of 'emergence' in systems thinking is most relevant to team coaching because:
- Teams should only implement features incrementally
- Team properties and behaviors arise from interactions, not just from individual members' skills (Correct answer)
- Emergency escalation paths must be defined in the team charter
- Sprint goals should emerge naturally from backlog refinement
Correct answer: Team properties and behaviors arise from interactions, not just from individual members' skills
Emergence means that team-level behavior (culture, trust, performance) arises from the pattern of interactions rather than being predictable from individual attributes alone.
Question 6: During a team coaching engagement, the coach identifies that the team's poor retrospective outcomes are caused by tension with a stakeholder outside the team. The systemic approach would be to:
- Focus retrospectives purely on internal team processes
- Help the team understand and address the cross-boundary dynamic affecting their system (Correct answer)
- Escalate the stakeholder issue to the Agile Coach
- Advise the team to ignore external pressures during retrospectives
Correct answer: Help the team understand and address the cross-boundary dynamic affecting their system
Systemic team coaching addresses both within-team dynamics and the team's boundary with the broader organization, since external relationships shape internal behavior.
Question 7: Which of the following best describes a 'homeostatic pull' in the context of team coaching?
- A team's drive to improve velocity sprint over sprint
- The tendency of a system to resist change and return to its familiar state (Correct answer)
- The pull toward consensus during planning sessions
- The attraction team members feel toward high-complexity tasks
Correct answer: The tendency of a system to resist change and return to its familiar state
Homeostasis is the system's natural self-stabilizing force — teams often unconsciously resist change to maintain existing patterns even when those patterns are dysfunctional.
CST Systemic Team Coaching 2
In systemic team coaching, what does the term 'system' primarily refer to?