DAC Coaching & Facilitation Skills 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A DA coach notices a team member consistently dominates retrospectives while others stay silent. What is the BEST facilitation technique to address this?
- Ask the dominant member to leave the room temporarily
- Use silent brainstorming or dot voting to equalize participation (Correct answer)
- Tell the dominant member to speak less
- Assign a time limit per person for all future meetings
Correct answer: Use silent brainstorming or dot voting to equalize participation
Silent brainstorming and dot voting are structured facilitation techniques that give all participants equal voice and reduce dominance by louder individuals.
Question 2: In Disciplined Agile, a coach using a 'tell' approach is most appropriate when:
- The team is highly experienced and self-organizing
- The situation is urgent and the team lacks the necessary knowledge to decide safely (Correct answer)
- The team disagrees with the proposed solution
- The organization mandates a specific coaching style
Correct answer: The situation is urgent and the team lacks the necessary knowledge to decide safely
The 'tell' stance is appropriate in urgent or safety-critical situations where directive guidance prevents harm or significant delay.
Question 3: Which facilitation pattern helps a group move from divergent thinking to convergent thinking during a workshop?
- Open Space Technology
- Diamond of Participatory Decision Making (Correct answer)
- The Fishbowl technique
- World Café
Correct answer: Diamond of Participatory Decision Making
The Diamond of Participatory Decision Making explicitly models the opening (diverge) and closing (converge) phases of group decision-making.
Question 4: A DAC is helping a team adopt a new practice. The team is resistant because they tried it before and it failed. Which coaching approach is most effective?
- Mandate the practice and monitor compliance
- Explore the previous failure context before recommending the practice again (Correct answer)
- Replace the team members who resist
- Skip the practice and move to a different one
Correct answer: Explore the previous failure context before recommending the practice again
Exploring past failure context helps a coach understand root causes and adapt the practice introduction to address the team's specific concerns.
Question 5: What does 'psychological safety' mean in the context of a DA coaching engagement?
- Ensuring no team member is ever given negative feedback
- Creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up, experiment, and fail without punishment (Correct answer)
- Protecting team members from performance reviews
- Keeping team conflicts confidential from management
Correct answer: Creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up, experiment, and fail without punishment
Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson and applied in DA coaching, means team members can take interpersonal risks without fear of negative consequences.
Question 6: A coach is facilitating a team that cannot reach consensus on a critical technical decision. What is the BEST next step?
- Make the decision for the team to save time
- Table the decision indefinitely until consensus emerges naturally
- Use a structured decision-making technique such as Fist-to-Five or Gradients of Agreement (Correct answer)
- Escalate the decision to upper management immediately
Correct answer: Use a structured decision-making technique such as Fist-to-Five or Gradients of Agreement
Structured consensus tools like Fist-to-Five allow teams to surface degrees of agreement and work toward an acceptable decision without requiring unanimity.
Question 7: In DA's coaching stance model, which stance involves asking powerful questions to help the coachee discover their own answers?
- Teach
- Tell
- Coach (Correct answer)
- Sell
Correct answer: Coach
The 'coach' stance in DA involves asking open-ended, powerful questions that guide the coachee to self-discover solutions rather than receiving direct answers.
DAC Coaching & Facilitation Skills 2
A DA coach notices a team member consistently dominates retrospectives while others stay silent.
What is the BEST facilitation technique to address this?