About ACI

Agile Coaching Institute develops competence and confidence in the profession of Agile Coaching, from the ScrumMaster of a few teams all the way to the Enterprise Agile Coach. We do this by evoking and catalyzing the development of Agile Coaches as agents of organizational (and societal) transformation, combining education, coaching, and mentoring.  We provide rich, transformational programs as well as thought leadership in the emerging field of Agile Coaching. We have trained over 6000 Agile Coaches as we do our best to give definition to Agile Coaching as a true profession.

Lyssa Adkins

I believe that Agile is an emergent response that helps us thrive in our ever-increasingly complex, changeable and interconnected world.  I am a passionate contributor to the discipline and profession of Agile Coaching and have trained many thousands of agilists in the knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to coach teams and organizations to get full benefits of Agile.

In 2010, I authored Coaching Agile Teams which is still a Top 10 Agile book years later. I am a champion of #WomeninAgile, most recently through the TENWOMENSTRONG programs. I share my thoughts and experiences on AgileCoachingInstitute.com and LyssaAdkins.com.

Halim Dunsky

Veteran agile coach and consultant Halim Dunsky is a faculty member and oversees the Agile Coaching Institute. With a decade of tenure at SolutionsIQ and more than 40 years in the software business, Halim’s depth of experience and passion for Agile are the driving forces helping us achieve the goals of business growth and high satisfaction for students, clients, and facilitators.

Upon being introduced to Agile ten years ago, Halim was an immediate convert. Armed with the belief that Agile goes beyond software teams and is a way of life that can be applied throughout an organization, Halim strives to build a transformative Agile educational experience and to support the emergence of rich human life in the workplace.

Halim originally hails from the suburbs of Chicago and holds a B.A. in Communications from Northwestern University, as well as an M.A. in Organizational Systems from Saybrook University.

David Chilcott

David Chilcott has an unusual set of skills that encompasses both the deeply technical and the deeply human aspects of software development. In addition to his background as a system architect, software developer and agile coach, David holds a degree in group dynamics, and has completed formal training in creative problem solving, advanced facilitation, Innovation Games facilitation, non-violent communication (NVC), conflict resolution and Co-Active Coaching, and Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC). David is the founder of Outformations, a collaborative software design, development, and Agile consulting practice. He is a former board member for the National Agile Leadership Network (ALN) and is the founder of the Bay Area ALN. David is a lead coach for ACI’s Coaching Circles, co-creator of ACI’s course The Agile Facilitator, and leader of the Competency Cohort for Agile Coaching Mastery.

Katrina Ferguson

I am a coach and consultant in the Agile space, helping large and small organizations navigate their enterprise Agile adoptions and transformations. I’m also a professional coach, certified in integral coaching. I have been teaching and mentoring Agile practices for about 8 years, teaching many hundreds of people along the way, and all around the world. I’ve coached dozens of teams through the ups and downs of their Agile journey, many of them in Fortune 100 companies. I create and lead workshops and practice cohorts for leadership development, and I’m passionate about helping leaders of all levels learn how to lead in a way that generates learning in their organizations. I have deep training in systemic coaching, and I bring this to bear in my interactions as a teacher, facilitator and enterprise agile coach. Working with some of the largest Agile companies, I am a practiced facilitator for team events and trainings ranging from a few to 300 people. My deepest fulfillment comes from providing an environment where people can discover their own competence to better navigate their life and career.

Simon Macpherson

I am passionate about helping individuals, teams, and organizations discover how to maximize value from applying Agile principles.  As an Agile Coach I seek clarity around; purpose, sharing the vision, and the personal values needed to align towards achievement, innovation, and sustainability.

I am also a pragmatist who understands, through experience, this is a journey for both the organization and each individual. How can Agile methods and mindset work in the existing container? What do we need to work on to change the environment to support greater agility? And ultimately, understand this is all about you. How are you showing up, what change is also needed in you? Because, here is the rub, trying to change others is futile but we have full control over changing ourselves.

My work life experience stretches across a variety of backgrounds beginning in retail, moving toward manufacturing and engineering, a stint in self-employment, many years in the hospitality industry, and finally software development. As an Agile Coach I have long term practice in telecommunications, health-care, travel & leisure, and insurance. I am also a trained and practicing Co-Active Coach.

Michael Hamman

For most of the past 25 years, Michael has committed himself to the possibility that the workplace be a site for personal, professional, and social transformation.  Trained early on in coaching and large group facilitation with Werner Erhard and Associates, Michael went on to train in systems thinking, facilitation, organization development, and leadership development with Peter Senge, Peter Block, Thomas Leonard, Otto Laske, Marvin Weisbord, and with the Leadership Circle.  For 12 years Michael developed software, and coached and trained software teams in the beauty of design and teamwork. Since 2003 he has coached dozens of Fortune 500 companies, leaders, and teams toward greater holistic agility. In the process, he has helped hundreds of people develop their own capacity for Agile leadership and practice.

Clive Prout

Clive holds a Masters degree in manufacturing engineering from Cambridge University and had a first career in the software industry. He has held software engineering and product management leadership roles in Europe and the US, included P&L responsibility for a portfolio of networking software products at Network Computing Devices in the late ‘90s.  For the past 15 years, Clive has been coaching leaders to increase effectiveness, self-awareness, and fulfillment. His clients are predominantly executives in the technology sector with Microsoft, T-Mobile and Aol being recent examples. In addition to his executive coaching practice, Clive has 10 years experience training professional coaches for The Coaches Training Institute (CTI). He holds professional coaching certifications (ICF PCC, CTI CPCC) and is certified in several coaching instruments (MBTI, FIRO-B, Benchmarks 360 and LDF).

Leslie Stein

Leslie has more than a dozen years of leadership, process efficiency, behavioral analysis, professional facilitation and training experience in a number of challenging environments. She is sought-after as a professional facilitator and facilitation trainer. Leslie’s company, Full Circle Inspiration, focuses on inspiring groups and individuals to look for new perspectives when the ones they’re stuck in just aren’t working anymore. Her passion is bringing innovation to teams in order to help them use their own brilliance to improve communication and enhance success. She is a co-creator of ACI’s course, The Agile Facilitator.

Bryan Stallings

As a Certified Scrum Trainer since 2005, Bryan has trained and coached hundreds of individuals and teams in Scrum and Agile techniques. Today he supports and mentors some 200 agile coaches. Bryan has also been responsible for advising and guiding the enterprise rollout of Scrum at dozens of companies. Bryan has been involved in the Agile and Scrum communities since their beginnings, and has worked in collaboration with both of the Scrum founders, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. At that time, Bryan led what was acclaimed as the largest-scale Scrum implementation of its time.

A unique set of capabilities in a combination of disciplines, including Professional Coaching, Management Consulting, Organizational Change, Leadership Development, Project Management, and Process Improvement have resulted from Bryan’s twenty years of international and domestic experience in consulting, information technology, financial services, and manufacturing. Bryan is known for his skill at facilitating collaboration within empowered project teams—across organization, geographies and cultures—and with key decision-makers, in order to foster productive relationships and achieve critical business results. Bryan has an MBA in International Business. He is a trained professional coach (CTI). Bryan is fluent in Spanish and has conducted Scrum training in Spanish.

Tim Cunnane

As an Agile Coach and faculty member of the Agile Coaching Institute, my passion is catalyzing the excellence that individuals and organizations contain. Through coaching, facilitation, teaching, and consulting, I have helped dozens of organizations develop highly-collaborative and effective leaders and teams. I leverage core values of curiosity, transparency, and dialogue to help people self-define and achieve ever-higher levels of performance and purpose. In addition to Agile Coaching, I am a student and practitioner of Integral Coaching. This methodology of professional coaching draws upon many traditions—biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, spirituality and more—to provide many avenues of insight and practice. My work with this methodology highly influences my approach to Agile coaching. Though different, I find the focus on long-term excellence and building the capabilities of self-correction and self-generation within individuals to be cornerstones of my work as an Agile coach.

Rebecca Sumrall

Rebecca keeps the home fires burning at ACI in her position as Training Events Coordinator. She is the public face of ACI to the thousands of students we serve each year.