# What Comes Next *Part 3 of 3: Where the real demand lives. Why the future belongs to a different kind of practitioner* ![[agile-market-that-vanished-renewed.png]] --- If the Agile coaching market collapsed because organisations stopped valuing what coaches offered, an obvious question follows. Did the underlying need disappear too? It didn't. If anything, it intensified. ## The pain didn't go away The challenges that Agile coaching was supposed to address included coordination under uncertainty, adaptive decision-making, team effectiveness, and sustainable delivery. None have been solved. They've been rebranded, redistributed, and in many cases made worse. HR and L&D leaders are now holding a set of problems that would look familiar to any veteran Agile coach, even if the language has changed. Poor employee mental health costs UK employers an estimated £51 billion annually. Trust in immediate managers dropped from 46% to 29% between 2022 and 2024. Seventy-seven percent of organisations report insufficient leadership depth. These aren't technology problems. They aren't process problems. They are fundamentally *human systems* problems. Heifetz called them adaptive challenges: what happens when organisations change faster than the people within them can adapt, and nobody pays attention to the gap. The gap between visible transformation progress and actual human capacity, between what dashboards report and what people experience, used to fall to the Agile coach. And albeit imperfectly, someone was at least paying attention to it. ## Different buyers, same need The shift I didn't see for too long was that the *buyer* had changed. The demand hadn't gone; it had migrated from technology leadership to people leadership. The CTO no longer commissions coaching. The CHRO commissions wellbeing programmes, leadership development, and culture change. The problems are the same; the budget line has moved. This matters because it changes the language, the evidence base, and the credibility markers. An Agile Coach credential means nothing to an HR Director. A Business Psychology qualification means a great deal. A framework with "Scrum" in the title gets politely declined. An evidence-based diagnostic with published research behind it gets a hearing. The skills haven't changed. The positioning has to. ## The integration that's needed What HR and L&D leaders are actually looking for, whether they articulate it this way or not, is someone who can work across three domains simultaneously. First, the *psychological* domain: understanding how individuals respond to uncertainty, why leaders burn out, what drives the hidden emotional labour that consumes capacity without appearing on any report. This isn't therapy; it's applied psychology in a workplace context. It's understanding Kegan's 'second job,' Edmondson's risk calculus, and the slow erosion of critical thinking under sustained pressure. Second, the *coaching* domain: the ability to create conditions for insight, to hold space for difficult reflection, to support behaviour change that sticks. Not the formulaic "powerful questions" of certification-mill coaching, but genuine developmental work grounded in evidence. Acceptance and Commitment Coaching, which is built on the same psychological science as ACT therapy but applied to high-functioning professionals navigating complexity, offers a rigorous framework for this. Third, the *organisational systems* domain: the ability to read structures, dependencies, and dynamics at a system level. To see how a reorganisation creates hidden coordination costs. To understand why a transformation that looks successful on paper is actually eroding the capabilities it was supposed to build. Here's what integration looks like in practice: a transformation director is struggling with a programme that's stalling despite green metrics. A psychologically informed practitioner can see that she's carrying unsustainable emotional load (psychological domain), help her develop the flexibility to hold uncertainty without rigidifying into control behaviours (coaching domain), and simultaneously identify that the programme's fourteen cross-team dependencies are generating structural friction that no amount of personal resilience can overcome (systems domain). The intervention works because the three domains aren't separate problems. They're compounding ones. The Agile coaching world touched all three domains, but rarely integrated them. The best coaches could read systems and facilitate change. Most couldn't connect their work to psychological evidence or position it in terms that HR and L&D buyers recognised. ## A different professional identity This realisation forced me to confront my own professional identity. I was an Agile coach, a good one I think, but that title had become a liability. Not because the work wasn't valuable, but because the market had decided the title wasn't. The pivot I needed to make was toward coaching psychology. Specifically, it put me on the path to becoming a Chartered Psychologist through the BPS, with business psychology credentials through the ABP. I didn't abandon the systems thinking and facilitation skills built over twenty years. Instead, I housed them in a framework with stronger foundations. The British Psychological Society provides the scientific rigour and ethical standards. The Association for Business Psychology provides the applied, commercial credibility. The coaching background provides the facilitation skill and the practice wisdom. Together, they create a professional identity that answers the question HR and L&D leaders are actually asking: *Can you demonstrate, with evidence, that what you do works?* ## Where this leads The convergence of these threads pointed toward something specific. If the core problem is that organisations lose 43% of their transformation value to invisible human-system friction, and if the core solution requires addressing both structural complexity and leadership psychological capacity, then what's needed is a way to *measure* that friction and *quantify* the recoverable value. That's what I built. The Hidden Work Diagnostic surfaces what dashboards can't show: the invisible costs of impression management, emotional labour, developmental misalignment, and hope depletion that drain transformation capacity. It connects psychological reality to financial reality, grounded in published research rather than consulting opinion. It's the tool I wish I'd had as an Agile coach. It's also the tool I couldn't have built as one. ## The hermit's lamp There's an archetype that kept appearing during this journey: the Hermit. Not the isolated figure most people picture, but the older meaning. Someone who withdraws to gain clarity, crafts a lamp from what they've learned, and returns to light the path for others. The Agile coaching crisis forced a withdrawal. The research and reflection that followed crafted the lamp. The diagnostic, the evidence base, the new professional identity: these are the return. The thousands of veteran Agile practitioners currently navigating their own version of this crisis don't need to follow the same path. But the underlying pattern is worth recognising: the skills developed over years of organisational change work haven't become worthless. They've become unhoused. The challenge isn't to abandon them but to find or build a new container worthy of what they can do. For me, that container turned out to be business psychology. For others, it may be something different. What matters is refusing to accept that the collapse of a market configuration means the collapse of the work itself. The work endures. The container changes. The hermit returns. And if you're carrying a lamp of your own, still looking for where to shine it, know that you're not alone in that. --- *Andrew Kidd is the founder of Daring Futures and an MSc Business Psychology researcher at the Open University, investigating how AI-augmented working practices can offset the hidden costs of digital transformation. His working premise: that the introduction of AI into work will increase, not diminish, our awareness of what's distinctly human.* ## References DDI (2025) *Global leadership forecast 2025*. Pittsburgh, PA: Development Dimensions International. Available at: https://www.ddiworld.com/global-leadership-forecast (Accessed: 3 April 2026). Deloitte (2024) *Mental health and employers: the case for investment*. London: Deloitte UK. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/services/consulting/analysis/mental-health-and-employers-the-case-for-investment.html (Accessed: 3 April 2026). Edmondson, A.C. (2018) *The fearless organization: creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth*. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Heifetz, R.A., Grashow, A. and Linsky, M. (2009) *The practice of adaptive leadership: tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world*. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Kegan, R. and Lahey, L.L. (2016) *An everyone culture: becoming a deliberately developmental organization*. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. McKinsey and Company (2021) *Losing from day one: why even successful transformations fall short*. New York: McKinsey and Company. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/losing-from-day-one-why-even-successful-transformations-fall-short (Accessed: 3 April 2026). Skews, R. (2018) *Acceptance and commitment coaching for senior managers: an RCT evaluation*. Doctoral thesis. University of Hertfordshire.