Matching Coaching Style to the Team's Mastery Stage

Definition

Borrowed from the martial-arts progression Shu-Ha-Ri, a team's relationship to any practice moves through three stages: Shu (follow the rule exactly, without yet understanding why), Ha (understand the principle behind the rule well enough to deliberately break it), and Ri (the rule has become so internalized that the team can replace it entirely while still honoring its deeper principle). The stages are not linear or global — concentric rather than sequential, so a team (or person) can be at Ri for one practice and Shu for another simultaneously. A coach must diagnose which stage is active for a given practice and shift style to match: Teaching (lay down the rules, "steel rod in your back") for Shu, Coaching (draw out their own reflection) for Ha, and Advising for Ri.

In the Book

Chapter 4 ("Let Your Style Change") opens with Adkins' own years of tai chi practice and her instructor's answer — "I don't know yet. I am still practicing" — to frame mastery as an unending process. It then applies Alistair Cockburn's Shu-Ha-Ri model directly to Scrum: a team in Shu follows the stand-up's 15-minute, three-question rule mechanically, without needing to understand why, because "rules break people out of their well-worn patterns"; in Ha they grasp that stand-up is really a commitment meeting, not a status meeting, and can safely bend the form; in Ri they might replace stand-up altogether while still honoring its underlying principle. The book pairs this with three named coach styles — Teaching, Coaching, and Advising — plus two supporting modes, Modeling and Reaching, and insists the coach's own skill likewise moves through Shu-Ha-Ri as they learn to diagnose which style a given moment calls for.

Why It Matters

This gives anyone in a teaching or leadership role a diagnostic for the single most common coaching mistake: applying the same style (usually directive teaching) regardless of the learner's actual stage, which either straitjackets an advanced team or abandons a novice one to failure. It generalizes past software teams to any skill-transmission relationship — apprenticeship, onboarding, athletic coaching — wherever early rigid structure must eventually give way to earned deviation.