Team Development Stages with Integral Coaching Quadrants
Written by Ilke Atasel, Agile and Integral Coach
Ilke Atasel is an Agile Coach, Team Facilitator, Project Manager and Integral Professional Coach with over a decade of experience in the gaming industry. Certified by ICAgile and Integral Coaching Canada, she blends Agile practices with Integral Coaching to inspire growth, collaboration, and lasting change in teams and individuals.
In this article, I would like to explain how you can merge Agile Coaching with Integral Theory Quadrants. Agile Coaching tends to focus on team delivery, collaboration, and organizational flow. Despite this, true agility goes beyond tools, it lives in people’s mindsets, relationships, and ways of being. Integral Coaching, rooted in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, provides a powerful framework to view the whole human being and the entire team beyond processes.
When you merge them, you help teams and individuals not only be agile but also be agile in a more conscious and embodied way.
Seeing the whole picture
Integral Theory’s four quadrants help you scan beyond what’s visible on Jira or in Scrum meetings.
Let’s look at the integral theory quadrants
Integral Theory suggests that any situation, personal, professional, or societal, can be understood more fully through four perspectives called the quadrants.
I (individual interior): beliefs, values, motivations. (What is going on inside a person, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, motivations.)
We (collective interior): team culture, psychological safety. (The inner, shared experience of a group, culture, shared values, relationships, trust.)
It (individual exterior): skills, behaviors, competencies (The measurable, objective side of an individual, observable behaviors, skills, physical actions.)
Its (collective exterior): processes, tools, structures (The external systems and structures around a group, processes, tools, rules, technologies, environment.)
How can we use this approach for Agile ceremonies?
As an idea, next time you sense something is not working for your teams, don’t just focus on processes, deliveries, or outputs. Explore individual motivation (I), team culture (We), strengths, capabilities, and improvement points (It), and organizational structures (Its). A quick quadrant mapping during a retro can reveal blind spots and improvement areas.
Here is an example of how you can map Integral Theory Quadrants as a Retrospective practice. (Questions can be changed depending on the needs of the teams and their current stage.)
After this mapping, you can analyze the Sticky Notes or Post-its by clustering them to see the patterns, improvement areas, and strengths.
As an example, if there are trust issues between team members (We), it can be connected to poor communication skills (I), which can be a good starting point to tackle as an Agile Coach.
There is one caveat, though, your Retro Session may take a bit longer than usual, so more time allocation may be required.
As a Coach, I always like to mix different approaches instead of repeating the same rituals without any real impact or action.
If this resonates with you, feel free to follow, clap, comment, or reach out. For more small bite-sized insights like this, you can also follow my Instagram page.
I wish everyone out-of-the-box solutions!
Read more from Ilke Atasel
Ilke Atasel, Agile and Integral Coach
Ilke Atasel is an experienced Agile and Integral Professional Coach who helps teams build healthy dynamics, overcome blockers and effective processes in both cross-functional and matrix organizations. She also works with individuals to overcome self-limiting beliefs, turn ideas into action, make conscious decisions, and cultivate resilience, confidence, and compassion. Drawing on somatic and neuroscientific tools, her coaching supports lasting transformation and the integration of new mindsets and behaviors.
