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CAC
The Certified Agile Coach (CAC) program teaches advanced coaching competencies, cross‑level organizational impact, transformative practices, and mastery of complex adaptive systems, preparing coaches to drive measurable agile change.
Who Should Take This
Senior Scrum Masters, Agile Leads, and organizational development professionals with at least three years of coaching experience who aim to deepen their strategic influence across teams, departments, and enterprises. They seek a rigorous credential that validates their ability to design and execute transformative agile interventions, navigate complex adaptive environments, and demonstrate sustained impact through documented outcomes and peer‑reviewed portfolios.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Advanced Agile Coaching Competencies
2
Domain 2: Coaching Across Organizational Levels
3
Domain 3: Transformative Coaching Practices
4
Domain 4: Coaching in Complex Adaptive Systems
5
Domain 5: Professional Mastery and Philosophy
6
Domain 6: Coaching Across Diverse Contexts
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
64 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Advanced Agile Coaching Competencies
4 topics
Mastery of coaching stances
- Apply mastery-level stance fluidity to shift seamlessly between teaching, mentoring, facilitating, and coaching within a single conversation based on real-time reading of client needs.
- Analyze personal coaching patterns to identify habitual stance preferences, blind spots, and growth edges that limit coaching range and effectiveness across diverse situations.
- Design a personal coaching development plan that systematically expands stance range, deepens weaker stances, and develops the intuition needed for real-time stance selection.
Advanced listening and presence
- Apply advanced listening practices including somatic listening, energetic listening, and field-level awareness to perceive organizational dynamics beyond verbal communication.
- Analyze the quality of coaching presence across challenging contexts including conflict, ambiguity, emotional intensity, and organizational pressure to evaluate mastery development.
- Design coaching presence development practices including mindfulness routines, body awareness exercises, and reflective rituals that deepen coaching presence over time.
Integrative coaching approaches
- Apply integrative coaching approaches that draw from multiple coaching traditions including ontological, solution-focused, narrative, cognitive-behavioral, and systems coaching.
- Analyze the theoretical foundations of multiple coaching approaches to evaluate when each is most effective and how they can be combined for more powerful coaching impact.
- Design a personal integrative coaching model that synthesizes multiple coaching traditions into a coherent approach grounded in both theory and practical experience.
Coaching with tools and frameworks
- Apply the Agile Coaching Competency Framework to assess coaching capabilities across dimensions including agile-lean practitioner, professional coaching, facilitating, mentoring, and teaching.
- Analyze the limitations of coaching competency frameworks to evaluate where frameworks provide useful structure versus where they constrain authentic coaching expression.
- Design coaching assessment approaches that evaluate genuine coaching competency through observed behavior, client outcomes, and reflective practice rather than checkbox compliance.
2
Domain 2: Coaching Across Organizational Levels
4 topics
Multi-level coaching integration
- Apply multi-level coaching techniques to simultaneously address individual, team, and organizational dynamics within a single coaching engagement, recognizing their interdependence.
- Analyze the ripple effects of coaching interventions at one organizational level on other levels to evaluate whether targeted coaching is producing desired systemic changes.
- Design coaching engagement strategies that intentionally create positive cascading effects across organizational levels through coordinated interventions at multiple touch points.
Coaching leaders and managers
- Apply leadership coaching techniques to help managers transition from command-and-control to servant leadership, including addressing identity challenges and loss of perceived control.
- Analyze the systemic impact of leadership behavior changes on team dynamics, organizational culture, and transformation momentum to evaluate coaching effectiveness.
- Design leadership coaching programs that develop coaching-capable leaders at every level, creating an organization where coaching is a core leadership competency.
Coaching peer coaches
- Apply coaching supervision and mentoring techniques to develop peer coaches, helping them expand their coaching range, deepen their practice, and navigate challenging engagements.
- Design peer coaching development programs that build a community of practice among coaches, fostering mutual learning, accountability, and continuous professional growth.
Coaching organizational systems
- Apply systems coaching techniques to work with organizational patterns, structures, and dynamics as coaching subjects rather than focusing exclusively on individuals or teams.
- Analyze organizational system responses to coaching interventions to identify where the system absorbs change, where it resists, and where it transforms.
- Design systemic coaching strategies that work with organizational emergence, leverage natural system dynamics, and create conditions for self-sustaining organizational learning.
3
Domain 3: Transformative Coaching Practices
4 topics
Working with organizational shadows
- Apply techniques for surfacing organizational shadow dynamics including unspoken assumptions, hidden power structures, suppressed emotions, and undiscussable topics that block transformation.
- Analyze the relationship between organizational shadow dynamics and transformation resistance to identify where bringing shadows into awareness could unlock stuck change processes.
- Design safe containers for organizational shadow work that allow difficult truths to surface without causing harm, enabling deeper transformation than surface-level process change.
Power dynamics and organizational politics
- Apply awareness of power dynamics to coaching practice, recognizing how formal and informal power structures influence coaching relationships, team dynamics, and transformation outcomes.
- Analyze how organizational power dynamics create coaching blind spots, privileged perspectives, and marginalized voices that affect the quality and equity of coaching outcomes.
- Design power-aware coaching approaches that redistribute voice and influence, challenge privilege constructively, and create more equitable organizational dynamics through coaching.
Coaching through organizational trauma and crisis
- Apply trauma-informed coaching principles to work with teams and organizations that have experienced layoffs, failed transformations, toxic leadership, or other organizational trauma.
- Design coaching approaches for crisis situations that stabilize the system, rebuild trust, and create pathways toward recovery while honoring the organization's emotional reality.
- Analyze organizational trauma patterns to identify whether they are acute, chronic, or systemic, and evaluate the appropriate coaching intensity and timeline for each type.
Authenticity versus performative agile
- Analyze the difference between genuine organizational agility and performative compliance with agile rituals to evaluate where coaching should focus on deepening rather than broadening.
- Design coaching interventions that help organizations move from performative agile adoption to genuine internalization of agile values, principles, and mindset.
4
Domain 4: Coaching in Complex Adaptive Systems
4 topics
Emergence and self-organization
- Apply coaching techniques that work with emergence rather than against it, creating enabling constraints that guide self-organization toward desired outcomes without controlling the process.
- Analyze emergent patterns in organizational behavior to identify which patterns are healthy adaptations and which are dysfunctional responses that require coaching intervention.
- Design coaching approaches that harness natural organizational self-organization tendencies, creating conditions where healthy patterns emerge and are reinforced through positive feedback loops.
Paradox and polarity management
- Apply polarity management techniques to help organizations navigate inherent tensions including stability versus agility, standardization versus innovation, and autonomy versus alignment.
- Analyze organizational polarities to determine which tensions are solvable problems and which are ongoing paradoxes that require dynamic management rather than resolution.
- Design coaching interventions that help organizations develop the capacity to hold paradox, resist false either-or thinking, and create both-and solutions that transcend apparent contradictions.
Coaching in ambiguity
- Apply coaching approaches for high-ambiguity environments where the path forward is unclear, multiple valid approaches exist, and premature certainty would be counterproductive.
- Analyze the organization's tolerance for ambiguity to evaluate how much uncertainty coaching clients can productively hold and where anxiety reduction is necessary before deeper work.
- Design coaching approaches that build organizational comfort with ambiguity by introducing graduated complexity, celebrating learning from uncertainty, and reframing ambiguity as opportunity.
System resistance and immunity to change
- Apply immunity-to-change techniques to uncover hidden competing commitments, underlying assumptions, and protective behaviors that prevent individuals and organizations from changing.
- Design coaching experiments that safely test immunity-to-change assumptions, creating small behavioral shifts that gradually expand the organization's capacity for transformation.
5
Domain 5: Professional Mastery and Philosophy
4 topics
Personal coaching philosophy
- Apply reflective practice to articulate a personal coaching philosophy that integrates theoretical foundations, practical experience, ethical commitments, and personal values.
- Analyze how personal coaching philosophy evolves through experience, challenge, and professional development and evaluate alignment between stated philosophy and actual coaching behavior.
- Design a philosophy-grounded coaching practice that maintains coherence and integrity across diverse engagement types, client contexts, and organizational challenges.
Ethical mastery
- Apply advanced ethical reasoning to navigate complex coaching situations involving competing stakeholder interests, systemic injustice, confidentiality dilemmas, and scope-of-practice boundaries.
- Analyze edge cases in coaching ethics where standard guidelines are insufficient, developing nuanced judgment that balances competing ethical principles in real-world complexity.
- Design ethical frameworks for coaching organizations that address contemporary challenges including diversity and inclusion, power-aware coaching, and responsible use of coaching at scale.
Thought leadership and profession contribution
- Apply research and knowledge synthesis skills to distill coaching experience into frameworks, models, case studies, or published works that advance the agile coaching profession.
- Design contributions to the coaching profession that include mentoring aspiring coaches, developing training curricula, advancing professional standards, and building coaching communities.
Coaching sustainability and self-care
- Apply self-care and sustainability practices to maintain coaching effectiveness over a long career, including managing compassion fatigue, maintaining boundaries, and renewing coaching energy.
- Design a sustainable coaching practice model that balances coaching intensity with renewal, integrates ongoing learning, and maintains the joy and purpose that sustains excellent coaching.
6
Domain 6: Coaching Across Diverse Contexts
3 topics
Coaching in regulated industries
- Apply coaching approaches adapted for regulated industries including healthcare, finance, and government where compliance requirements, audit trails, and risk management intersect with agile practices.
- Analyze the tension between regulatory compliance and agile flexibility to identify where creative integration is possible and where compliance must take precedence.
- Design coaching strategies that help regulated organizations achieve genuine agility within compliance boundaries, avoiding both compliance theater and regulatory risk.
Cross-cultural coaching
- Apply culturally intelligent coaching approaches that respect and adapt to different cultural norms around hierarchy, communication, conflict, and collaboration in global organizations.
- Analyze how cultural dimensions including power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and time orientation affect agile coaching approaches and transformation strategies.
- Design coaching engagement models for multinational organizations that honor cultural diversity while building shared agile values and practices across geographies.
Coaching non-software domains
- Apply agile coaching principles to non-software domains including marketing, HR, legal, and operations by adapting coaching language, metaphors, and success measures to each context.
- Analyze the transferability of agile practices from software development to other knowledge work domains, identifying which practices translate directly and which require adaptation.
- Design coaching programs for non-software teams that introduce agile thinking without imposing software-centric frameworks, meeting teams where they are in their own professional context.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Coach (CAC) learning objectives: advanced agile coaching competencies, coaching across organizational levels, agile coaching frameworks and models, transformative coaching practices, coaching in complex adaptive systems, and professional mastery and contribution.
- Advanced agile coaching competencies including mastery of coaching stances, advanced facilitation, systemic coaching techniques, and the ability to work effectively across individual, team, and organizational levels simultaneously.
- Coaching across organizational levels including the unique challenges and approaches for coaching teams, coaching leaders, coaching peer coaches, and coaching organizational systems as interconnected layers of a complex system.
- Agile coaching frameworks and models including the Agile Coaching Competency Framework, coaching maturity models, and integrating coaching with Lean, systems thinking, and organizational development methodologies.
- Transformative coaching practices including working with organizational shadows, addressing power dynamics, coaching through organizational trauma, and helping organizations develop genuine agility rather than performative compliance.
- Coaching in complex adaptive systems including understanding emergence, working with paradox and polarity, coaching in ambiguity, and maintaining coaching effectiveness when the system resists or subverts change.
- Professional mastery and contribution including developing a personal coaching philosophy, contributing to the profession through mentoring, research, and thought leadership, and maintaining ethical excellence.
Not Covered
- Foundational and intermediate Scrum framework knowledge covered by CSM, A-CSM, and CSP-SM certifications.
- Enterprise-specific organizational transformation strategy and executive coaching covered by CEC certification at the enterprise transformation level.
- Detailed scaling framework implementation mechanics covered by CASP certification.
- Technical engineering practices, software architecture, and DevOps tooling.
- Product management, product strategy, and product discovery at the team level covered by the Product Owner track.
- Training design and delivery mechanics covered by CST certification.
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